Kitchen & Mairead's party

This has been the fastest kitchen redo in modern history! Let me show you the latest...

The cabinet went in on Thursday, then Friday they finished up the beadboard, knobs and lots  of other stuff. Can't wait to get it all painted!

Here are the newly refinished cabinets, with knobs and pulls. Above the stove will be a stainless steel hood and fan. The appliances are still out because they need to be replaced after the floor is in. When that's done, we can have HK come and hook up the sink, dishwasher and hood.

Nick came today and scrubbed the wallpaper backing and paste off the walls. He doesn't have time to paint the upper part until a couple of weeks, so I may just get busy on it myself. I'm going to scrub the metal blinds before I put them back up. Yesterday I wiped all the heavy dust out of and off of the cabinets and totally scrubbed the go-round shelves, which were pretty bad. They look great now!

The lower part of the new cabinet looked a little funny with those legs in front of the kick space, so we bought one of those 8 oz. containers of flat black paint and "painted away" the part we don't want to look at. Isn't David nice... painting it this morning, bright and early? He was headed to Redondo afterwards to see his mom for Mother's Day and ride his bike at the beach.

It's looking better!

Gretchen and Chris came for the weekend so she could work and they could have a little vacation, so at 9:00 I went over and got a perm. Came home, saw Chris and Anders, got the present and went over to Heather Shackelford's grandparent's house farther down Beverly Blvd. for a little birthday party for Mairead. She's six. It was a stitching party! We all tried our hand at drawing something, then outlining it with embroidery floss. I did a picture of our house with the red door I hope to have soon.

Here's the birthday girl, showing us the lunch and lovely cupcakes that were chocolate chocolate with crushed peppermint sprinkled on the tops. Yum.

Isn't she cute? She's as sweet as she looks.

Here we are, doing our best... that piece of embroidery lying on the table was done by Mairead!

Heather lit all the candles and Mairead blew... and blew... and blew... but they kept coming back! I think those candle people played a trick on us because you had to look really closely to see that they were the trick kind of candles!

This is the innocent first lighting...

We used those licorice whips as straws for our lemonade!

While I was at the party, the granite guy came back to finish putting the granite windowsill in. I just love this feature and think it really improves this window! That and the beadboard surrounding it.

Tonight Phil and Abby walked over to take a look at the kitchen progress. While they were here John and Toni, our renters who are going to have a baby, came over to see it. Anders was here, with us babysitting, while GG and Chris are on a date. Things are poplin' here, and I can't wait to start putting stuff in the cabinets again! But for now... I'm going to sleep in the library until they get home, so we won't be so far away from the child in case he wakes up.

Tomorrow, to celebrate Mother's Day in our traditional way, we go up to Penn Park for sandwiches after church with GG and Chris and Anders, Mom and Dad and GG's friend Shannon, from Canada, who is in the area. The weather should be lovely.

On Monday the people come to install a new 1/4 inch subfloor and on Tuesday they come to install the vinyl sheet "linoleum" floor that looks like slate. Hooray! Then I just need to paint and put stuff away! I ordered a print for the wall... it's "Milkman's Here!" by Scott Moore. I'll get that framed for the final touch. You can find it on his website. So now you know the latest!!

I wish you a very happy Mother's Day, wherever you are... and I wish you were here!