Under Construction: Labor Day weekend was..laborious

Don't want to miss out on any of our renovation shenanagins? 

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Ahhh Labor Day weekend. The last hurrah of summer where most families are out enjoying the long weekend. The Evergreen State Fair finished up in our area and part of me is relieved. You can't really escape the sounds of the fair, concerts and raceway from either of our houses (thankfully, this week we will be down to one permanent place of residence!).  But as you can probably expect, we spent the weekend working on the house.

Adam laid down a couple coats of stain on the kitchen floor during the week. A major improvement from the very light oak that was popular in the 90's.

Still needs to be sealed but it's definitely come a long way!

We also visited our carpet contact and picked out our carpet. If you're in the Seattle area and looking for new carpet, we're working with Macias Carpet out of Kirkland. They work with remnant stock and are priced very competitively. We aren't super sticklers about the color of carpet (we just wanted something gray toned and are easy to please) and they got us signed up for an install date for Sept. 2.

On Friday my family came up for a visit and my step-dad worked on getting the lawn ready for the fall and winter. One of my brothers, whom I haven't seen since May, was up for a visit from California, so it was fun catching up and seeing him soak up some uncle-niece time. 

Saturday was masking and paint day for Adam, while I took several trips to Lowe's to choose paint colors. Because spraying the paint on is going so quickly, we decided to go ahead and do colors.

After masking off the kitchen, we kind of stood back and had a laugh as Dexter fans.

Our "sky" was also very quickly clearing up! I can almost hear your disappointed cluck..

My follow up trip was to talk to their cabinet people. For our first remodel went with a semi-custom line that did produce a quality product, but we've lowered our expectations A LOT this time around. We also wanted to spend about 1/4 of the money too ;) What can I say, kids change priorities, right? So we've been taking a look around at some ready-to-assemble (RTA) cabinet solutions and also checked out Lowe's just to see what we'd get as a comparison. Still considering what we want to do, but we've got time on our hands. This time we didn't get overzealous and kept most of the existing cabinets instead of ripping them out immediately, so I have a functional (albeit not very pretty) kitchen.

On Sunday my father-in-law and Adam's step-bro came to help us move our furniture. All of our couches, tables, one of the beds and a ton of boxes got moved over. We currently sit on the floor to eat (or blog...) like cavemen. ;) But this will be short lived since the carpet installation is on Tuesday.

The final update for this weekend that I have for you is that Adam rewired the majority of the kitchen in one evening. We had to add power to the island and move light switches around, which he says he found to be very enjoyable. I didn't get to snap a picture to commemorate, but he was pretty proud. Penny clapped for him when I said "good job!" :)