Bye Bye Tiny Sad Kitchen

With only a few weeks until completion, things are coming together and starting to feel like a home rather than a construction site.

All countertops and sinks are in and tile is installed in the master bath (photo) and downstairs bath with back entry tile needing to be redone to correct the pattern in the hex tile (photo).

The issue with hextile installation and the off-center-with-the-kitchen-window sink issue have set us back about a week but the beginning of April is still essentially when we planned to move back into the house.

Floors will be sanded and finished next week so we’re trying to get three rooms painted as much as possible before then so we can worry less about drips and spills.

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We could no longer stand our long-standing standing water issues.

Many homes in the neighborhood don’t have rain gutters but we’ve always had water pooling in areas and a heavy rain will start seeping into the garage.

We considered doing a bit of the labor ourselves and dig a french drain but have opted to hire someone to do a much more thorough and professional job. Rain gutters were installed everywhere on the house and garage last week and today trenches were dug and PVC run to connect the downspouts and route all water to the street.

Not quite as pretty or interesting as other aspects of our renovation, we hope the drainage will fix the standing water problem that has plagued our garage and the north side of our house for years.

Apologies to our kitchen forum readers for boring them with pictures of Houston’s sticky wet earth. For them, we offer other news:

After cabinets were installed and our counters cut, we discovered a small hiccup in measurements caused our main kitchen sink cabinets to be  3″off center from the window above it. We ordered a drawer base to its left in a smaller size so that the cabinets can shift to get the sink base in the correct location. Inches will be cut from the left end of the Silestone, the countertop shifted and the cut inches added to the right end of the cabinet. The thin seam under the corner cabinets shouldn’t be noticable.

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