Plaster & Disaster

We’re approaching the final stretch of Kitchen Reno Week, folks! Don’t forget to check out installments 1, 2, 3, and 4 to see how far we’ve come! When I left you yesterday, the kitchen looked like this:

And now it looks like this!

Okay you got me, it looks exactly the same. That’s because the work today was all about sanding and smoothing the mud on the sheetrock, and that’s a lot of detail work that is super noticeable up close but not so noticeable from afar. Of course I totally failed to snap photos of them working because I was on phone calls all day, but I think you get the picture. They’ll wrap this up with a bit more work tomorrow, and then the rest will be in our hands! That means I’m officially declaring this the end of a very successful Kitchen Reno Week on Plaster & Disaster — thanks for following along, and I hope you enjoyed this format! Next week we’ll be back to our regular post schedule, including a post next Friday to update you on what we plan to do in the kitchen this weekend (work on the pantry with my dad).

In the meantime, I think it’s time to mop.

Our guys did a great job keeping the house cleaned up and free of debris, but it’s still such messy work. Fortunately we’re replacing the counters and floors, so I’m not too worried about getting it pristine.

We sure came a long way in a week! Many thanks to our amazing contractors, who did such a phenomenal job and worked so incredibly hard!

And to our cats, who clearly suffered terribly.

Welcome back to the fourth installment of Kitchen Reno Week! If you missed my updates earlier this week, you can check out our weekend prep, Day 1, and Day 2!

When I left you yesterday morning, the kitchen looked like this and we were hoping for a successful building inspection by the City:

I was thrilled to get a text from Sam around 11:30am that the inspection was a success! I was pretty confident because our contractors are awesome, but you just never know. With that underway, they got back to work and at the end of Day 3 when I got home from work it was looking like this:

Um, omg. It’s like a real room. A real single room.

As you can tell, once the inspection happened the rest of the day was dedicated to putting up sheetrock. Or “rock,” as the pros call it (I am not a pro). Sam snapped a few photos:

Below you can see how they perfectly cut a piece to fit with the jagged edges on the left side of the photo above:

And you can see all the screws they use to attach the sheetrock to the underlying structure.

I thought Day 2 was a huge change, but it’s hard to believe how far it’s come yet again! These pictures really show how much light we’re bringing into the rest of the house. You can see how light the sunroom is compared to the rest of the kitchen — these photos are right before sunset when light is just streaming into the windows on the right side of the sunroom (in the photo below), where there are no kitchen windows. It creates such a nice warm glow, and I’m so excited we’ll be able to enjoy that more in the main part of the house.

Even though the bulk of the work has been completed, the mudding and spackle portion can still take awhile because it requires multiple coats with sanding and dry time. The hope is that what they put on yesterday will be dry today for sanding and then that they can apply a second coat and hopefully be ready to sand again tomorrow morning on their final day. Today I’m working from home, but I’m in non-stop meetings from 9:30am – 4:30pm so I’m not sure how many photos I’ll be able to snap. (One thing I love about my job is that it’s pretty easy to work remotely when needed, even on days with a lot of meetings.)

It’s hard to believe it, but we’re nearing the end of this project! Of course it will leave us with a TON more work to do to get this kitchen to a “final” state, but it’s such a huge step.