7 Weeks Later

Following a full day of scrubbing and waxing our kitchen’s cement floor, and enjoying a tasty Chinese food dinner, at 9:45 PM we started assembling our kitchen cabinets. For the sake of marital bliss we each started constructing one cabinet a piece. The first box took the longest because although we are both fluent in the sparse language that is IKEA, it usually takes about one build to get warmed up.

Sans breaks it took us 7 hours to construct three 36” base cabinets, two 15” base cabinets, one 30” base cabinet and six 24” horizontal wall cabinets. If you did your math right that means we were up until 4:45. This might not have been too rough if we could sleep in; however, with our amazing contractor (AKA superhero) arriving at 7AM to help us with our cabinet installation, this so called "sleeping in" was not a viable option.

After about two hours of sleep and feeling like reheated leftovers, we managed to peel ourselves out of bed and start our day with Tim. I’d like to take a second here and give a shout out to Tim. Tim, who owns his own contracting company called TJK Remodeling, is the very man, with the assistance of his sons, who built our sweet pocket door. Not only was Tim upbeat, positive and willing to teach us every step of the process but he provided his expertise, supplies and hard work free of charge. We are thankful beyond words for his time and effort this past Saturday. Honestly, if you are in AZ and ever need remodeling work, Tim is the guy to call!

While Jonathan and Tim installed the cabinets I worked on constructing the drawers for the various units as well as the gigantotron pantry unit. By 3ish they had the entire kitchen mounted and looking fabulous! We are still working on getting the handles on doors and drawers as well as mounting the doors on both floor and wall units. Once we have all of these items in place I'll finally get to unpack all of my precious kitchen items, some of which have not seen the light of day since before our wedding, back in May 2008.

As of Monday our days of living out of a cooler and purchasing bags of ice are over. Our refrigerator has arrived and is as cute as a button! On Wednesday our stove and dishwasher will arrive, and then, to top it all off (no pun intended) Saturday we’ll have our countertop and sink installed. After nearly 7 weeks of eating out for nearly every meal and having a kitchen that consisted of 4 walls and a floor, a completed kitchen is a dream come true.