Under Construction: Counters (sorta) and the pellet stove

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"If the women don't find you handsome, 

they should at least find you handy."  ~ Red Green

Well, my husband falls under the 'handsome' and 'handy' category, but this isn't news to me. Thanksgiving weekend meant he had 4 days to schmooze with the fam over a turkey meal, go tree hunting with Penny and I, relax for 5.5 seconds and then the man got some sh*t done.

I'm pretty sure you're waiting for one of these renovation posts where I say "ooh! ooh! Look, I did this project all by myself!" where I pump my fists in valor and pride. Although I can be of use with some of the projects around here, so far all of them are done quickly and easily by Adam. He says my job is to 'bake the baby and bake him treats.' So I oblige, because I like doing both of those things :) Don't worry - eventually the day will come where I share my own project completion with you!

The island cabinets were installed about a month ago but this entire time I've sort of been trying to use the empty top drawers as counter space and it just wasn't working anymore. We aren't ready for our 'forever' counter tops yet because only half of the kitchen has been renovated, but something needed to be done.

So it actually took a little bit of convincing from me to him to just get some wood and make some temporary counter tops for me. As hilariously woodsy / tacky as it looks, he did a great job and now we have a good visual representation of what our counters will look like when we get our real ones. 

Another medium sized project that's been going on around here was making a fireplace surround for our pellet stove. The ones you can buy are honestly a) very expensive and b) don't really do a good job. Luckily my man is handy with both wood and metal so he welded up a gate to go around the pellet stove that will safely keep all little bodies away. 

He designed the surround to have storage space for pellets (holds about 400 lbs of pellets at a time) and also a gate for easy access with a safety latch. As a result it does take up more space than we would have liked it to, but again it keeps the little ones safe and is a functional space as well. 

The final project, and admittedly the biggest, that he started this weekend were the upper cabinets for the kitchen. For our first renovation the guys thought that taking a sledgehammer to the cabinets would be the easiest way to take them down. Lol. Not so much. That took several hours (though I'm sure loads of fun). This time, Adam calmly unscrewed the cabinets and had the 6 boxes down in 20 minutes. We haven't decided if they will be moved into the shop or laundry room for additional storage space, or sell them on craigslist on the cheap for someone who needs cabinets for their cabin or something. 

He had several of our new cabinets already put together, so he put up 2 before realizing that we've hit a road block. Our corner upper cabinet was ordered with seriously incorrect dimensions...luckily our rep responded quickly and he got us the correct one right away. Awesome. When this happened in our last renovation (yes, this happens A LOT so if you're redoing your cabinets - no matter how much or how little you spend, there will be mistakes!) and it was like pulling teeth to get the problem solved in a reasonable amount of time. At first they quoted us 10 weeks - and we were able to whittle it down to under 4...still horrible when you've got an already torn apart kitchen.

So unfortunately that was the end of Adam's productive weekend, but we couldn't complain too much ;)