New Mantel!

We just finished the mantel for the fireplace, we're both excited to have something more than a brick ledge for a mantle. The mantel was made from baltic birch plywood and hangs off the existing brick ledge.

The mantel before...

And after...

Concrete Countertops (and running water)

We installed the two largest pieces of concrete countertops today and hooked up our new faucet and sink drain!

We're very excited. We can now fill up containers taller than 4 inches without using the bathtub and within the next week we hope to have the dishwasher hooked up as well.

The concrete countertops turned out very well. Zack wasn't too excited about the front edges, but I don't mind them. I think it looks just like a concrete countertop should. The edge around the sink will need an aluminum closure strip to hide that edge and to provide an easy joint to caulk.

Kitchen Still Moving Slowly

We have pendants (but only two lightbulbs)! For the first time, we both really like the kitchen because it's starting to actually look like one!

We will be pouring the concrete countertops next weekend. The island countertop will be laminate with the exposed plywood edges. We're using this laminate:

And someday, we hope to have this Electrolux range:

The Story of the Floor

We have a beautiful living room and kitchen -and corner bedroom- which are not quite yet done (ceiling, in particular) but we love them. The floors are natural and they have a water-based polyurethane on them which I highly recommend. However, I must tell you though you would never know, that these floors were stained Minwax Jacobean three times before they got to stay natural. The first time, we hadn't done a good job sanding and the stain didn't adhere so we sanded it off. The second time we stained it, the first coat of Super Fast Drying Minwax Polyurethane didn't dry for a week. It turns out we maybe didn't wipe up all of the stain very well and the polyurethane wasn't sticking to it. So we sanded it off and did it again but took hours to carefully wipe up all of the excess stain immediately so that there was no residue at all on the floors when we put down Minwax Fast Drying Polyurethane. Three days later it was wet so we took it off again, afraid if it wasn't adhering to our floor that it wouldn't last. We're happy now and will never use Minwax again.

Here's a shot of our fireplace. It still needs a mantle and wood around the base of the hearth, but it looks so much better than it used to. I put a before picture up just to compare.

And just for fun, we got some cool new dining room chairs...

And having nothing to do with our house...

I bought a bike! I hope to replace my usual red speedy ride with this new red one for my 2.5 mile daily commute.

(And no that is not my white picket fence.)

Summer Progress

I guess it's been a while since I've updated, but we've been very busy and we just have so much going on, it goes so slowly. The date is 8-6-08 for the purchasing of the cabinets and living room furniture!!! So the floors need to be refinished the weekend before that so everything else has to be done this weekend in order for that to happen. We still have to finish putting up the ceiling, install the new wood floor, sand some mud, paint the windows and structure, paint all of the walls and the ceiling touch up coat among a few other things. So here's the photos from the last couple of weeks.

We poured a concrete hearth

We started installing new wood floor for the kitchen

We started painting

So we have installed some of our ceiling which looks GREAT! We've installed our window, our new exhaust fan and the drywall! We got a lot done this month. It's finally starting to show!