finishing touches

When we last left our kitchen renovation - hmm, I believe we were here:

she loves the plywood counters i made her

A functioning kitchen with plywood counters and no trim.

This kitchen... oh this kitchen.
When we first moved in - this was the room we started to demo first. I blogged about that here.
Its been a delightful challenge ever since.

We lived with those plywood counters for a very LONG time. We knew we wanted butcher block - but evidently there was suddenly a huge RUN on butcher block. huh. Go figure.

Sometime during the time we were hunting down butcher block - the giant back window started to leak. As a stop gap measure - duct tape and plastic sufficed.

notice Ferris and the FREE dog do not seem to mind

Plywood and plastic...classy.
Can you see the plastic over the window? We then lived like this for another LONG time. It felt suffocating.

After much research and calling and begging(ok we really didn't beg - we just wrote a check) - we finally acquired some butcher block.
To save some money we spent hours in the garage (later to be the studio) sanding and treating them ourselves.

she is such a perfectionist

They came out pretty nice.

 

 

 

Since that time - we've had (all) the windows replaced.  I trimmed around this giant window myself- and my rather flexible wife installed delicious backsplash tile.

 

And then the finishing touch..

 

We had purchased a counter depth fridge and had our cabinets designed to fit that fridge size - but these are stock cabinets, not custom, and so there was a gap over the fridge of just a few inches (you can actually see it in the first picture above.). So when we had the under cabinet lighting installed we asked the electrician to put a light tucked up under the cabinet that sat over the fridge with a separate switch.

 

Well - in getting good use of her new studio - my clever wife finally found time to pull this all together.

 A close up - because I can't seem to capture the amazing colors and textures of this piece with my crappy camera.

 

 ...more stained glass pieces to come.