It’s been great messing with the new camera since it’s arrived in the post. With help and recommendations from friends, I was able to start shooting all manually, and have been pleased with the results. I scored a manual focus non-metering 50mm f/1.8 prime lens from the 1970s on eBay for $26, and shooting photos with that has been a lot of fun. With everything set manually, it’s been a hell of a lot easier to get non-blurry photos of L and the animals.

It’s been a little over a month since I’ve last posted, and with good reason, everything’s gotten hectic.

E was brought on board at a great job, which means L went into daycare. Though he is benefiting greatly from socializing with other kiddos, it’s still extremely difficult to leave him in anyone else’s care after being by his side every day for a little over a year.

Having someone else deal with his allergies has always been a big worry, he’s very sensitive to a wide variety of food ingredients. The first day he was in daycare, despite us bringing particular things to eat and stressing the importance of his diet, he somehow wound up with a cheese cracker and a subsequent rash on his face. We luckily equipped them with Benadryl and a dosing chart, so he wound up okay. It was, however, enough to freak us both out and make us second guess everything.

He’s become a very, very happy little guy. He’s accumulated a medium sized arsenal of toys, and runs around the house with a few of them causing mayhem and destruction. He’s figured out how to open the latches on the dog food container, the result of which should be self-explanatory (as should the need for heavy items on top of the dog food container from then on). Since the day he entered daycare, we’ve taken to bathing him every night to get the cooties off, and he loves every second of it.

We’ve tossed around the idea of having him sit for some portraits recently, and just can’t bring ourselves to do it. Though it would be great to have a nice photo or two of him, as hardcore DIY people we can’t justify spending a few hundred dollars per sitting for a one-off. We decided it would be better to take what we would spend on a photographer, and buy a DSLR camera. We got a deal on a Nikon D40 that we simply could not pass up. This way, we won’t just have a photographer’s perfect photo of him once a year or less, we’ll have great photos of him frequently throughout his whole early life.

We headed down to Austin for Halloween, as our friend got married to his longtime girlfriend on Halloween night. I was asked to be in the wedding party, an invitation I was honored to accept.

L and E spent a lot of time in the hotel room, L unfortunately came down with an ear infection right as the trip kicked off. We arrived in Austin at 2am Thursday night, and our first night was spent consoling a screaming child followed by a 7am trip to Walgreen’s to buy a cool mist humidifier.

Within twelve hours of a visit to a pediatric association’s evening doctor group, L’s penicillin kicked in and the difference was like night and day. By the next afternoon, he was dressed up in his little skeleton sweatsuit, running around the hotel room.

The wedding was absolutely gorgeous, the venue was way up on a hill overlooking a valley, the view of the entirety of Austin was breathtaking. I got to sneak a photo of our friend spending his last few moments as a bachelor deep in reflection and contemplation.

We met some great people, L enjoyed dropping it down on the dancefloor with the ladies, and our trip home was thankfully quick and uneventful. We cleaned the house thoroughly before we left for L’s party, so we were greeted on our arrival by a clean bed with soft clean sheets.

As I said, from this point on, we finished the rest of the kitchen in less than 48 hours. I was able to fit the door casings, do the rest of the cabinets and countertops, wire the range vent hood, and lay the thresholds at the edge of the door frames.

There are a few things left to do, like replace the ugly teal ceiling fan, original to the house. IKEA was also out of stock on the large doors needed for the stove side cabinet, so we’re going without for a few weeks. On the big bare wall above the sink, we will most likely do some open shelving.

We simply snapped some iPhone photos and uploaded them to Flickr, mainly because we are burnt out. We rushed and rushed to get this whole thing done by the time L’s birthday party rolled around. Now, I don’t want to turn another screw, take another photo, wire another fixture, or even look at the resultant mess of tools and scrap wood in the garage for at least a few weeks. The ceiling fan will get to have its last hurrah.

Overall, we’re quite thrilled so far.

It’s hard to believe that at this time last year we were in the throes of doctor trips and hospital preparations. It was all very nerve-wracking, mostly for me. E seemed to have a calm about her that I envied. I don’t think I calmed down and was able to sleep without worrying, until L was a few months old. After E’s labor, I had a huge new respect for women who give birth.

We had a small party for L on Sunday, some friends and relatives came, most with their children. The party was a resounding success, and what really struck both of us was what a great home we have now that most of the construction is finished.

L didn’t like the cupcakes at all, most likely because they were a lot more sweet than the bananas and sweet potatoes he’s used to.

It’s been a whirlwind weekend, with my mother visiting for L’s first birthday party, and finishing the entirety of the kitchen in roughly two days. I haven’t been this tired or poorly rested since L was two months old.

I had put together enough of the cabinets that I got my time down to ten minutes per cabinet. Despite that, it took me three hours to do the uppers, mainly due to a shitty studfinder that turned the whole stud finding process into a comedy of errors. It began with knocking on the wall to listen for solid areas, and ended with four unneeded drill holes through studless drywall. I finally got pissed off enough that I went to Home Depot and dropped $30 on a studfinder that actually worked. After working on cars, houses, electronics, and everything in between, I’ve found that 80% of fixing anything is having the right tool.

The uppers mount to a rail that’s drilled into the studs. The mounts are standard IKEA keyhole l-brackets.

One of our problems was the placement of the electrical lines for the vent hood. I was able to cut out two small holes in the drywall, feed the lines back through the stud, and down the wall far enough to perfectly line up with the input hole in the hood. We then patched the wall and repainted that section.

Here are the upper cabinets and vent hood, midway through mounting the countertop on the wall of lower cabinets.

Tuesday evening we pulled an almost-all-nighter to install the sink side cabinets. We booked an appointment with the plumber for Wednesday morning to hook up the sink, disposal, dishwasher, and ice maker, so we needed to have everything ready.

First we cleared everything out and started mounting cabinets. The AKURUM cabinets use an l-bracket in the top corner on each side, with a keyhole mount in the center of the bracket. The odds that the keyhole will actually line up with a wall stud are astronomical, so I used heavy duty toggle bolts mounted in the drywall. Each cabinet also came with two sets of screws that could be used to screw each cabinet to the one next to it, which I took advantage of.

Next we cut the countertop. We chose the IKEA NUMERÄR double sided counter, and used the white side up. It’s a standard eight foot span of laminate, so to fit on either side of the sink we had to make two cuts. We used a regular circular saw with a fine toothed saw blade good for cutting laminate and melamine without chewing the edges. We wrapped the cut area in painters tape beforehand and cut the counter bottom-side-up as extra precautions.

My cuts were pretty good, but not perfect. Thank God the sink sides rest on top of the counter pieces, to hide the imperfections.

The finished product, sans doors:

My overall impression of IKEA’s cabinets is not too bad. Though it’s nice that the material is 3/4″ thick, I’m still not a fan of pressed particle-board, I’d rather they at least be made of MDF. Though we picked up everything at the store (as opposed to delivery), we still had two boxes with bonked corners, that we had to return and exchange. The DOMSJÖ sink is porcelain, and as a result has a hairline imperfection or two, which I am undoubtedly going to obsess over.

Though my anxiety has been high during installation as everything seemed fragile, I have to admit that everything is rock solid when mounted. I would feel comfortable standing on the countertop with no problem, and with reviews online saying how well they stand up over the long haul, it looks like it was the right decision. I will say that the flipside of saving a lot of money is that installation is very labor intensive, and not for the faint of heart or the non-handy.

E and I put L to bed and spent Saturday night carrying out Operation Bunny Gray. We let it dry and saw that it was still way too dark for a kitchen that will have black cabinets. We went back to the drawing board (and Lowe’s) and picked up two gallons of Iced Cube Silver.

After picking up the aforementioned row of lower cabinets for far less money than I envisioned, it occurred to me that doing the whole kitchen was slightly in reach. We talked it over and planned everything out, and walked out of IKEA Sunday afternoon with a full set of counters, upper and lower cabinets. Our sister and brother-in-law were our angels from above, trekking up with us in their F150 to haul the bulk of it back to the house.

We solved the counter dilemma by opting for the more expensive DOMSJÖ double bowl apron sink. This severs the counter sections completely into smaller sections without the need for a seam, and allowed us to pick up countertops at IKEA while we were there.

The only place we ran into trouble when designing the kitchen was that we originally placed the dishwasher immediately to the left of the apron sink cabinet. I wondered, since the sink is flush with the cabinet, if there would be anything for the end seam of the counter to rest on. There wasn’t. We inserted a twelve inch wide cabinet between the sink and the dishwasher.

Enough about the planning stages. As I say to E all the time, “Less talking, more working.”

Between work, life, kiddo, and Bella, progress on the kitchen has been a bit slower than we’d hoped. We had some last bits of mudding to do after Mike left, and over the last day or so E went through on the midnight shift and sanded everything down.

We do have a coherent plan as to how this needs to come together. First, we bought nine feet of IKEA Akurum cabinets with Applad black doors. We’ve started assembling those and should be done this evening.

We’re going to paint the walls Benjamin Moore Bunny Gray. It was a toss up between that and Iced Cube Silver, but Bunny Gray has the word bunny in it, so that’s a bit of a given. We should be able to paint when the plaster dries and we sand one last time.

Our only dilemma has to do with the countertop. Our budget is maxing out, so something like stainless steel will have to wait. L is having his first birthday soon, so the two week waiting period to have even a basic laminate countertop fabricated is backing us into a bit of a corner. We might settle on using some of the 8.5 foot spans of extra red countertop we have stashed in the garage, just for the time being.

Either way, it’s going to be a long weekend.

We decided to take L to Lowe’s to look at countertops for the kitchen cabinets. He had different ideas about what he’d like to look at, and ran around the aisles a bit.

On our way in was the line of appliance floor models they were selling. At the end of the first row was a gorgeous black Bosch dishwasher on sale for 50% off. E ran through a string of floor monkeys trying to get them talked down even further, getting denied each time until she finally talked to the manager. He agreed to take another 10% off, for a total of 60% off the retail price. We tossed it in the back of the shaggin’ wagon, and went home.

Behold, in all its glory:

Our old dishwasher was a hopeless piece of trash that’s already been serviced twice through American Home Shield and has to have its knob wiggled to get it to even start a cleaning cycle. One of the tabs on top that screw the dishwasher to the underside of the cabinet broke off, and the kickplate has long since disappeared.

Despite not being in our original budget, the Bosch is truly gorgeous and in hindsight, much needed.