Our estimates were off...

Andrew and I are used to projects taking much longer than we expect. Since we had a busy Sunday, we were shooting for just having the kitchen tidied up and ready for doors and drawers to be replaced Monday night. Boy, were we surprised by how the day unfolded.

We woke up at 8:15. Andrew had set an alarm for 7, but I slept serenely when he woke up and shut off the alarm. The first thing he said was "sorry, I screwed up about church."

I said "No problem, we can still go. I showered last night!" Then I remembered that the early service is at 8am, not 9. Whoops.

So we ate a leisurely breakfast. Andrew topped a wheat crumpet with a fried egg, fresh basil, just-picked tomatoes, and avacado. Not a bad way to start a morning.

We decided to attack the inside first with the poly coat rather than divide and conquer again. We were shocked by how fast it went, since everything was already taped from the day before's staining.

And then we were done. 

The directions said to do 1 coat, sand, and then apply a second. We decided to throw caution to the wind and just do our best to apply one even, thin coat. It worked remarkably well. So we moved on to outside.

And pretty soon those were done, too. We had plans for a movie at 1:50pm, so when it was 11am and everything had a nice coat of poly, we started milling around to see what else we could accomplish.

Andrew brought out the big guns to start working on the jacked up lazy Susan doors.

I found Motsenbocker's on a blog when our floor project had reached an impasse - back in the day. It's a water based paint stripper that is less toxic than other options. It's also pretty effective. This stuff is from 2009, but it still works.

Here's the before of the doors. You can see how the stain caked and the grain of the wood is lost.

A nice smear of Motsenbocker's to begin.

Already a difference.

Meanwhile, I decided that we could carefully put the drawers back. And then I put everything that had been hanging out on our dining room table back into its proper place.

I also organized the junk drawer. I'm very anti- junk drawer organizing. It just doesn't make sense - I feel that it's ok to have just one chaotic catch-all place. But there was a lot of junk in there and the drawer was difficult to close. So I sorted. There is something wonderfully calming to me about sorting (I blame my grandma, who used to give me a tin or mismatched buttons to play with. I could sort for hours. Or 10 minutes).

See? Organized. Well, not really. But better.

By the time we needed to go, the kitchen was actually in much better order.

Once the movie ended, we ran to HyVee for some groceries and met our friends back at our house for dinner. Our friend Andy had just worked a 24 hour shift, and Andrew and I were exhausted from our DIY weekend. So I am not embarrassed to admit that conversation was basically limited to listening Andy's 3-year old son expound topics including the following: setting sail using all the pillows in my living room, his friends, what he thought of our hammock, his like of cake and cantaloupe, and all the characters from Planes 2.

After dinner, Andrew and I went straight back to work on the cabinets. With the exception of one that gave us some trouble, everything went into place with ease. About an hour later, we were taking our "after" photos.

Not a perfect match for the other woodwork in the house, but much more complimentary than the builder-basic yellow tone.

I have plans for the top of that cabinet...

And this morning, I couldn't help but compile some fun before and after photos. Of course, I forgot to take current "before" photos from when we started, but I did have a few on a Facebook album from 2008 and 2011.

Here we go!

Top is from 2008 when we first saw the house. Note there wasn't a fridge in here yet.

These before shots are from 2011. Wall color has not changed - just different lighting.

There's still some work left - despite taping, we need to clean up some stain that ended up on the floor and walls. Obviously, the lazy Susan doors need to be finished, so we will likely get those back in place later this week. And of course, I'm still wishing for darker hardware to make the look a little more Craftsman and less late 90's. But all in all, we are both blissfully happy (and pretty shocked) that our weekend project (mostly) just took a weekend to accomplish. Who knows what can happen with this new-found confidence.