Kithcen Progress

After way too much drama with the city permit department, permits are cleared up, rough inspections are done and we are clear to proceed until completion, then one last final inspection. The permits weren't actually TOO bad at first, I had to go to the city twice, but then $700 later, I had a permit. The real problems came when the inspector came and saw there was an un-permitted extension on the kitchen. He told us he couldn't even inspect all the other things in the kitchen until we gone back and added the existing extension to the permit. This time the permits weren't so easy. They wanted more drawings, the old drawings redone, and another $200. First visit they told me that I would have to tear off the siding on the kitchen extension and convert it to stucco. Luckily they backed off on that and said since there was also some siding above garage that there isn't any problem with the kitchen having it also.

So far we have had two different inspectors and they have both been very reasonable. Inspector issues really worried me about this project. I'm really hoping our luck holds out in that regard.

We have picked out our new gas stove. Cabinet and granite installation is scheduled for next week. Here's a picture of our kitchen, newly painted.

Plastered, textured, painted.

All this time I've been trying to arrange things to get done as quickly as possible. Now that we have everything lined up to get things completed this week, there isn't really anything left we can or really need to do right now. So this morning I got new tires for Julia's car and helped my dad get his retaining wall on track to finish today. I did find couple things to do tonight, calking edges of walls (mostly for ants), and cleaned most the plaster and paint off the underlayment in the kitchen. The kitchen really will look a lot more open and inviting now. Here's a look at what things looked like with the previous owner. Notice the window was a few inches shorter.

Previous owner's kitchen.