More Adventures in Mimi and Opa's Unfinished Basement Home or "Can We Build It? Yes We Can!"

No, this is not the winner of a pie-eating contest! Just Ricky after a marathon spray-painting of our basement home! He did the whole thing in one evening, practically by candle light. Okay, by shop lights..... Thanks, Ricky AND Lynne who did the majority of the primer coat. Yall rock!

We picked up our IKEA kitchen from the warehouse on Wednesday or Thursday. It took both our truck and Lynne's Expedition to accomplish the deed, and we are ever grateful to her for giving us her afternoon to make this happen. And then, boxes boxes everywhere! So we enlisted Dave's help with moving the boxes down to the basement. Again, a major task! What would we do without our children who give of their time and physical labor to help their parents? Our Vasses left for a week at Disney World and graciously offered us their home while they were gone.

We had asked our contractor Carl to give us a price for him and his team to assemble and install our IKEA kitchen. We were excited for that to happen, but unfortunately Carl had a crew member quit, so he was behind on his other jobs and had to hire some new guys who were to do our kitchen. We stopped by the second day to have a look at what we hoped would be our almost finished kitchen and found our workers surrounded by some put together cabinets and in quite a quandary with the IKEA products. They had been working for more than 10 hours already, and had gotten not very far. At an hourly rate, it didn't take us very long to realize that we could not afford to employ these nice men any longer.

The picture above is of the very nice Brent and Chris, who took longer than we could afford to pay. I had a few minutes of mild panic, realizing that the Corian people were scheduled to come the next morning to measure our countertops. Do you see any countertops in the picture above? Does anyone have a little brown bag? I think I am hyperventilating........

So that evening, Jim phoned Carl and said we would finish the kitchen cabinets ourselves. Can we build it? Yes We Can! So I went on You Tube looking for some videos of maybe cabinets being assembled, and what a surprise! There are a bizillion videos on You Tube which come up when you type in IKEA. Some of them are very nice. Some of them use the naughty words in the their titles. But Jim read all the literature we received from IKEA, and the explanations really are easy to understand, so as Bob the Builder (I mean Mimi and Opa) say, Yes We Can!

Yesterday the laminate (Pergo) was installed in our kitchen and water closet. That's pretty neat. We enjoyed looking at it for about five minutes before we started moving all the cabinets, boxes, table saw, wheelbarrow, etc. into the kitchen, because Monday our carpeting will be installed. Today Opa and I enjoyed (?) our fourth time to install tile! We did three rooms in our home in Mobile (which still hasn't sold) . It really was pretty fun, and I even got some pictures! Check out these next two, which are of our adventures tiling. I did the mudding, Opa did the laying, and we finished it in record time, considering that Opa had to go back to Home Depot for more mud.

So what happens next? As I said, Monday the carpet will be installed, and Brother Peterson will come and put in our Toilet!!!!! Tuesday our appliances will be delivered (after us changing the date three times), and sometime during that time, we hope to finish doing our kitchen. And our closet, also IKEA components. Oh yes, and our bathroom vanity. And Wednesday, we will finally be measured for countertops. Add to that trying to go through our boxes to decide what we will put in a yard sale, and being in charge of the Ward Ice Cream Social and Family Talent Show on Friday evening, which is also our Tyler's birthday, and me leaving for Mobile the following Tuesday, which is also Dave's birthday, and so I'm still sort of hyperventilating. Wish us luck!

addendum: Opa suggests that next time I get Chelsea to write my blog entry for me. Looks like I'm not the only one impressed with Chelsea's writing style!
see http://theparkesfamily.blogspot.com