Almost an ‘AFTER’ Shot – The Countertops with special guest: Stained cabinets!

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

So the countertops are installed. I love them. I Ann and Nancy Wilson them. I ‘Billy-Bob-Thorton-eating-the-prenup-in-Intolerable-Cruelty’ them. I fear they are looking around the house and thinking they are too good for us. In fact, G and I are afraid to even put anything down on them. Our friend J put a plate down on them the night they were installed and G was like “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? THOSE ARE OUR COUNTERTOPS – YOU CAN’T JUST PUT YOUR PLATE DOWN ON THEM.”

Side note: Is it “countertop”? Or “countertops”? Plate down on “it” or “them”? It seems like it should be singular because I’m not talking about multiple kitchens, but plural just feels right. I’m not sure which is correct, but I want you to know I’m very concerned about it, grammatically.

Also – you can see a bit of how the stained cabinets turned out. (We haven’t put on the hardware yet). The dude who was the ringleader of the installers insisted that G write down where we ordered our cabinets and exactly how we stained them. I thought that we should ask for a discount before we give away such information. Then I remembered this here world wide web thingy where I have already given away the milk for free. So it was moot. Moot, I say.

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Honed Carrara Marble Countertops: Stupidly genius? Brilliantly dumb?

Posted on October 4, 2011 by

Last night we left a plate of cannoli and a cup of espresso out for him. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I woke up this morning and tip-toed down the stairs, peeking around the corner. He had not yet arrived. But he will be here soon.  For it is Countertop Morning. MERRY COUNTERTOP MORNING TO YOU! Oh what a joyous day. Let’s sing some Countertop Carols, get drunk on Counter Nog and watch that kid stick his tongue to the countertop and go “stuck… stuck… STUCK!”. Sure, that makes no sense but I DON’T CARE. IT IS COUNTERTOP MORNING.

(our two slabs - hi slabs!)

But today was almost not to be. I told you how we had some issues finding a countertop we liked. But we finally decided that honed carrara marble was what we wanted. We were then immediately told the following facts from acquaintances, installers, and random people I stopped on the street:

It’s an awful choice!

It’s a wonderful choice!

It stains anytime you spill red wine on it.

As long as you seal it and cancel your Manson Club meetings, it won’t stain.

You have to seal it once a year.

You have to seal it every 15 minutes.

You can never put anything hot on it or it will burst into flames.

It’s the perfect surface for food prep.

It’s the perfect surface for baking.

If you bring a lemon within 1 mile of it you’ll etch the surface. They can just sense it.

Martha Stewart has marble countertops. She’s fancy and has good taste!

Pauly Shore has marble countertops. He was in Bio-Dome!

Marble kitchen countertops will add value to your kitchen.

In Italian, Carrara means “ugly countertops that are stained and etched and owned by people who regret the decision to buy them and they have a blog and document their regret for all to see.”

Marble countertops will make you happy.

Marble countertops may cause incontinence.

Marble countertops dated your mom.

Go for it!

You’re idiots if you do it!

So there you have it. Quite exciting. Pictures soon. I mean, I better take as many pictures as I can before we stain the hell out of ‘em, right?

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The Appliance Fairy

Posted on September 22, 2011 by

Oh hiiii there. How are you? Things have been a tad hectic around here. But a good hectic. The Appliance Fairy came this week. We put soggy frozen corn kernels* under our pillows and the next day she appeared. Granted, she said she’d arrive between 12:30 and 2:30 pm and she showed up at 4:30. So points deducted for tardiness. But hooray for appliances. G and I put on brightly colored clothes and took turns jumping up and down and crying, pretending we were in the audience for Oprah’s Favorite Things. G does an excellent Oprahesqe “THESE. NEW. APPLIAAAAANNNNCCCEESSSSS!”

stocked

We've been discussing what the first real home cooked meal in 11 months should be. Send recipes. And a cook.

Dishwasher & microwave. Or I hope so. We got tired after all the Oprahness and stopped opening.


*So our old freezer was on the fritz for about the last year or so. The defroster didn’t defrost, so ice would build up around the sides, causing the frozen food to get warm and soggy. How did we solve this problem without resorting to $repair$ or the purchase of a new fridge? HAIR DRYER. Set to high hot heat. You’d empty out the freezer, put down a bunch of towels under the fridge, get comfy, blow dry the freezer’s insides for about a half hour, melt all the ice, and everything would get cold again. Then a few months later, when the frozen veggies would start to get soggy, you knew it was time to schedule a blow dry appointment. I wrote a letter to the Hair Dryer Manufacturers of AmericaTM telling them they should add this selling point to their packaging: “makes a GREAT freezer defroster!” but I received no response.

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Appliances, countertops, fantasy football and the art of decision-making

Posted on September 7, 2011 by

We had three major tasks this past weekend. Each task involved way too many choices. At the end of the weekend, we were 2 for 3. Two decisions made, one decision not made. Come! Let’s look back… way back to 4 days ago…

~~~ squiggly line dream sequence ~~~

Task # 1: Choose and order appliances

Decision: MADE.

We are officially adults with actual adult appliances. And we even checked Consumer Reports before we bought the ones we did. It was so legit. I felt like one of the cartoon people in those investment commercials. You know the cartoon commercial people who discuss their worries about investing but you’re like – wait, why is this serious person who’s worried about their investment/banking decisions a cartoon? Jem is a cartoon. Anyway, in a few weeks, we may be able to make real food in an oven with ingredients and everything. Or at least we will have the option to make real food if we want to. We may still just want to order delivery.

Task #2: Choose and draft a fantasy football team

Decision: MADE.

The couple that disagrees about whether to pick their fantasy team’s defense in the 7th or 8th round of their joint team’s draft stays together, because anyone else will think hanging out with them between the months of August and February is an absolutely unbearable experience.

Task #3: Pick out a countertop

Decision: NOT MADE.

Total failure. Let’s say you need a countertop. And let’s say you go to a certain large warehouse in Chicago that has 6 billion square feet housing slabs of all kinds of countertop stone. Do you think you could find one you like? WELL COULD YA? If you were a clown and performed for children and seniors in your kitchen, there would be several slabs you would like and would fit in well with your decor. If you were a pair of lion tamers visiting from Las Vegas, surely there would be many many slabs in this establishment you would love. But if you were me and G, the answer is no. No you would not find a single one you want. And you would drive home with a bit of road rage at all the Toonces driving that day and G would make the claim that you have more road rage than he does and you’d say, “Um, that statement is so very untrue” as you wave your fist in anger at the world.

Posted in Kitchen, kitchen renovation, NFL | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

What to do when you run out of DIY space

Posted on August 25, 2011 by

Working on a DIY project? Have you got all your materials? Your paint? Wood? Brushes? Miter saw? Felt? Pipe cleaners? Sequins? Hot glue gun? Feathers? Cut-out photos of Daniel Craig?

Have your spread them all out across your table? And do you have just so much that you’ve run out of space? And did you get sawhorses and sheets of plywood and set them up in your killroomImeanbasement and make 2 more tables to accommodate your epic DIY project? And you still don’t have enough space?

Look. Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s…

…a freaking hook.

We currently have 2 million just-stained cabinet doors in the basement. And since we can’t stack them on top of each other to dry, we needed a solution. A SOULTION FROM ABOVE. Hooks.

They’re actually called euro finishing clips (“because Europeans are so smart and savvy and good looking” – G), and they’re designed to fit into a cabinet door’s hinge cup (yes, the part where the hinge goes) so you can hang one and spray both sides easily. Hang a wire up, place the clips on it, and hang the doors from it and there you go. Genius, really.

Seriously. Think of the possibilities. You’ve just gained all the airspace around you for DIY projects. You weren’t using that space anyway. I say fill it with lumber. Or hang all your power tools so your nail gun is always at arm’s length. Or take all your unfinished projects and hang them up so they’re right there in front of you – staring at you – which will either be inspiring or infuriating. It’ll be a fun surprise!

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G’s Paula Deen-esqe perfect dye and wood staining recipe, y’all

Posted on August 23, 2011 by

The 4 blocks of wood you see here are 4 sample combinations of wood dye and stain for the kitchen cabinets. G tested recipes for wood stain until he got just the right one to match the other woodwork in the house (based on our house’s original oak floor color) with the white quarter-sawn oak of the new cabinets. Although I’ve never heard him say “y’all”, I like to think of G as the Paula Deen of wood staining – and isn’t Paula an evil genius*? People often criticize Paula for using butter as currency, but hey, you do you, Paula. You do you.

G is quite the evil genius, too. He has a secret evil lab and everything. The lab is set up in the dining room right now so I guess it’s not really a true secret lab like in the bowels of anything. And aside from the bunnycide incident THAT WE DON’T LINK TO BECAUSE OF THE HATE MAIL, he is actually quite nice, not evil. If you fell down, he’d help you back up. He wouldn’t point at you and laugh. See? NICE. One time I was with my friend E and I walked into a glass wall at a Starbucks and she pointed and laughed at me when I fell down. But you know what? It was point-and-laugh-worthy. Regardless, G does have a most excellent recipe for wood dye and stain that he concocted in his evil genius dining room laboratory.

The super secret wood dying secret

We chose to dye the wood first, then stain it. This process makes the flecks of the quarter-sawn wood “pop” nicely. (blah blah blah we love flecky craftsman quarter-sawn wood, you know the drill).

TO RAISE THE GRAIN OR NOT TO RAISE THE GRAIN. Back when we stained the living room wainscoting, we used a dye solution of wood dye & water. A water-based solution like that will “raise the grain” of the wood, meaning it will swell up the cells of the grain once you apply it. So you want to raise the grain before you dye it by wetting down the wood with a sponge, then sanding it. It’s kind of an annoying extra step when you just want to get to the action. So G set out to skip this “raising the grain” step completely this time around. How? By using a solution of dye and denatured alcohol. Since alcohol evaporates quickly, the grain doesn’t have a chance to raise. SANDING STEP AVERTED, LAZYPANTS. VICTORY ACHIEVED. TELL THE KIDS! ALCOHOL RULES!

G’s Butter-free Wood Dye & Stain Recipe, y’all

INGREDIENTS

For the dye solution:

½ oz TransTint Dye (we used Reddish Brown)

2 cups denatured alcohol

Directions:

Mix it well. Very well. Make it in as large a batch as you need. We needed a lot. G bought fancy measuring cups and I was like yowza – we didn’t even splurge like that on our wedding registry. When I bake brownies I use a plastic cup and count Mississippis for teaspoons.

Apply to the wood in the direction of the grain with a sponge brush. Wipe of excess with a clean rag, but honestly, the stuff should dry pretty fast. We finished all the dying and went straight to staining.

(bear with my photos here as I was trying to take pics with my phone as we were both applying and wiping):

Applying dye to cabinet shelf. Any excess was wiped off immediately.

Dyed & ready for stain

For the stain:

No recipe here, just General Finishes gel stain in Antique Walnut.

(G tested the General Finishes water-based stain but it was awful. We hated the results, so Gel won, hands-down.)

Directions: Apply an even coat to wood in direction of the grain. We didn’t really let it sit for any specific length of time. G just applied it, passed the board to me, and I wiped it off (again, in the direction of the grain) with a clean rag.

Apply the stain - looks like puddin' y'all

Wiping off the excess stain. Looks like delicious squid ink! (for the Bourdain fans)

... and then we did a miliion of them

Polyurethane:

G’s spray-poly’d the wood with General Finishes Enduro-Var water-based polyurethane. This worked great on the flat pieces we hadn’t assembled yet. However, the drawers came pre-assembled, and spraying was tricky. So I brushed the poly on these. 3 coats on everything.

finished... but not assembled

SO PRETTY, YES?

Unfortunately we haven’t even started on the doors yet:

…deep breaths…

*The real evil at the Food Network lies inside one Mr. Bobby Flay. That guy is the devil. He should be banned from television. I need to start a whole new blog to list my reasons. But trust me.

Ok fine, here’s why – have you watched that “throwdown” show of his? Isn’t it the most mean-spirited show that ever was? I mean, they trick some poor unsuspecting yokel into thinking “GEE LOOK AT ME, MA! I’M GOING ON THE TV TO SHOW THE WORLD I HAVE THE BEST MAC AND CHEESE! WOW THANK YOU KIND PEOPLE AT FOOD NETWORK!” and then Bobby comes in flipping tables over and doing the ‘there’s something on your tie’ nose-flicking bit and spray painting ‘BOB-B waz here’ on the walls with his minions, saying “You think you’re the best? Yeah, well I’m Bobby and this is my show and I put chipotles and blue corn in everything and have you even SEEN a chipotle? I’LL DESTROY YOU!” and then the Bobby minions ride motorcycles around the poor  sack who is in tears at this point and then the showdown throwdown happens and smug Bobby wins. I hate that guy.

Posted in DIY, Home, Kitchen, kitchen renovation, Wood finishing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Godzilla vs. the DIY kitchen remodelers

Posted on August 16, 2011 by

There’s so much to talk about I don’t even know where to begin. The cabinets are here. It’s crazytimes. They arrived in 2 massive crates in a truck that couldn’t even fit down our street*. The driver had to come down another street then wheel them on a cart down our alley into our backyard. It was just like Christmas morning, if Santa’s sleigh can’t fit down the chimney so he has to circle the reindeer back around the next major street over and around the block, then pull over and drag his sack past the dumpsters and you then feel really bad so you slip Santa some cash so hopefully he’s not too angry about the whole experience.

Then G and I opened the crates. I wanted to say “FRA-GEE-LAY! It must be Italian!” but G doesn’t get jokes from American movies made in the 80s.

And then we hauled in a million piles of these:

EXCITING, YES?

So… now… for the last few days we’ve been

1. Down in the kill room dying and staining the wood parts of the cabinets that will be seen. Much more on this later.

2. Assembling other parts of the cabinets (the parts that don’t need to be stained because they wont be seen). We’ve got a mini city of doorless cabinets sitting on the floor of the kitchen, so it’s easy to pretend you’re Godzilla wandering through town. Although I never watched a real Godzilla movie, so I assume my impression of going “ROOOOOUUUU” is not very good. Only fun.

* To be fair to the truck, we live on one of the most narrow streets in all of Chicago. I am one of the Most Excellent Parallel Parkers that ever lived, so it’s not a big deal for me, but many a great driver has fallen victim to its slenderness. I would, however trade my parking talent in a heartbeat for the ability to roll my Rs.

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