Running water, a new hood, and waiting

We last left the kitchen with a sparkling new countertop and a sink just waiting for a faucet. As you can imagine, when we hit the "do not do plumbing for 24 hour" mark, I immediately got to installing the new faucet. I will skip the miserable details and leave you with this: 3 days and 4 trips to the hardware store later, we have running water and a functional garbage disposal. And no leaks! Overall, I discovered that plumbing is not really a complicated part of home improvement... but the tight space and tricky task of getting everything sealed properly easily make plumbing my least favorite thing so far.

Let's be honest...this is the view I'm most proud of.

That first night, we took breaks from our faucet frustration to install a new range hood over the stove. Our last one was white and about 6 inches too wide. This new one was a relatively inexpensive upgrade and I just love what a difference it makes.

But after those few nights of faucet-frenzy, it seems like things have hit a bit of a plateau here in the kitchen renovation. Not only have things started to pick up with work (gotta welcome all those new students!), limiting our "free time" significantly, but many of the next steps in getting the kitchen together require waiting.

What are we waiting for? Well, the biggest thing is for the cabinet doors to cure. They were completed on Friday and need 5 days to self-level and harden enough to be re-installed. I've been surprised how little it's bothered me to have all of our cabinets open for several weeks. It actually makes it very easy to put dishes away, and (surprisingly!) Annie doesn't mess with the contents too often.

Dry, babies, dry!

We're waiting for the doors to be hung so we can add our new hardware. I was able to put handles on a couple of drawers that were finished last week, and I'm so excited to see how it will look to have everything together!

We're also waiting on our new subway tile, which was ordered yesterday. That should come by Friday, which maybe means we'll have it installed by this time next week. I'm so excited to show it to you...we took another major design turn when we picked something other than white subway! Things were starting to get a little too white with the cabinets, counters, and sink. And I think this new design is going to be perfect! Stay tuned :)