With every good intention imaginable, we’ve had some flavor of table and chairs in this corner of the family room since we moved into this house. Though instead of a consistent place to either eat dinner or sit and make fun of drug-addled celebrities when we have company over, ninety-five percent of the time our table and chairs functioned as a mail bin or coat rack.

So, our Saarinen repros got thrown on craigslist (reaping an assload of money), and Munchkin Corner breathed its waking breath. At least now I don’t have to cringe every time one of our friends called our table and chairs “Jetsons furniture”.

The first order of business in furnishing any young boy’s fantastic toy extravaganza: find a LEGO table. A quick glance at the hundreds of dollars some places wanted for what amounted to a little short stack table with plastic plates on it immediately violated any notion I had of buying one.

Coincidentally, my eBay trolling wife almost immediately found a Pottery Barn Activity Table in perfect condition and snagged it for 39 bucks. With the table retailing for almost $350, somebody lost their shirt on that one.

The next step is to prime and paint it, and epoxy enough building plates to the top surface to create a nice, sturdy LEGO wonderland for our little midget.

We’ve already had to pull up the red area rug we covered the floor with, as he would run his metal shopping cart up to the edge of the rug and scream at the top of his lungs when it stopped dead in its tracks. But add in a hand me down IKEA bookcase, a whacked out scary, nightmarish painting E found at a tag sale, and the first iteration of L’s play area revisions has begun.

The problem with joint compound is that with any sanding down, it immediately goes airborne and covers everything. The solution is a makeshift sanding “tent”.

The enclosed space helps catch all the dust and keep it isolated to the plastic-contained portion of the room. As long as I head straight for the shower afterward, I don’t seem to get plaster dust anywhere. Well, almost.

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.

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.

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.

When all was said and done, I was able to fit everything together in a way that we literally were down to two and a half pieces left over.

We did, however, learn from the living room experience, and bought a much better grade underlayment. It made a big difference in the classic laminate tapping sound, and I believe will be better in the long run.

My only real complaint is that I should have bought kneepads. It may be just that I’m not eighteen anymore, but by the time evening rolled around and I was finishing up, my knees were bright red and bruised from moving around the floor in that position for seven hours.

We then spent the first part of the weekend putting up a few base coats of flat white. It began to look like a real room.

Our next step was to level the floor to prepare for the laminate installation. There were sections where the subfloor was replaced, and other sections where the cabinets had been built into the floor. All were missing the linoleum that was under the old laminate. Since the difference in height was so striking, we opted to rip some strips of luan paneling and adhere it to the subfloor with some Liquid Nails.

We are hoping to put a small countertop on the built out wall. Mike is going to put in a support post when the wall is built out, to prevent the beam from sagging any more than the 1/8″ it’s already begun to sag.

After spending the first day doing a lot of planning and deciding, he and E called it a day and I arrived home from work to face the evening’s task. Yes, we scraped the 1980s popcorn ceiling.

We had seen a lot of DIY jobs call for wetting the popcorn using everything from hot water to a 10:1 vinegar and water solution. None of this would work for us as the popcorn had been painted with enamel, effectively sealing it from any tampering. We decided to do it dry, and bought one of these:

Mike showed us how easily the popcorn came off with a putty knife, which gave us the idea to do a straight scrape and sand job. After scraping the bulk of the popcorn off, we went through with pole sanders and sanded down the remnants. The result was a ceiling that looked only slightly textured. We are very pleased, and the whole job including taping off the entryways with plastic sheeting took three hours.