We moved into this house in August 2013. I love our house. The previous owners, Harry & Sue Olson, had updated everything in the house except the kitchen cabinets. They are probably original, built in about 1960.
I have wanted new cabinets since we moved in and have spent a lot of time exploring my options, and hoping each year to use our tax return to buy new cabinets. I thought this might be my year, so I got a quote for new cabinets from Home Hardware. $13,000. About twice as much as I was hoping. Then our tax return went to fixing vehicles and a couple trips to Utah.
I actually prayed that someday I would be able to get new kitchen cabinets and that I would be blessed with patience until then.
One Monday morning I was browsing social media while walking on the treadmill. I thought I will just check for kitchen cabinets on kijiji (a website where people can post things they are selling). Several families in our ward have told me to watch kijiji in Calgary in the spring because rich people redo their kitchens and sell nice cabinets.
That's when I saw this kitchen for sale. $2,000 if you pick it up my next Monday. It included all of these cabinets, the granite countertops, the fridge and the dishwasher. I started emailing the lady who was selling them and spoke to her on the phone a couple times. Austin text me 3 times that day asking if I had bought them yet. The cabinets were an antique cream with gray in the grooves. That is the exact finish I had asked for the quote for kitchen cabinets from Home Hardware. It was no coincidence. And another little tender mercy from the story is that the kitchen came with the sink, but not the kitchen tap. Well, last June, we went to a Westwind School Division summer barbecue, and as a door prize, I had won a nice, new kitchen tap.
On Wednesday, we hired Neal Cahoon to drive to Calgary to pick them up for us. Then we unloaded them into or garage.
Two weeks later, the project began. We painted the first wall red (Carly, Jill and I did a terrible job and we thought there was going to be streaks and big splotches), but by the fourth coat, we loved it.
Then when spring break started, Tyler Bevans came and spent a day helping us with the first part of the project.
We got this beautiful wall finished and started on the second wall.
That was the easy part. A few days later, we took out the rest of the cabinets. Then we had to have the plumber come so we can take out the old kitchen sink and install the new one. And Tyler had to wire a new plug on the wall for the dishwasher. First, I wasn't prepared for them to have to explore every inch of our house - our storage room was not the cleanest place in the world. It took another 2 days to get the rest of the cabinet, sink and dishwasher installed and working, much longer than I thought it would take.
And the first night, we rolled in this nice big fridge that we got and moved all of our food into it. It never got cold. So the next morning, we packed our food back to the garage to the old fridge out there. A week later, I found an appliance repairman who would come and look at the fridge. He found that there was mouse droppings and several of the wires had been chewed. He tried to fix the wires he could see, but it still didn't work. So we hauled that fridge back to the garage, and brought back in our little white fridge.
Then we were going to paint the other 3 walls gray, so Austin put on the first coat the other night. But it looks purple. Not good. So we are going to get a new tint to the paint tomorrow and try again so we don't have a purple wall.
It has not been an easy project, but I love my new kitchen. I am so thankful for Austin and Tyler Bevans for spending so much of their spring break installing new kitchen cabinets.
