This Old House: Will work for food (preparation room)

Its Day 77 in kitchen-less captivity. SEVENTY SEVEN. Earth was created in 7, but God did not use IKEA cabinets.

We've come a long way since the last post, even with a Mexican vacation in there. This has been a period where it was best to leave the house unlocked and open for the various plumber, electrician, tile installer and/or drywall hanger who may or may not show up randomly. I made sure the house plans I drew up were littered throughout the house in my passive aggressive attempt to say 'I'll make you do it again if it doesn't look like this'.

Before we left for vacation we were able to install the insulation (Mike installed and I stapled) and we hired someone to put up the drywall because life is too short to hang your own drywall (and wallpaper in my opinion).

That's when we got this delivery:

Which is 1,000 square feet of Brazilian slate, which I thought would take up the whole driveway, of which it took up about 10 square feet.
The tile guy started by putting down a layer of Schluter Ditra, a crack isolation membrane that allows the subfloor to move independently from the slate. This is the bright orange you see here:

That's Freddie- our diligent and patient installer. He has 5 kids so ya, he kinda has to be. After 4 days he was done:

I had spent a few weeks laying out our kitchen cabinets using Ikea's online tool, thinking through every side panel, skirt board, and drawer divider a hundred times over. I felt confident that my trip to IKEA to finalize the order would be doable over a lunch break from work (with time left over for Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce). 4 hours and 8 meatballs later I had a clean order! Thanks to Tara, one of their kitchen pros, I only had to make 3 subsequent trips back to exchange things I had measured incorrectly.

Thats Tara and I. She sat patiently with me as I waffled between locations for the pullout trash can and which drawers should house cutlery vs cooking prep utensils. And she didn't care that I changed my mind afterwards.

Our kitchen came to us in 84 boxes and packages:

Time for vacation! While we were gone our pretty painter Annie finished off the walls and ceilings. It was ready for cabinet construction by the time we returned and so mike and Kirk got to work: