Before I start, I will give you the before shots.
This is what the place looked like when we moved in. Kitchen and adjacent dining room
Empty
Full
After I covered the cubboards with matt black contact paper (got the idea from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, of all places, but it worked a treat, it's hard wearing and washable and cost almost nothing and took about 5 minutes a door) and changed the hardware.
So I got up soooo excited. And Allen, well, lets say, not that much.
I went to the gym with Charlie and by the time we got back, Allen and his dad were ready to jump in the car to zip up to Ikea to get the new sink.
Yes, I had to buy my sink from Ikea, because I wanted a white ceramic sink, which in this city, seems to be absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to find. They only have those really ugly and counter top space consuming metal ones that have drippers on the side. Yuck. I was so sick of ours, it was so small I couldn't even fit our frying pan into it to clean it. Grrr. So I went to - count them- 14 kitchen stores to find a ceramic sink. And believe it or not, NO ONE had them. NO ONE! And when we went to Ikea to pick up our counter tops, there it was. Nice, beautiful, white ceramic sink. And cheap, too. So there. Hurray for Ikea.
We also bought our new floors from them. The cheapest in town, what can I say. We didn't have a big budget.
We also hit the hardware store, our trusty Bunnings, to get our taps and plumming stuff, and a saw.
Then finally, the work began. We ripped off the old rosy-beige counter tops. That felt really good. Then it was measuring time. Allen and I had bought breakfast bars at Ikea instead of actual counter tops, because the one we wanted was out of stock and the breakfast bars were made of the exact same wood, and they were being discontinued, and so, were super cheap. Only thing was, the ends were rounded off and they were a bit wider than counters, so we'd have to cut them to size. A bit more hassle, but we saved 300$ this way. After all the traces were made on the breakfast bars, the boys packed them into my father-in-law's pick up and took them down to Bunnings to see if they could get them cut. They were turned down, and so came back and lost about two hours of their time.
By that time, I had to leave for work.
And I came back to find that the counters weren't put in.
Somehow, we had miscalculated and with the rounded ends we had to cut off, we were missing about 30cm of counter tops.
At the end of day one, our kitchen looked like this.
Oh boy.