A Bit More Progress on the Kitchen

I haven’t been in the mood to embroider this week, so I’ve instead been tackling some of the projects that I want to get done around here. Today I removed the doors off the very upper cabinets in the kitchen, and I emptied and took down the cabinet over the fridge.

I tend to undertake these kind of projects when hubby is out of town, and I got in a bit over my head today (literally!!) with the over-fridge cabinet — I was able to take the cabinet off of the wall with no problem (I was even smart enough to put a big fat pillow between the bottom of it and the top of the fridge, so that the cabinet would be supported on something once it was unfastened from the wall and wouldn’t crash down on the top of the fridge — I felt so DIY’y when I thought of that LOL), but once it was resting on the top of the fridge I realized it was too heavy and I am too short to have been able to maneuver it off the top of the fridge by myself. Fortunately, one of my brothers didn’t mind “He Man’ing” the cabinet off the top of the fridge for me when he came by to pick up my nephew / his son — which was good, because otherwise it would’ve bugged me to have it sitting up there and I would’ve figured out some way to get it down by myself ;-).

I really like how it looks having the upper cabinet doors gone:
(You can see how it looked with those doors on the cabinets in this post, several pictures down into the post.) I can finally begin to truly envision how open and bright it’s going to look once the cabinets have been painted white!!

Here’s a pic of the fridge/oven side of the room, now with no upper cabinets:
(There’s a pic on the above-linked post showing how it looked when there was still a cabinet over the fridge.) I realized, after I had already taken the ladder back outside, I left a strip of wood above the fridge — argh!! It’ll just have to stay there another day, because I was too pooped tonight to bring the ladder back in just to unscrew three screws.

Hubby has some work ahead of him, getting that wall fixed up so it can be primered. See that piece of wood near the ceiling over the stove? When we took the cabinet down that was over the stove, we discovered there was an A/C vent behind it. If we leave that vent uncovered, the kitchen will be frigid while the bedrooms feel like saunas, so hubby covered the vent up temporarily. He has some ideas of how to cap that off completely, but if those don’t pan out we can always get a HVAC person over here to do it. We can’t do much to get that wall ready for primering until that vent is taken care of, so it’s high on the priority list right now.

Neither of us like the backsplash or whatever that stuff is that goes partway up the wall behind the stove and the counter next to it, so we’ll remove it too. Like I said, lots of work to be done on that wall.

It is kind of humorous to see just how many different colors of paint there are on that wall, now that so much of it is exposed ;-).

I have, amazingly (to me, anyway!), found homes for pretty much everything that came out of kitchen cabinets that have been removed in the past couple weeks. If you look at that post I linked to above, take a really good look at the size of that pantry and the size of that over-the-fridge cabinet, then feel free to pat me on the back for what I’ve accomplished (well, you know, if you can get a pat in around all the patting on the back I’m doing myself LOL!!). I’ve gotten rid of A LOT of stuff (a trunk full has already gone to Goodwill), and I’ve done lots of cleaning out and reorganizing of other closets and storage space in our house to make room for the stuff I did keep. We will eventually have open shelves (your basic wood-planks-atop-brackets type of shelves) on two of the walls in there, which will provide more storage . . . but it’s cool to see that I actually don’t *need* the storage — I’ve managed to make everything “necessary” fit in what exists storage-wise at this very moment. Boy, that is such a great feeling!!!

My cookbooks have been weeded through quite thoroughly, and I’m down to only eight or so. I would like to keep less than a dozen at any given time. Even a dozen is probably too many, truth be told. I’m hoping that having them in the kitchen (they’re in the open cabinet above the sink) will be a visual reminder to pull them down and make more use of them. When they were on our hallway bookshelf, I tended to have the “out of sight, out of mind” problem.

I am one pooped pup tonight!! Yesterday afternoon and evening was spent cleaning out and reorganizing, and then this afternoon I did the above stuff in the kitchen. My body has declared “Enough!!”. Tonight I will read (I’m having The. Best. Time. going through my stack of magazines, pulling out the decor and crafting ideas that appeal to me) and watch whatever Bravo reality show is on (the finale of Make Me A Supermodel, I bet — I’m rooting for all three of the guys, too bad they can’t all three win!).