House Project 5: Backsplash

The big finishing touch for the major remodeling part of the kitchen was the backsplash. See, in in installing the new cabinets and granite, they didn't quite line up to where the original ones were. Our cabinets are actually about a quarter inch deeper than the old ones, and we didn't want to risk ruining the travertine tiles when we cut a quarter inch deeper into them to fit in the cabinets (because we didn't have anything to replace them with unless we redid the whole house), so instead of just putting the cabinets on the ground, we actually floated them over the ground and attached them to the wall, just like the upper cabinets. However, this meant that they were now a quarter inch taller than the other cabinets.

Then, on top of that, Anthony wanted really big thick granite on top, and a big lip over the edge, so we needed to elevate the counters even more to make sure that we'd still be able to open our drawers after installing the countertops.

So our counters ended up about an inch or so higher than the originals. This meant that the tile backsplash still attached to the wall wouldn't work anymore - we'd be cutting into the pattern, and it wouldn't look right.

It took a lot of creativity, but we were able to find a pattern that worked and allowed us to keep some of the existing tile still in place.

This was a very very very long project. We started Saturday morning and didn't get to finish until about 3AM on Sunday. And that was just the first part of it.

Here's how the main part came out:

Now, our kitchen counters extend through the dining room, giving us a great buffet/serving area. Unfortunately, the cabinets that had originally been there were not a standard size. They were far shallower than standard lower cabinets and didn't have drawers. The original plan was to take off the backsplash in the buffet area and move it up a few inches, so that it meshed with the rest of the backsplash in the kitchen, while still showing a clear distinction. But we forgot that we were also adding depth, and we were about 6 inches short on tile.

The pattern that we used in the kitchen was far too expensive to take all the way down the room, plus it would look too busy.

So after sleeping and recovering from our endless hours of work on Saturday, I had a brilliant idea.

Unfortunately, my idea was very complicated.

I took the leftover tiles from the border (the long white-ish pieces) and then picked out some leftover scraps from the pattern (the black and tan ivory squares) where we had cut out room for wall sockets, and hand-pieced together a 6 inch border for the remaining buffet area.

Then, since it didn't seem finished off, we took a piece of flat crown molding and I painted it gold, then made a black glaze and applied it for an antiquing technique, and then painted the edges solid black, to distinguish it from the brown walls.

Here's how it looked:

It took soooo long to do, but I absolutely LOVE how it turned out!

The First Meal

We just had our countertops installed. Finally, after almost two weeks of living in our new, beautiful house, we can use our kitchen!

So what do we do?

We cook a fantastic gourmet meal, of course! What else do Mauro's do?

House Project 4: Plumbing

I absolutely love my husband. He is the most talented guy I think I have ever met. When you meet him, you'd think he was kind of a pretty boy, a jock that thinks he's joe cool, but he just knows so much! Throughout the entire house process, he never ceased to amaze me.

Here's just one example: he installed the plumbing for our kitchen sink all by himself, and it worked perfectly on the first try. He just went to home depot, bought everything he needed (he didn't even really have to ask anyone what to get) and put it together. Voila! A fully functioning kitchen sink!

If you join the Mauro Clan...

...You develop very odd tendencies.

And this applies to animals as well.

Take my cat for instance. He is a very strange little monster. He has all of these really weird fetish phases that he goes through. For a while it was twistie ties. Then it was Anthony's brown sweater. Not just any sweater, this one brown one. We would come home from work and find that he had dug it out of a pile of laundry and drug it into the other room for whatever reason (but he never put it away. I need to work on his cleaning skills).

Well, right now it is q-tips.

Yes, q-tips.

He loves it when we throw them away and accidentally miss the trash can, because then he'll run in and bat them around the floor for hours on end!

And then he discovered that we kept the glorious q-tips in the cabinet under the sink and would whine and scratch at the cabinet to try to get at the q-tips!

And then today, when I came home, this is what I found:

My dear Prinxie had hit the jackpot.

House Project 3: Installing Cabinets

Well, the next step in putting the house together was to get some cabinets in there! Kind of an important feature in a kitchen...

We found this great mail-order site for cabinets, and the pictures looked really nice, so in the interest of saving money, we thought we'd take a gamble and try them out. It tured out to be a good thing, since they not only looked great, but were about 1/3 of the price of the cheapest "discount wholesale dealer" in town.

So within a week of ordering them, we got a call from the shipping company saying that they had about 17,000 lbs of cabinets waiting for us to come pick them up! (We got free shipping if we had them delivered to a certain place in Phoenix). Just the boxes alone took up the entire front room! It was insane!

By the way, we have some fantastic friends that came out and made the experience far more enjoyable and helped us get it done very quickly!