The kitchen in its current state

Yup, yup. It's been forever, I know.

I have no excuse. Ok, maybe I do and it mostly pertains to my own laziness in dealing with the fact that our photo library is on an external hard drive up in the spare bedroom that I never want to step foot in since it appears that a craft store blew up in there. 

Enter: new phone with easy blogging capabilities.

Anyway, we've been trucking away on the kitchen and making lots of progress. 

We both got iPhone 5s this past week and I'm still learning how to use it. The panoramic photo function is a great way for us to show everything that is going on in our tight little kitchen. Of course, I forgot to crop out the weird black parts on the top and bottom before posting. 

And please ignore the construction material that is currently taking up 1/3 of my large swath of counter space. It's the only way to stay motivated. 

Feel free to admire my new giant rolling pin purchased for $9 at the restaurant supply store. I love that place!

Not much has happened on this side of the kitchen. We need to put up some 1/4 round molding around the other molding and build out some new, wide windowsills both so I can fill them with plants and so Pepin has a nice place to sit while we cook. 

He's been complaining to us for months about his lack of lounge-space. Kidding, kind of. 

We're loving our new Overstock.com stools and even purchased an extra set so more people can squeeze in if wanted. And at a price of $80 for two, it wasn't too much of a stretch. Have you priced stools lately? Apparently spending over $100 on a single stool is not crazy! 

And they come in lots of fun colors. We opted for the fun, tangerine hue because at this point, why avoid color? 

The sink area has been one of my planning triumphs of this project. I was pretty insistent on an undermount sink so water wouldn't pool around the overhang and damage the wood. I also wanted to have access to all of the butchers block for oiling purposes. And while a little pricy, we manages to save a good bit by purchasing a "used" one from Amazon Warehouse (meaning that someone had it shipped to them then returned it, it had never actually been installed). The extra cost was totally worth it for two reasons: 1) The thick gague stainless is sturdy, soundproof, and doesn't vibrate the whole counter when using the garbage disposal. 2) The sink is extra deep (10" as opposed to the 7"-8" norm) which is so helpful to those of us with gigantic pots and pans but without the space to install a wider sink. 

And I am totally in love with the faucet. It is sturdy, the finish doesn't show fingerprints (a true triumph in our house!), and can be operated with a wrist when hands are messy. And the actual pull-out sprayer has an awesome momentary shut off button so we can pull it over to the stove to fill a pot rather than lugging it out of our extra deep sink after full (so maybe the extra depth is a mixed bag). 

Crown molding over the cabinets has been a slow, slow process.  The ceiling is nowhere near level and the area around the leftmost cabinet is totally out of whack. The stretch of ceiling where we pulled out the old soffit had some bulging plaster that had to be butted up against my drywall patchwork leaving a distinct high spot (or low spot?) that the crown molding had to fit around. So Michael was left with the task of planing down those two pieces of molding on the left cabinet for at least 10 hrs until it was a perfect fit. The middle cabinet's molding went up relatively quickly (only a few hours, maybe) but the last cabinet is going to be another pill, requiring a good bit of carving to fit.

 And as I knew would be the case, we are now faced with forcing ourselves to install the finishing touches (lots of tile and molding) while keeping ourselves from just cooking all day in our functionally complete, brand shiny new, kitchen. 

*sigh*