We were downstairs a couple nights after the "lasagna week" and were just kind of staring at everything and thinking of where we should start. Reid's workout equipment was down there as well as his motorcycles, some tables, and still a ton of my moving boxes. We decided the shelves above the stovetop/sink area needed to go. I think they were made of particle board to begin with and weren't very strong. So we thought we'd tear down about 3 feet of them so there was just a little area above the sink left.
Well...it kind of turned out to be what happens when you try to cut your own hair. Just a little bit more to make things even ends up with no top shelves at all. We just kept saying "Well, it will be better to have hooks there and hang things instead."
The next night or so the stovetop came out along with a few more feet of built in countertop. The wiring was shot underneath and even if we got it fixed we knew it wouldn't pass muster that close to the sink in a commercial kitchen. Once we finished tearing everything out, only the sink and a little counterspace around it remained with the storage space underneath for cleaning supplies.
For a few days after that I started to make a pile of things that could safely be stored in the barn until we had room for them/cleaned out the barn. (Who knows what kind of treasures I'm going to find in five years...) Opie & Reid hauled everything out to the barn one night and we finally looked like we were getting somewhere.
The next project was Reid's "weight room" It took up a quarter of the basement and was in the half we planned to use as part of kitchen storage/Southern Scratch office area. Before we (actually just Reid-no way I can lift 80 pound dumbells. Oh how I love his country boy biceps...) could move all that we had to find a place for the two twin beds I brought to our union. In Warm Springs I had a dormer room which fit my grandmother's two white twin beds just perfectly. Here though we really didn't have a great place for them. The guest bedroom had my queen bed already in it along with a desk/printer for Southern Scratch (and still more boxes).
Somehow I made space for them in the guest bedroom and with the help of a ton of underbed storage boxes managed to
Finally we had everything we could moved out, moved over and cleaned up. I bleached the concrete floors and shop-vac'd everything, multiple times. Then we started painting.
It started out as kind of a fun job. The change from cinderblocks to white changed the whole look. It could see it being transformed from a dark basement to a white washed Grecian island abode (a la the set in Mama Mia!). After about an hour of painting, and going over the blocks several time since the paint seemed to just soak in and disappear, I stepped back and looked at my job. And realized I had painted maybe 3 square feet in all. I couldn't believe how slowly it was going but I guess since the cinderblocks had never been painted before they just soaked up the paint like a sponge.
Meanwhile my mom asked about the twin beds and possibly using them in her house. They were also redecorating and thought they would be perfect for a grandchild room. She knew we were struggling with where to put all the furniture and I gladly told her she could come up and haul everything except our toothbrushes away if she wanted! I was so sick of not having living SPACE. (At one time i think I even contemplated just moving everything out to the barn and slowly allowing things back in one at a time. I think I didn't because I was afraid we would love having nothing in the house too much and end up being uber crazy minimalists with no TV and no couch). They also had the fridge from my Warm Springs house in the warehouse to bring to us. I told my mom to just pretend she was doing missionary work and come on up.
So I did what every sneaky little daughter does and bought a couple 5 gallons of Kilz white primer and extra paintbrushes/rollers for their visit. I made sure there was plenty of food on hand and by the end of the weekend Reid and my dad had finished the walls of the future kitchen. They left the fridge with us and disappointingly only brought the rug back with them which was not the big furniture purge we had hoped for. (But looking back probably good we didn't just up and give away everything we had to sit on or eat off of in our house).
The following week the guys from South Star came out and ran the LP line. With a sink, an oven and a fridge all ready to go we were almost ready to start baking. We moved my desk back downstairs (this mammoth white thing I built in college when I got my first power drill) as well as a china cabinet (repurposed as a ribbon & gift packaging storage area) and shelves (that I built from old cabinets also repurposed as a cookbook/display containers storage area).
After another oh-so-romantic trip to Sam's, we had a couple more stainless rolling work tables and some storage & stainless baking racks. It was finally beginning to look like a real working kitchen! Luckily it was just in time for our first non-family houseguests...
In part 4: Housekeepers, humidity & hygrometers....
