Welcome to Week 2 of the fall One Room Challenge. If you missed the intro to this mess, or you have no idea what the One Room Challenge even is, you can catch up here.

Today I’m reporting live from the dust bowl that is my kitchen?! I’ve been repairing walls from moving cabinets and ripping off beadboard using spackle and joint compound.

There has been an archeological dig of wallpaper dating back to when the house was built in 1970. I’ve seen glimpses of something in the orange, gold and avocado family with hand crank coffee grinders or some such thing on it?!

Spackle dries faster, but joint compound, it turns out, is better for some of the larger wall woes. Once dry, you sand it smooth and wipe it down to get all the dust off. It is basically snowing white dust in my kitchen (check my IG stories for actual video of this phenomenon) and I need to get this part all done BEFORE I start applying the paint to the cabinets so it doesn’t weld itself to my new paint.

It takes a while for paint to fully cure , and I most definitely don’t want to have to do this again! #notmyfavoritejob

My vacuum cleaner has gone into shock from over-use this week vacuuming up the constant piles of white dust on the counters and floors.

This was also a birthday week for my son, so I took a break from the sanding mess to make his new favorite cake (chocolate with mocha Swiss buttercream, recipe here….yummm).

slice of the BEST chocolate cake with mocha buttercream — Happy Birthday, Jamie!

Anyway, in the meantime we have a hood saga going on….

The Vent Hood Saga

You remember I mentioned the demon possessed appliances? Well the ringleader of them is the over-the-stove microwave, heretofore known as ‘Karen’ 🤣. Karen is leaving in favor of a pretty vent hood for over the stove.

You may or may not know I have a raging affection for anything scalloped and I got it in my head that I wanted a curved chimney hood with a scalloped lower edge.

What I wanted does not exist in the ready-made world, of course, and so I explored the possibility of having it made.

I sent some sketches to my cabinetmaker and got back a quote that was much higher than I had hoped - curved wood is complicated and scallops are not that straightforward either.

I thought maybe the local metal fabricator would have an easier time with the curve so I sent the sketches off to them. After several rounds of no, “please make it look like the sketch”, I got back a mock up of exactly what I wanted. With a price that nearly knocked me over. For a mere $16250 (PLUS the actual fan and crating and shipping, so closer to $18K) I could have the hood of my dreams.

Unfortunately that is most of my budget for this entire little refresh project so no, I cannot have the hood of my dreams.

Finally, I found a company online that made the basic shape I want, would customize it to the size I need, and could provide it unfinished so I could paint it to match the cabinets.

I could not get it with a scalloped apron (I did ask :)), though I possibly might be able to modify it to have one depending on how the insert needs to attach and whether the apron is solid or plywood, but even without my beloved scallops, it would still be pretty and a vast improvement over Karen!

And altogether, it was about 1/10 the cost of my dream hood, so far more doable.

I ordered it in September and got a couple of email production updates about my order, with an expected ship date of October 11th - phew, that was all going to work out!

My next contact was a text from a trucking company saying they could deliver between 9 and 5 on Monday and someone would need to be here to sign for it. An 8 hr delivery window is a painfully long time!

As promised, it arrived Monday afternoon crated onto a pallet and was wheeled into my garage where I frantically opened the box before the truck left to make sure it was what I ordered and intact. It was, in fact beautiful and well packed.

But alas the early arrival was too good to be true. I had paid the extra charge to have the height adjusted for my not very tall ceilings, and before uncrating it and hauling it off to be painted I wanted to verify it was the right size.

The standard heights are meant for 8’ and 9’ ceilings and mine is 7’8”. It was, unfortunately, 2 1/2” taller than what I ordered, which is not going to work.

The company has been responsive and has promised to send out the corrected size in 7-10 days, which *might* make it here in time to get it painted and installed by the deadline…fortunately, it is the last thing that goes in!

So for now, I am back to patching and sanding.

Cabinet Update

I heard from the painter today that my cabinet doors will be ready for pickup next week, so I need to get cracking on prepping and painting the boxes - I’m about 1/3 of the way through the prep so far.

This is the chaos I am living in, and this is the section of cabinets that have been prepped for paint thus far. I’ve also been madly giving away extraneous bakeware and dishes…though I still have a staggering amount of both - this is maybe 1/3 of my baking pans (do I qualify for #hoarders?)

If I can finish sanding, I may be able to enlist some help with starting the painting over the weekend, but I need 3 coats and 4 hrs between them, so…it won’t get finished this weekend even in the best of circumstances!

Progress is progress

In other news, my handyman has started installing the new fridge panel/alcove which, of course🙄, necessitated shifting a pantry cabinet and adding more wall repair to my list.

He is coming tomorrow to finish that and add trim and crown molding to take my cabinets to the ceiling…yippeee!!! The white spots in that picture are because of the plaster dust hanging in the air, my own personal life size snow globe?!

Today, between working and writing, I have to get all the stuff out of the top cabinet shelves so he can get in there with tools. My dining room is starting to look like a colossal yard sale.

AND he will be exporting Karen so I can prep the sides of those cabinets. Karen is being replaced by a sweet retro looking countertop model that is currently in a box in the front hall and will soon join the dining room menagerie until the painting is done. I cannot be without a microwave to reheat my tea…some people run on dunkin’, I run on caffeinated tea!