Friday, January 26, 2007

Another cold weekend

The only good thing that comes with the frigid weekend weather is my desire to stay in the house and work on inside projects. This weekend is especially conducive to project work because there is no football. And particularly this year because the Beloved Bears are in the Super Bowl, and it will be good to get my mind off the upcoming game by doing things around the house.

Two years ago, I installed new countertops and a sink at the old house. This year, I'm installing kitchen cabinets and new countertops at the new house.

The kitchen at the new house is 'drawer-deficient'. There are only two drawers, a 'regular' 16" wide drawer and a woefully undersized 9" drawer. We knew as soon as we moved in that we would need more cabinets, especially a cabinet with drawers. There are neighbors down the street who added cabinets up and down which greatly improved the funcitonality of the kitchen. They also put in granite counters, but I'm not willing to throw $5000+ on granite. That's just me.

We found some cabinets that just about match the existing ones and ordered a new laminate countertop. We are going with a 'high definition' product, which has a texture. With a rounded over edge, it looks nicer than the standard edge of the existing top. The countertop came in last week, and I picked up the cabinets last night. They are a better cabinet than what we have, and I sure it will be a matter of time before we decide to start saving toward replacing all the cabinets.

This will be the third countertop I've done. It's really pretty easy as home improvement projects go. All you need are extra hands to tote the darn things around. The largest section is almost 12' in length, and I'll be recruiting my new neighbor, Steve (as opposed to good ol' neighbor Tom, who is trying to pack up his house to move away) to give me a hand. He's coming over tonight to help with the upper cabinets, and we'll tackle the lower cabs and countertop tomorrow. Which reminds me that I need to SHOVEL FIVE INCHES OF SNOW off the deck to set up a work area so we don't have to schlep up and down the steps from the garage every time we have to work on the countertop.

Steve lives around the corner, and he and his wife have 2 kids (like us) and girl and boy (like us) a little bit younger than our kids, but they get along just fine. Steve and Lori go to our church, and Steve manages our church softball team, so we know each other and get along pretty well. He appreciates cynicism, evidently. We worked together on a church workday building some shelves in a storage closet, and we speak the same language and work at the same pace when it comes to tools and stuff.

I'll help Steve with his shed this summer. I'll have more fun doing that.

Anyway, I took a 'before' photo of the kitchen, and I hope to have an 'after' photo to post next week.

And no, I'm not about to make a prediction on the Super Bowl. I'm not sure how I'll be able to watch it. The NFC Championship game seemed to be the closest 25 point blowout I've ever seen. Games like this make me anxious.

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