Countdown to the New Old House: Houston, We Have a Toasted Ahn-DEEV Kitchen

Okay, technically we will have MOST of a kitchen next Thursday.  GC has decided to prioritize painting and flooring in the kitchen, so that we can get the cabinets installed and then pull the trigger on countertop fabrication.  Nice of them to get with the program, right?  So, walls got textured last night, worker bees may be painting said walls as I type this, and the tile is going down early next week.  I have asked Spouse repeatedly if the GC understands that the tile goes WALL TO WALL, because this is not the kind of kitchen where the cabinets go in first and then the tile gets put in around them.  No, this is the kind of kitchen where the cabinets sit on the floor, because they are supposed to look like furniture.  Theoretically.  In the sense that they have little bun feet.

Spouse assures me that he has had multiple conversations with the GC on this, and we are good.

In other news, my Cambria countertop sample arrived in the mail yesterday ($30 worth of samples, $38 in rush shipping fees - ouch).  Glory to God in the highest, and peace to this particular person on Earth, because it appears that I finally found the countertop that matches the weird, sort-of-grayish-but-probably-technically-a-beige-with-just-a-touch-of-green paint color that I picked for the upper cabinets.  Because that's how rational people operate, right?  They pick a paint color for their cabinets, and THEN they go out and find a countertop surface that matches it.  Oh, wait - I was supposed to do it the other way around?  Sorry, that's not how I roll.  And, you know, all's well that ends well and stuff.

I knew when the sample came out of the box that it was a keeper - but then I had to go home and prove it to myself by pulling out the tester cans of paint and painting the cabinet and wall colors on a piece of foam core.  (Yes, there was an actual sample of cabinet board with the colors on it down in the garage; I have no excuse, save for extreme laziness.  And excitement.  If it's possible for those two things to coexist.)  After juxtaposing the samples and confirming that we were firing on all cylinders, I had to drag over a kitchen stool (to stand in for the stained lower cabinets), a paper towel holder (to mimic the color of the kitchen faucet) and various other random items.  I created my own still life, and then I stood back and stared at it like it was a flippin' Renoir.  Because I have become one of THOSE people.  The people who obsess about countertops and say things like, "No, the grout absolutely has to be a DARK taupe.  A medium taupe is not acceptable." 

I sound like the wife on that commercial:  "No, it's absolutely pronounced 'ahn-DEEV.'"

Hmm.  Endive would be a nice paint color, wouldn't it?

See?  There I go again.

Okay, sorry, I was gone for a minute, because I had to Google "endive paint," and would you believe that there are 26 paints with "endive" in the name?

That's True Value's "Belgian Endive" on the left and Sico's "Endive" on the right.  The color in the middle?  My own paint selection, BM's "Refined," which I choose to refer to as "Toasted Endive" from now on.

Wait - make that Toasted Ahn-DEEV.

I really love it when a blog post comes full circle.

The other exciting news from the home front:  last night, I was able to access the master bedroom and the bathrooms for the first time in - wow, almost six months exactly.  Until last night, I had to rely on Spouse's reports from the "Home Back" (get it?  as opposed to "Home Front," because the bedroom and the bathrooms are . . . in the back . . . never mind), because I refused to traverse beams and floor joists to get from Point A to Point B.  But now we have subfloors, so now I am able to walk from Point A to Point B and personally confirm that the reconfiguration of the boys' linen closet is in process, and that the new bath fan is installed (but needs a sheetrock patch), and, also, that our bathroom stinks like an outhouse.  I'm not sure if that's because contractors have been using it for six months without bothering to clean it or if it's because the disconnected toilet from the boys' bathroom has, apparently, been cooling its jets in there this entire time?  Whatever.  There is a significant line item on the estimate for "cleaning," and I'm gonna hold them to that.

Pictures to follow.  Not of the grody disembodied toilet, but of other, more photogenic stuff.