All But Finished Kitchen

We are so close to having a finished kitchen, and I'll be the first to admit that the progress that we have made since buying this house almost two years ago fills me with a sense of pride that I didn't know I could feel for an inanimate object. Our kitchen, like everywhere else in this house, has been more work than we could have anticipated when we started dreaming of how we could change and modernize the house. We gutted the kitchen first thing after getting the keys to the house, and spent days peeling up layers of linoleum tiles only to find that the wood floor underneath would need to be replaced. We replaced the floor with reclaimed hardwood, only to have a leak destroy all of our hard work and force us to re-replace with more reclaimed hardwood. Appliance troubles, scheduling troubles, troubles with just about everything one could think of, yet here we are with our fully functional and almost finished kitchen.

We will replace the black vent hood with a stainless steel one after we pass final inspections for the house, and we plan to have the electrician over to install our under-cabinet lights as soon as we get our final electrical orders in, but we have a functional kitchen. We've quickly filled up cabinets and drawers with the millions of boxes of kitchen supplies, gone grocery shopping for the first time in almost a year, and have cooked a hot meal every day for the last two weeks. Get ready world, once our dining table comes in we plan on having a hell of a housewarming party.

A reminder to all of us what the state of the kitchen was when we purchased the house.