Our home renovation has been in progress for, um, five years. We bought our house five years ago so I feel like that is excellent progress. Except not. But what happened was, we started with a lot of enthusiasm and then we unexpectedly had a baby at 25 weeks and spent all our money on medical bills instead of marble countertops.
Just kidding. We were never going to get marble countertops.
St. Martin’s Press asked me to write about our home renovation and I thought I would share one of our in-progress projects. One of the things that I knew I wanted to do as soon as we bought the house was paint the cabinets white but also extend them. I used to work for a home builder doing marketing and so it surprised me that whoever built our house put in such short cabinets since we have such tall ceilings.
So my dad and my husband and my friend Trey all spent a day last summer adding height and crown molding to our cabinets. I spent the day photographing them doing that. I am very helpful. (They would not let me turn off all the lights while they worked so that I could have really nicely lit pictures but you know, they were making over my cabinets for me so pick your battles, right?)
We bought crown molding and 1×6 boards of MDF. I measured the cabinets and they cut the lengths I needed for me at the store.
This is what the cabinets looked like when we moved in.
The first thing we did was nail a few blocks of wood to the top of the cabinet, in the center and in the corners, so that we had something to add the board to.
Then they nailed the 1×6 boards into the blocks of wood they had placed along the top of the cabinets.
After that they drew a chalk line about an inch down from the top of the board to know where to add the crown molding.
I can’t even talk about crown molding. Making all the cuts to make fit correctly was a huge pain. For the guys. But totally worth it. For me.
They just glued on the crown molding and used painters tape to hold it on until it dried. It hasn’t fallen off in an entire year so that method works pretty well. We also bought a very thin strip of molding to cover that gap between the cabinet and the board.
Have I painted these cabinets yet? No, I haven’t because at the time I decided to start this project I also decided to write a book and as it turns out doing both of those things was maybe “Biting Off More Than I Could Chew.” But don’t tell my husband that I admitted that 😉
I have replaced the flooring, installed all the beadboard, added chair rail, torn out the old cabinets and painted everything. So you know, I have made a LOT of progress considering I did all that while raising a tiny human and all. But I am really looking forward to having the cabinets painted so finishing the kitchen is my Big Summer Project for last summer this summer. Seriously, I’m totally going to get around to it.
Speaking of books. special thanks to St. Martin’s Press for sponsoring this post in partnership with Barbara Delinksky’s new book about home improvement!
About the Book #Blueprints: Some women are born with an instinct for knowing how things work—and what to do when they break.
Caroline MacAfee is a skilled carpenter, her daughter Jamie, a talented architect. Together they are the faces of Gut It!, a home renovation series on local public television. Caroline takes pride in her work, and in the way she connects with the show’s audience. But when she is told the network wants her daughter to replace her as host-the day after Caroline’s fifty-sixth birthday-she is devastated. The fallout couldn’t come at a worse time.
For Jamie, life changes overnight when, soon after learning of the host shift, her father and his new wife die in a car accident that orphans their two-year-old son. Accustomed to organization and planning, she is now grappling with a toddler who misses his parents, a fiancé who doesn’t want the child, a staggering new attraction, and a work challenge that, if botched, could undermine the future of both MacAfee Homes and Gut It!
For Caroline, hosting Gut It! is part of her identity. Facing its loss, she feels betrayed by her daughter and old in the eyes of the world. Her ex-husband’s death thrusts her into the role of caregiver to his aging father. And then there’s Dean, a long-time friend, whose efforts to seduce her awaken desires that have been dormant for so long that she feels foreign to herself.
Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they’ve built their lives around suddenly need revising. While loyalties shift, decisions hover, and new relationships tempt, their challenge comes not only in remaking themselves, but in rebuilding their relationship with each other.
Learn more at BarbaraDelinsky.com or follow Barbara on Twitter and Facebook
