Kitchen Catch Up

We've made some milestones in the kitchen and it feels like things are moving fast right now. After missing a few weekends (where Troy still made progress), I have put in some time during the week. Troy has also been able to use a couple of his "free Wednesdays" for kitchen work.

First up--Troy finished the box for the cabinet above the fridge, first the framing,

and then encasing it with drywall:

And earlier this week, Troy finished up the insulation on the ceiling of the west half:

I have no progress pictures (shame on me), but he worked on it a lot over the Thanksgiving weekend. His dad was visiting and helped a lot with this project. Each bay is filled with seven inches of foam insulation. This means that the kitchen is completely insulated!!! Isn't that amazing!? Thank goodness. The room is toasty and I do not at all miss the freezing draft that used to pour out the gap where the beam now is.

Once the ceiling was insulated, we could drywall. Or at least that's what Troy said we were going to do last night. But he neglected to mention that we would have to do more plastic first. That was a "big sigh" moment for me, but then I remembered to just carry on.

So first we hung some plastic and stapled everything up to 4 inches from the wall. Then Troy went around and put caulk all around the outside edges:

Then we pushed the plastic to the edges, into the caulk, and stapled it to death:

And of course, we had to let the lightboxes "out."

Once the plastic was done we still had time to put up the drywall. We ended up with the cliche footsteps on the ceiling.

(I still find that funnier than it actually is.)

Here's a better view of the whole ceiling:

I successfully convinced Troy to do the big pieces in two 6 foot lengths rather than an 8 foot and 4 foot. (We had to cut up two pieces either way and it resulted in the same number of seams.) I'm not sure I could have held up an 8 foot length. I do not have the strength for this!! We had to use a bunch of 4 foot patch-ins for the very west edge. They don't look good, but they'll all end up under the upper cabinets, so we're not worrying about it and neither should you!

We almost got it done--there's just this little corner left:

By the time we got this far, it was 10:00 and Troy was calling it quits. (Yes, please note it was Troy for once who said he couldn't take any more.) It's left me with a full day to kick myself for cutting up the scrap piece of drywall that would have been perfect for this gap.

You see before we got started, I cut up and threw out some drywall scraps to keep myself busy while Troy was doing something. Little did I know that one of them would be needed later. Troy tells me to get over these things, but I find it hard to do. What I should really do is go look to see if there's another "perfect" scrap in the shop to fill this up. And take out the garbage bag with the cut up scrap. Then maybe I could stop thinking about it. It's getting late, but there's still a chance I could do that before Troy gets home from work. We'll see.

So if I don't get to it first, tonight we will finish the drywall and then tape and mud so that we can paint tomorrow. (Now that the work pizza party and Thanksgiving are done, it's time to get back to Servitude Sundays.) Then we'll start installing cabinets.

It's really going to come true. I can barely believe it.