Wow, been a little bad about blogging lately!  I will try to remember everything that we did since the last post.  We have since had a weekend to work on the house, then I took thanksgiving week off and the first part of the week worked on the house then back to NY to visit family for thanksgiving.  Finally ending in a Sunday at home relaxing (out to breakfast!) and during a late 2 hour nap we went through all our cabinets to make sure they were all in good shape (they weren’t, so they are express ordering 3 of them – 1 of which was broken and 2 had minor issues).

Anyway so back to the weekend of the 17th.  Ryan finished the upstairs bathroom floor (patching in some subfloor, then laying down new cement board).  So the upstairs bathrooms are all ready for plumbing rough-in when Jason can come out (this week).

Then it was on to the kitchen floor – it was a lot of work but Ryan got up the old kitchen floor layers and then we started putting down cement board (2 pieces) 🙂  Our drill does not like this kind of work evidently and it was over heating (it’s new because our old one burned out the batteries and we have to take them someplace to get replaced – no time yet!) – we may be replacing this new one though).

kitchen floor removed and 2 pieces of cement board glued and screwed down.

a view from the other side of the kitchen

Once the weekend was over Alli went off to daycare per usual but I was home to work on the house!  I actually don’t remember what day I did what but I ran to the dump every day (monday through wednesday).  I caulked the new siding and windows on the driveway side of the house (it was crazy cold on my poor little finger!).  I moved everything in the attic over to the small section we are not having insulated yet for storage reasons.  I cleaned up the basement really well (the kitchen demo did a number on the basement below).

I also demo’d most of the outside wall in the hidden section off the kitchen (old stair well).  This way they can insulate that section for us.

Hidden stair well – with wall demo’d for insulation

After that i finished up the outside wall electrical, running a cable/ethernet drop, the feed for the outlet run, a feed and wires for the disposal and dishwasher, the recessed lights over the sink and counter.  I also put down 2 more pieces of cement board in the kitchen but wasn’t able to get the saw to cut the other pieces I needed to install so that kind of halted.

cable drop and outlet feed added

dishwasher and disposal lines (the disposal is on a switch), both run under the sink.

I’m pretty sure that’s all I did other than pack and get ready to head out Wednesday night to NY.  I don’t have recent pictures of the kitchen – I’ll get some before insulation goes in on thursday.  Jason is also coming out thursday to rough in the upstairs bathroom and laundry room plumbing so we can drywall the kitchen as our next project.

We realized this past weekend that another driving factor for getting the cabinets installed before xmas (besides the major one of wanting a working kitchen again) is that we can’t put up a xmas tree in our cupola until the cabinets are out of the way and it’s Alli’s first xmas – we need a tree!!!