More progress

Ok, I obviously watch entirely too much HGTV which has left me with a strange desire to only post our house's before pictures and then wait until all the exciting stuff has been installed so I can post pictures of THE BIG REVEAL. Well, for the sake of those who are interested in the progress and not just the before/after, and because I'm sure the final product will still be very exciting, I will continue posting as we go along. This week has been so exciting, as you will see...

But first, for all you Iain fans, here's the cute boy in his newest outfit (picked out by Mark).
As always, he's such a trooper. Here, he's just woken up from a nap. I had been hard at work for hours, putting together our cabinets in the other half of the room. God really knew what He was doing when he gave us such a content firstborn!

Much to my pride's chagrin, this picture makes it look like Mark (rather than I) has just successfully completed our cabinet construction. To Mark's credit, he and I make an excellent team. He was able to assess and fix a few problems here and there that enabled the entire process to be a success. For any of you cabinet afficionado's, they are chocolate-glazed solid birch faces on plywood box/birch ply veneered - for the price, this is impressive considering typical cabinets are particle board boxes. If I haven't already mentioned this, we ordered them quite inexpensively (relatively speaking, of course) from a Christian company at www.easykitchencabinets.com as you might guess, we're big fans! :)On Memorial Day, our hardwood maple floor was installed in our kitchen/dining room. The first coat of sealant was applied to protect it, but it will be buffed and resealed before move-in.

In the above picture, you can also see that our existing oak floor was sanded and 2 test patches of sealant were applied. The left is oil-based and the right is water-based. We decided on the water-based, as it is a lighter finish and doesn't amber with age as does the oil-based. Below is a closer picture of our maple floor.

Moving right along, this is a picture of our newly-tiled tub-surround (minus the grout). :)

The other end of the tub, minus the faucet fixtures....oops, apparently I just deleted the other 2 pictures of the bathroom. Well, you'll just have to wait for those. Sorry.

I haven't seen this for myself, so you're seeing what I've seen in the following pictures. Mark took these for me this morning when he stopped by the house. Our kitchen cabinets, in the process of being installed!!! This is the north wall of the kitchen. In the west corner end will go our fridge and in the center space will be our stove and microwave.

Below is another view of the kitchen. In the southwest corner is our lazy susan. As an aside, we were originally going to buy 2 of those, one for each corner of the south wall, however we changed our minds about how we wanted to utilize the space on the "peninsula" and opted for a 3-drawer base cabinet that will face the dining space. Having assembled all the cabinets myself, I'm SO glad we only had 1 lazy susan. Two might have required a hospitalization for the sake of my sanity...though I still highly recommend the cabinet company!