Kitchen - the cabinets go in, part 1

Sorry I've been a bit quiet - there's a bit of a problem with blogging renovations, and that is that when you're in the midst of the exciting stuff you're way too busy renovating to blog about it. It doesn't help if you smush a first birthday party into the middle, either (although it does help us overall since that meant lots of awesome family help for us, due to birthday visits).

Since the floor was done a couple of weeks ago we've been waiting for the kitchen cabinets to arrive. We had family arriving on Thursday afternoon; we were hoping the kitchen cabinets would arrive before that so that we'd have a chance to put the pantry in and put some things away, to free up valuable floor space. Technically they did arrive before the first guests but only by about five minutes and none of them were off the truck yet!

However, since it was my parents who were the unlucky first, the pantry was in place before anyone else arrived because my dad is not one to rest on his laurels, even when he's purportedly on holiday. The timeline was something like this:

Thursday: cabinets arrive and are stacked in the corner and ignored while our house guest helps to assemble his own bed (a Murphy bed! More on that in another post sometime).
Friday: Pantry installed, some cabinets assembled and roughly placed in position. Other odd jobs done, mainly by our guests. We should have people to stay more often!
Saturday: Remaining cabinets assembled and placed in position. Some plumbing for new kitchen done. Manic cake baking and party preparations. First birthday party for our small person. We survived a whole year! He hasn't eaten any screws yet! Woohoo!
Sunday: Sort of rest day. Some tweaking to cabinet positions, other bits and pieces. Family time.
Monday: Cabinets properly leveled and fixed in place. Plumbing completed, dishwasher installed and temporary sink (from old kitchen) installed.

Thursday afternoon / Saturday morning / Sunday morning 

Our cabinets are from iKitchen, same as last time - we like them! They have various cabinet door options (and will send you swatches for you to check out) and we like the thermowrapped gloss doors - easy to keep clean and look fresh, but also won't date too quickly. This time around we looked at getting a profile door (think farmhouse kitchen or tongue and groove) but couldn't agree on a profile, felt it might look too busy and the profile doors are more expensive so in the end went back to the plain gloss finish.

The cabinets were just over $6k including delivery - a pricey part of the job but pretty good value considering what we got. Our kitchen includes a few slightly high-brow features including drawers in the pantry, a fancy-pants pull-out for the corner cupboard and some glazed wall cabinets (which I made a mistake on so need to be re-glazed, oops). They come flat-packed (with a couple of exceptions), or you can pay 10% extra and have them all delivered fully assembled. We're cheap so you know what we chose!

The kids were all pretty keen to help too!

Installing cabinets is more time consuming than you might think, and there are some tools which are essential for a good result, but it's completely achievable for a competent DIYer. That's not really us but we had my dad's help. ;-)

I have lots more photos and detail but perhaps will aim for installment two tomorrow so that I can go and put my feet up now that we have the house to ourselves for the first time in a while. Lazy, huh?

Renovating with a baby

Someone asked me the other day how we find renovating with a baby. As today is said baby's first birthday (don't ask me where a whole year went!) I thought it was an appropriate day to expound upon this.

Just a few hours old and blissfully
unaware of the turmoil his DIY
wannabe parents will thrust upon him.

The short answer: it's much slower and trickier than without a baby!

The worst part is having large areas of the house very much un-childsafe, which means we've been spending a lot of time in certain rooms. The downstairs bedrooms, which we finished before we moved in for this purpose, are safe, but still aren't ideal for playtime; our freshly folded clothes seem to be mysteriously strewn across the floor more often than I'm fully comfortable with.

We find ourselves trying to get a lot done during naptime - but these are becoming less frequent... And as any parent will know, the day I really want him to have a nice long sleep because I need to finish a coat of paint will be the day the nap only lasts half an hour.

Sometimes we ambitiously try to get things done with the small helper around, but more often than not this ends with one of us fully focused on the boy to prevent him from eating screws / playing with saws / falling through holes in the floor.

Which is not to say that the baby-wrangling is bad - it's lots of fun and for every set of challenges there are rewards too (we like him!). But it does definitely need to be factored into the planning because it... changes things.

Baby loves Bunnings!

And the most helpful thing: I'm currently unemployed (a recent development of my own doing) but we have kept our part-time childcare arrangements in place, as I will seek work again soon. This means I get some time to spread out the tools without having to worry about little fingers, which definitely supports progress!

If only I could work out a way for these self-indulgent projects to also generate enough income to make this more than a temporary arrangement... Anyone want to pay me to project manage their renovations? ;-)