Weekend Edition: Renovation Progress

I was home in Albuquerque over the holidays, and as with all trips back, I try to tackle some house related project.  This time it was over at my Mom's house, installing kitchen cabinets to compliment the beautiful work she's had done on her new "great room".

To refresh, it used to look like this.

And now it looks like this.  Its unfinished, the island shown here is temporary, its missing a new refrigerator and dishwasher, and some additional cabinets, and the doors and windows have yet to be replaced, but it looks soooooo much better.  And it smells delicious from all the new wood on the ceiling.

 

The ceilings look amazing.  The contractor decided that cladding the old beams was the best way to go, even though some of the old wood was amazing.  My mom custom mixed the stain to try to achieve roughly the same tone as the old.

  

The floor on this side of the room had to be completely replaced due to the dry rot and damage that pulling up all that old linoleum seen above caused.  This photo makes it look discolored, but that's just a shadow, in real life its a beautiful pale oak.  The old floors look fantastic now too, now that they are no longer a horrific DIY gone bad shade of purple (meant to be cherry or mahogany?). The stools are new, from Industry West.  The island is temporary, the new island will be bigger and the stools will fit underneath.  That door is new, although the opening is old and was boarded over until this renovation.  It leads to the laundry room and the back door.  Once there is a dishwasher in place I'll hopefully be able to convince my mom to get rid of that giant dish rack.  It was driving me bananas and eating up all of the counter space.  I finally had to turn it 90 degrees to at least make it hog a little less counter space.

As the box of kleenex attests, our cabinet install project did not go as smoothly or as quickly as one would have hoped, due in part to the fact that first I came down with a bad flu, and then passed it on to my mom, and in part to the fact that 90 year old adobe walls are not even remotely flat or square.  I did manage to install the bulk of the cabinets before I left.  They still have their blue protective film on the doors.  The doors are a glossy white in reality.  This long shot (above) shoes the cabinets that will frame the refrigerator, and below are the cabinets that turned the old closet into a pantry.  Its through that door on the left in the picture above.  A pantry is part of our strategy for keeping the cabinets minimal in the kitchen area, and making everything seem a little more like furniture than built-ins, in the main room.

 The left side of the pantry (above) and the right side (below).  Again, the cabinets aren't blue, that's just the film that protects the finish during installation.  My mom's contractor is going to come back to install the new countertops, which are butcher block.

The contractor did a little work over at my house too.  He replaced my kitchen door with a glass paned door, making it even brighter, and he patched the exposed adobe, and did a lot of finish carpentry that I didn't want to do myself because it's tedious and requires better tools.

The cabinets are still awaiting their second coat of paint, but the dishwasher is now framed out, and there are baseboards (kick-plates) under them.  I also got a new-old ebay runner for the space.

Meanwhile the rest of my house looks like this.  My mom just moved everything that needed to be moved out of the way during construction (from her house and mine) over to my house, so it's become a disaster of a storage unit.  I do not look forward to sorting through all of this and putting it (or throwing it) away.

 Did you do anything productive over the holidays?  Or were yours more fun and relaxation oriented?

Friday Fun: Antique Store Loot

I spent the afternoon visiting various thrift and antique stores.  These came from the latter, so not really thrift finds, but fairly thrifty nonetheless.  The mango and the tomato are there just for scale, to show how big the Russell Wright platter is. Its rather a strange color, but the table cloth coordinated so nicely that I figured I'd go for it.  Reproduction Russell Wright ware has a color called chartreuse, so maybe this is the same?  It seems a little more mustardy than greenish, which is how I characterize chartreuse.  That little gold tomato was the last from my tomato plant.  I picked it right after the new year, still green because the vine was on its last leg thanks to recent frosts.  It riped inside on my counter.  Hope it tastes good.

The weather has been freezing here, literally, but it finally warmed up yesterday.  Today was lovely and I took advantage of my biweekly Friday off to make a quick stop at the beach during my shopping.

Also, this isn't exactly my style, but there are so many cute little 1940s houses here that sometimes I daydream about living in one... and this (probably 1960s) sofa would look so cute in a little breakfast nook.  I've just finished watching Million Dollar Decorators Season 2, and this sofa seems totally Katheryn Ireland to me...  with the back pillows switched out for her signature mis-matched patterns, of course.