Subcontinents, Stucco, and Blackberries

Todd finished installing all of the kitchen cabinets. The banquette looks great, as you can see in the picture above. All we need to do is slide in the awesome table that the cabinet guys made and we will have a great place for breakfast and lunch. In the picture below, you can see that the subcontinent is in place -- bigger than an island but smaller than a continent. Once it has its top it is going to be great. I can't wait to fill the big flat space it offers with lots of piles of stuff -- just kidding, Dad! Todd did have one complaint, however -- we have lots of wood tops on the cabinets, which meant he had to scribe all of them to meet the walls. He did a really good job, though, and they all look fabulous.



The stucco has been completed as well. We had to pay more when we redid the roof to have the parapets covered in stucco instead of metal, but it was worth every penny. The stucco guys did a great job when putting on the final coat, and it looks just like it did before, with the nice, rounded parapets. You can see how nice it looks in the picture below:



The front porch looks great now that it has been covered in stucco. The tile that we added to the front of the porch bring in a traditional look -- we always regretted that our house seemed to be the bargain version of the bungalow without the tiles above the windows that many of the other houses like ours have. We fixed that by putting some tiles above the top of the porch. You can see them in the picture below.



They have installed the doors, as you can see in the picture below, and are working on the trim. The doors look good and Todd is doing a great job on the trim. I don't have any pictures of the trim, but will put them in the next blog. The one problem so far is that the laundry room doors were terrible! They are the cheap louvered bifold doors that slide on a cheap track. We are going to have to replace them with doors that look like the regular ones and open out instead of bifold ones. So far it is one of the few missteps that we have made, but we need to correct it because you can see the laundry closet doors from just about every room in the house.



Our blackberries are finally getting ripe! You can see how beautiful they look in the picture below. It was worth fighting for them when we did the trenching -- they are pretty much the only plant left in the backyard that we really care about!