Kitchen Frustrations and Functionality

We are happy to announce that we finally have a fully functional kitchen! On Monday night we bought a new faucet to replace the extremely leaky one. We bought a Kohler that looks very similar. The big difference was that the Kohler took about one quarter the time to install as the first faucet – with no leaks. We are very pleased with it. Below are pictures of the faucet and plumbing.

After the third trip to the hardware store and our second round of consulting with the store plumber, Chris was able to come up with the correct combination of parts to make the drain work properly. Chris thinks that it is the ugliest plumbing job he has ever completed but it works and there are no leaks.

One additional source of frustration for Chris was wiring the garbage disposal. The wiring that was there was about a foot too short. Instead, Chris had to install a junction box and BX cable under the sink. It looks (and works) much better now.



Monday night I was able to finish closing off the open wall in the den/sunroom. It’ll be so nice to have the switches at normal people level! Obviously I still have to add a lot of drywall compound and install a lot of trim…


On Tuesday, we finished the range and range hood installations. Now we can finally cook in the kitchen. Because it was getting kind of late we had to go with a quick meal – salad and Skyline chili! As the first meal cooked in the house it wasn’t the most elegant but it did taste good!


On Wednesday, I had to fly to Little Rock, Arkansas for work. So as I stayed in a nice hotel overlooking downtown and ate great barbeque (pictures below), Chris was stuck in the Maryland heat working on the porch railing and finishing the installation of the dishwasher (which included re-doing most of what we had completed before). He is such a trooper!



When I arrived home on Thursday, I was able to help Chris finish up the top part of the porch railing. We still have to install the balusters but it will pass the final inspection this week. At some point in the future we want to remove this little porch and replace it with a much bigger deck/patio but as a temporary measure we think this works well. It is the perfect place to put all of our herbs!


Early Saturday morning we packed up the camping gear, bikes, and dog and headed to Pennsylvania to camp with my family. My whole family was there (minus 2 cousins) – even my aunt and uncle from New Hampshire made the trek. We had a lot of fun biking, kayaking, relaxing, eating, playing games and going to Conneaut Lake Park. This is the campground that my family has been going to since before I was born – we have so many memories of time spent there. Of course I was bad about taking pictures so below is Tucker next to the creek.


We drove back today and knew that we would hit traffic – it took us six hours to get home from my parent’s house because we had to take a lot of back roads. Before we even had a chance to unpack the whole car we had issues.

We had let Tucker into the backyard to run around a bit and on his way back in the storm door slammed hard on his tail and Chris tried to open the door quickly which caused the glass to shatter. Chris ended up with a big gash on his hand but he’s all sanitized and bandaged up now. We spent the next half hour cleaning up all the glass from the kitchen floor and porch. That storm door had been driving us a little crazy for awhile – the previous owner’s dogs had knocked out the bottom half of the glass a long time ago and the door slams so hard and loud every time. We should have taken it off a long time ago but always had other things that were more pressing. Now we have a storm door with no glass that still slams each time it closes…I think removing it might be moving up on the priorities list!