Yippee!

I got the drain pipe to work. Well, it's drying now, we'll see if there are any leaks in an hour when I'm allowed to test it. And I got a fancy tool for tightening the sink bolts. What I'm learning about DIY projects is that the first few you spend all the money you would have on having someone else install on tools. :) Thankfully we've been able to borrow a lot of them from neighbors, but we are much more equipped for home projects now than we were. Although I don't know if we'll ever do countertops again. Ugly!

However. They look great. Here are some pictures:

Mike had to crawl into the cabinet in order to attach the two corner cabinets. I had a really, really good laugh while he was trying to get in there.
Here he is "fully submerged" in the cabinet. He's a real trooper.


And there were more tight spaces when he had to attach the countertop to the cabinets by fitting his hand inside our tiny side cabinets. Again. He's a trooper.

A little variation of the typical soap on screws idea. It worked well for him.



And after we got the countertop all installed, we had to uninstall it to get the sink cut just right. I felt bad for Mike because I was insistant that we get this done that night. He was thinking we might could find a special tool from a neighbor the next day, but I needed my kitchen back! So he unscrewed all his screws, cut the rest of the sink cut (we just couldn't reach the very back), and then drilled new screw holes for new screws. Have I mentioned that he's a trooper?

And here it is. So pretty. I really like how the darker countertops accentuate the wood color of the cabinets. They are speckled with tans, so it really brings out the brown. (And you know how much I love brown!)

And here's the fancy sink. I left some dishes in it to show how deep it is. I don't know if you can really tell, but it's nice and deep. I'm in love with this sink. And notice the cutting board. Nice little extra to have. Who knows if I'll find it very useful or not.

And a close look at the corner. Mike really did a great job on this. I'm so grateful that he stuck with this. It was hard on him, I know. But it looks really great and we feel really good about having it done.

Now I'm going to tile the backsplash area between the countertops and the cabinets. Hopefully that will happen sometime in the next week or two. But I think our difficult projects are over. We just had the garage door spring break, so we're going to have to figure that one out. But no more major remodeling projects are in our foreseeable future.

And in case you didn't catch it, Mike is cool. :)