Yet another Kitchen Update

For those of you paying attention, We began this kitchen remodel on January 10th. That means that today is day 47 of the remodel. And we are making progress! New sliding door and window over the sink. Granite is in (and looks amazing). A lot of the little details are coming together, too. Almost all of the handles are installed. The outlet strips and under cabinet lights are in. The overhead/recessed lights are halfway up, and the motion detector/dimmer installed. The cover pieces and some of the trim is up. Well, I'll let you see for yourself. I'm thinking it looks pretty darn awesome!!!

I'm so happy for the progress we're making. It really is coming right along. Its so much fun cooking with the new layout. I feel like I have so much more space! Oh, that's right, because I do! Thanks to my wonderful husband who pretty much thought of everything and designed an amazing kitchen for us!

~Pam

PS. The new sliding door and window are so much better than what used to be there. It's so quiet in the kitchen/dining room now! And, it may be our imagination, but it felt warmer this morning in there, too.

Do not do businss with Tri North Lighting

I just wanted to put a brief review of my experience with Tri North Lighting. I purchased (well am still attempting to purchase) several Phillips Profile Powercore under cabinet lights on December 23rd. I understand that this was the holiday season, so I patiently waited.... and waited... And finally in the first and second week of January I attempted to contact the company through the website. After 3 attempts and no responses I called them. They did answer the phone and mumbled how that was weird and it should have shipped by now, then said ohh it is back ordered and should ship on Monday.

I wait another week or so and e-mail to get no response, so I call again and they say it should ship tomorrow. Finally I receive notification that my product has shipped. I get excited and it arrives... only to find out the wiring components are back ordered along with 1/3rd of my lights. The interesting thing is that the lights were shipped direct to me from another company called "Color Kinects" and they included a handy Packing List, which had on it an "order date" of Janurary 30th. So this leads me to believe that they never even really placed my order with their distributor who appears to be Wiedamark based on the Packing List. Instead they sat on the order and didn't bother to do anything. Now this is speculation on my part, but the great part of having no contact with their customer service means that I get to make as many assumptions about the company as I like.

So here I sit on 2/19/2013 (just shy of two months after my initial order), I still have no way of wiring the lights that they did send me, and am missing lights as well. I have nobody to really contact to find out how long these products are back ordered, nor do they seem willing to answer any questions. The only thing I can do is broadcast my frustration to the Interet about how HORRIBLE the service is from the people at Tri North Lighting, also doing buisiness as: Neon Lights, www.ledchristmaslighting.com, ledneonlight.com, and probably more dubious names. With their stellar BBB rating of B- and 23 complaints I hope you avoid them like I will in the future...

-Matt

The remodel continues

Slowly but surely we are making this kitchen happen.
This first picture is the start of the wall cabinets going up.

And now, today! We have all wall cabinets hung, all but one base cabinet installed, a sink, faucet dishwasher and cooktop with most of the countertops in! Its looking great!!!

We need to finish tiling the closet (not in this picture) so we can grout this weekend. And hopefully get someone out to measure for our real countertops sometime in the near future. The counters on right now are from Ikea, and while they are fine, they're not our forever counters. Oh, and we need to think about lighting, like where to put lights. And install the vent hood for the cooktop. All the light colored wood on the sides you see will be covered with the same color as the cabinet fronts. It's so much bigger than our old kitchen! :)

Kitchen Remodel

So, this post is mainly for my friend Rene', who doesn't have Facebook (who doesn't have facebook?) and hasn't been able to see our progress on our kitchen remodel. It all started last Thursday, January 10th, when Matt and I started ripping out cabinets. Technically, it began the weekend prior when we started ripping up the flooring, or perhaps around Thanksgiving when we received our cabinetry and we had to put them all together, but that's neither here nor there. Officially, on Thursday, we began ripping out cabinets after Matt got home from work. For those who don't remember, here's what the kitchen looked like BEFORE:

So, we ripped it all out. Everything. All the cabinets. That soffit that keeps the cabinets from reaching all the way to the ceiling. All of it.

That took all of Friday and Saturday to complete. Then on Sunday we were still evening up the edges in preparation for insulation and drywall. Matt worked on wiring.

Monday, Matt worked on wiring and I worked on insulating. Did I mention that the coldest week of the year was happening right about this time, and we were FREEZING out there in that non insulated room that was open to the attic and the crawlspace. Anyways...

Tuesday and Wednesday we drywalled, and Thursday Matt finished up the plumbing while I finished up drywall and we began mudding. We were using the 90 minute mud, which made a huge difference! Pretty much by the time we finished with one bucket, it was dry enough to begin the next coat.

Friday: Mudding continued, with some sanding. Saturday was spent all day mudding more coats and sanding them down. Sunday we finally finished mudding! We did a final sand, primed and painted, and got the Ditra down on the floor, in preparation for tile.

Look at those smooth walls!



Anyways, Now we're up to Monday, the 21st of January. This is day 12 of the remodel, and we got started tiling. What a big job! Vince came over and helped, and in the morning we laid down about 33 tiles. Then in the afternoon, Matt and I laid down about 40 tiles.
Tuesday, we continued tiling. Matt and I were exhausted, and laid about 60 tiles down. Took all day. Wednesday, Vince came over and helped us tile a little more and also bring in the first of the big cabinets. His muscles sure helped!

This picture is at the end of Tuesday.
Wednesday afternoon, Matt and I installed some more tiles along the wall, and then got the pantry and oven/microwave cabinets installed. Then, we installed the oven and microwave. Success!

Thursday, Matt had to go back to work, so all morning and afternoon I cleaned up, got laundry caught up, cleaned thinset off tiles, and tried to relax a bit too. When Matt got home, we tried to install the over fridge cabinet, but realized the one we purchased and put together was too big, so I drove to IKEA to pick up a smaller cabinet, we put it together, and got it hung, and the fridge with water line installed. Its starting to look like a kitchen!!!

We even installed some doors. So you can see how beautiful this kitchen is going to be once we're done. Everyone tells me that we're making really fast progress, and sometimes it is hard to see that, but it is going to look nice when we're through. If you're keeping track (which I am) it's been 16 days since we started pulling the cabinets out. We still haven't decided on lighting, or a sink. But I'm hopeful we'll have a kitchen sometime in the next few weeks :)

~Pam

Kinect Windows SDK programming using Visual Basic

Perhaps you are like me and trying to use visual basic to do some programming on the Kinect with the new SDK microsoft released, only you can't find any working examples. I manually converted an old BETA SDK sample to the new code so it is functional (except the skeletal tracking) the video and depth cameras are functional however.

Hope this helps someone: Here is the link

-Matt

My first week

Well, as most of you know, I'm now on the employed list. Yep, made it through the first week, even. :) That means, I still need to survive 2-3 more weeks before I know if this is the right job for me. Here I am, wearing my Hawaiian shirt on Friday. Everyone was impressed that I found a girl's Hawaiian shirt. :)

So, the way it works at my job is the first 3-4 weeks are the "Multitasking" phase. They teach us the bare basics of what the job is about, adding new stuff each day. At the end of the initial phase, they assess us by throwing a bunch of stuff at us and we have to sink or swim. If When I survive, I'll move to the next training phase, filled with classroom instruction and listening in to real dispatchers do their job. This is just the beginning of a long training phase, which might last up to 18 months. I hope I'm ready for it...

I'm really lucky, because Matt has been helping me out, practicing the verbiage, and teaching me how to do certain evolutions. I would be completely lost without him. Instead of just lost. ;)

Anyway, I'm probably going to be pretty busy for the next LONG while, and won't be blogging as much (such a joke, since I haven't been blogging much lately anyway), but I'll try to keep everyone up to date on my progress.

~Pam

Chhhhhhh-anges!

Well, I guess most of you know by now, but Matt and I are going to go through a drastic life change here pretty quickly...I got a job. And not just any job, but a Load Dispatcher job with Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Sound familiar? Yep, it's the same job as Matt. As in, we'll be working together. We might even see each other every day. All day, even. Shocking, I know. I mean, how can a marriage last when you have to see each other all the time? :) I'm just poking fun at some of the comments we've gotten since I was offered the job. Some people really can't imagine working with their significant other. I'm thinking it won't be such a big issue. If we can ride our bikes from Canada to Mexico together and manage not to kill each other, I think we can manage working alongside each other. Will there be moments? Yes. But tell me this. When are there not moments? Does everyone get along 100% of the time with every single one of their coworkers? Nope. Didn't think so. I'm pretty excited. I know the first couple years will be extremely challenging, especially for me. I have a lot to prove. I mean, I'm the first female Navy Nuke the department has hired. Only one female so far has completed the training program and was picked up as load dispatcher (she was a station operator beforehand). That puts a lot of pressure on me to complete the program and get picked up. But I'm ready for a challenge.The job starts on Monday, when I will begin ~1.5 years of training prior to becoming an actual load dispatcher (until then, I'll just be a trainee). I'm getting pretty excited!

Matt and I (and Gwen, too) have been doing P90X for almost 2 months now. I've put off buying new clothes for the job, since my body is going through some changes. I'll be doing some major clothes shopping this weekend, though. It's been quite a while since I've bought new clothes, and I'm a little excited about that as well.

In order to make our lives easier, with the two of us working, Matt and I are trying out a new thing. It's called Dream Dinners, where you basically make up a menu online, then go into the store at your reserved time, and put your meals together. They have all the ingredients laid out and you put it together, seal it in freezer bags, and viola'! Ready-made meals. I made up my first set of meals today. 36 servings of food took me about 45 minutes to put together. Not too shabby! That, along with the installation of a dishwasher, is going to make my chore list much shorter and easier to manage :) And Matt has promised to help out around the house more as well. We've put up white boards around the house so we have places to make check lists of things that need to be done. I'm thinking a 50/50 split with the housework sounds about right, don't you? :P

Anyways, that's about it. Enjoying the beautiful California weather. It's been sunny and warm lately, in the mid to upper 70s, but I'm sure spring will get here eventually and the marine layer will move in. I'm hoping we get some rain..it's been pretty dry.

~Pam