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.

Now things are calming down, and we can stop and smell the roses (and hopefully the sawdust and lacquer).

In an effort to get rid of a lot of what hasn’t worked, we began trolling craigslist and eBay for things that would. E made some incredible finds. We paid obscenely low prices for our favorite 1950s and 1960s dressers and credenzas (or as our friend Wes refers to them, “that boring Mad Men shit”).

Our front room is starting to resemble a furniture warehouse, as we try to make room elsewhere for some of these great scores.

First stop on the project train? A room-by-room, whole house purge of items. I’d love to go through with big black trash bags. I’ll settle for E’s stock of Rubbermaids.

After walking around and taking in that fantastic tree smell for awhile, we took a walk through their tacky “Spray-Snow Winter Wonderland” room just for giggles.

We always have a a huge crisis of conscience when buying a real tree in Texas. Being New Yorkers, our dead parents would spin in their graves if they knew we spent more than $50 on a tree. So we walked past the $300 six foot trees up front, and asked for their Charlie Brown section. We’ve had luck doing that previously, I’m always surprised what constitutes a “reject” tree in some people’s minds.

As we turned the corner to Budget Row, we were greeted by some of the tallest, most full and beautiful trees on the lot, for a fraction of the price of the others. We asked the lot guy what could possibly be wrong with these and he said, “A lot of people don’t like them because the needles are stiff.” Anyone who has hung an ornament on a Christmas tree knows that stiffer needles keep the hooks on better, so we laughed and shelled out a comparatively miniscule amount of money. The total price wound up being 35% of what we paid for the fake the week before.

When we got home and got the tree in the house, I grabbed the Sawzall and lopped off a few of the bottom branches to give me enough trunk to get it into the base.

Though we can’t know for certain what L thinks about the tree until he starts talking, we’d like to think that the smile on his face last night meant that he knew this tree was super fantastic and the other one sucked big ass balls. After he touched it a few times and stared at it, we’re certain the “stiff needles” will probably be one deterrent to him mucking with the tree.

Then, as quickly as the day passed, it was suddenly time for bed.

After combing through websites and sale circulars, I found that Garden Ridge was having a 50% reduction in price on all their artificial trees, including their unlit models. We decided to go with an unlit tree simply due to the amount of lights we already have in the attic, we figured we could save a bit of money foregoing the prelit option.

It being a particularly quiet Sunday evening at our local neighborhood Garden Ridge, we turned L loose from the shopping cart and photographed some of the mayhem.

After having our newly purchased “reality challenged” Christmas tree sit in its box in our front room for nearly a week, I decided to clear some space and assemble the thing. I got out the base and unfurled the bottom layer.

I thought I was imagining things, but to me the bottom layer looked like complete shit. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assemble the rest of the tree.

I slid each layer into the top of the previous one, and by the time I popped the top crown into the second-highest layer, I had a 7 1/2 foot tall towering piece of garbage. I tried again to think that maybe I was just misjudging the thing. It was obvious that each branch piece consisted of a bunch of wired twig pieces that needed to be spread way out to fill in all the blank space. L by then had long been asleep so, going against my desire to throw it off the front porch, I took a small nap before he woke up.

As L and I woke up, E arrived home. She strolled through the front door, looked up and said, “What the fuck? Please tell me our Christmas tree doesn’t look like that.”

I gave her the bad news and then, to check whether I was crazy, asked her what she thought about the whole “spreading out the twig pieces” deal. She agreed it was obvious that needed to be done. But the more we looked at this poor bastard tree, the more we realized there was just not enough spreading out that could be done to even remotely make Olive Oyl here look like something resembling a standard Christmas pine.

After letting Liam walk around this horrible piece of shit and completely ruining the first glimpse he’ll have in his life of what a Christmas tree looks like, we packed it back up in the box and found the receipt. I hope he’s not yet old enough to form a solid memory of what we did to his tree, I felt like a zookeeper who removed a baby squirrel from its mother and instead let it imprint on a pelican.

Needless to say we’ll be exploring other options.

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.

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.”