This past weekend Dave installed the crown moulding around the tops of our cabinets. This isn’t a super-tall design, we wanted something subtle, yet elegant.
Later this week and this weekend we will start the priming and painting of the rest of the cabinets. We have a paint sprayer to use for the doors, but will hand-paint the cabinet bases.
We also picked up our hardware for the cabinet doors and drawers. I can’t wait to see how awesome they look when installed.
The moulding is white because we chose a PVC composite.
For those who don’t know, Dave and I are “Eastern People”. He’s from New York, and with the exception of 3 years or so in Hawaii when I was very young, I grew up on the Eastern Seaboard. We are accustomed to humidity, high populations, and rich colonial U.S. history around us.
People from the western U.S. have their own set of traditions and nuances (calling “interstates” “freeways”, for example), and apparently In-N-Out Burger is one of them. There aren’t many of these restaurants, and they’re all concentrated in a 5-state area: California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas (why they completely leapfrogged over New Mexico is beyond me). In-N-Out has no plans to expand beyond this small market, unlike Five Guys, which now has well over 1000 outlets. We had a chance to check it out! More »
The Alpine Coaster at Park City Resort is a unique experience. Here we are getting read to push off.
On such a warm day at Park City Resort, the kids had grown weary of the icy skiing by early afternoon. Many of the trails that were open took us right past the track of the Park City Alpine Coaster, and Timmy was very interested in giving it a spin.
Timmy and I decided to get some tickets and check it out! More »
It was so warm, Dave could ski in shorts…well, sort of…
On our first full day in Park City, we decided to check out the Park City Ski Resort, which was just a couple blocks from our condo. We took advantage of a military deal for the resort, although being one of the Vail Resorts, it was still pretty costly, even for end-of-season conditions.
It was quite warm, with highs in the 60s and blue sunny skies.
As a consequence, there weren’t many trails open, and we had numerous detours. We’re grateful the boys were skilled enough to negotiate some of the detours.
Skiing at Park City at the end of March was like skiing on the East Coast. Icy. Jacob and Timmy are obviously spoiled rotten skiing in Colorado because they had a very hard time with the changed snow conditions. They didn’t have the best day. More »
Staring skyward at their Elastic-Launched Glider. We’re so proud of Jacob (on the left) representing his school at the state Science Olympiad competition.
In March and April, our family was busy with Jacob helping his team for the Colorado Science Olympiad tournament. Plenty of after-school sessions, evenings at the kitchen island tuning his handiwork, and family trips to Colorado State University – Pueblo and Colorado School of Mines (known around here as just “Mines” — note the URL if you click through the link) for the competitions.
Science Olympiad is a set of competitions in a wide assortment of science and technology topics. You can click the link above to learn more. I remember hearing about it when I was in middle and high school, and for a while I thought I had participated in a regional tournament when I was growing up in Virginia, but now I’m more certain I had participated in Odyssey of the Mind.
I’m thrilled Jacob expressed interest in this group; he has a wonderful group of friends, not just in his own grade, but also in 7th and 8th grade.
The competitions blend of classroom testing, problem solving exercises, and hands-on homemade projects that are built to achieve some sort of goal. Jacob represented his school in the following competitions:
Road Scholar, which involves a problem solving exercise with maps. Jacob needed to be familiar with USGS Quads to be successful in this.
Elastic-Launched Glider competition. The students craft a glider from lightweight wood, launch it with an elastic launcher of some sort, and see how long it stays airborne.
Jacob’s glider had a LOT of trouble and wasn’t airborne for very long. I didn’t take any video. But here’s a video of one that stayed airborne for nearly 30 seconds (and won!) at the 2014 North Carolina competition at NC State.
Reminder: This is NOT Jacob’s team! This is NOT even in Colorado!
Jacob’s school finished in the middle of the pack for the state, and we’re particularly proud of Jacob’s performance in the Road Scholar competition, where he and his partner placed 7th out of the 30 teams! He’s looking forward to joining the team again next year. He was taking keen interest in the better-performing gliders and seems to have a lot of ideas for next year.
So…um…yeah…we had the wrong kind of primer the first go-round.
This morning I picked up a can of Zinnser Bullseye 1-2-3 primer and it made a HUGE difference! I was able to sand down the blemishes in the primer job before applying the first coat of paint and it didn’t peel off in two seconds. More »
The prep work we did last night wasn’t good enough…
We had a pretty substantial setback today on our journey to (like) new cabinets.
Dave and I had read plenty of DIY tips suggesting that if one’s stained and sealed cabinets are old enough, a simple chemical treatment with a “sander deglosser” is all we would need before applying the primer, then paint.
Boy were we wrong!
Last night we had applied two coats of Kilz primer to the island and cabinet doors, and this evening, as Dave took a sanding block to some of the drips from last night’s work, large pieces of the primer came right off!
So tonight we had to break out the big guns: trisodium phosphate (TSP) and an orbiter sander to get all of the original primer off. It isn’t pretty. We will also be switching the primer to a “bonding primer“. We probably should have chosen the bonding primer all along…
So tomorrow we try all this again…we need to get the prep work right the first time, so this paint doesn’t chip and peel on us in a matter of months!
Today was the primer for the island. Once we started down this road, we told ourselves “There’s no turning back now”.
The island itself will be ready for the real paint color tomorrow, but we will need to degrease and sand down the cabinet doors more than the rest of the surfaces. The doors need a LOT of prep work, since they bear the brunt of the 16-years worth of grease and grime.
Our plan is to have the kitchen island painted by the end of this weekend. I’m not completely sure when we’ll get to the rest of the cabinets, which we’re painting white. But we plan to space things out some. As of now, I can still use most of my kitchen, which is nice.
Timmy studies his scrambled cube for 15 seconds before the timer starts.
Last week, Timmy was on a team representing his elementary school at a regional Rubik’s Cube competition. It was his first experience, and was the first time his school had entered a team. Timmy was the only 4th grader, the rest of his team were 5th graders. While the team didn’t take home any prizes, they certainly are competitive and I’m sure all the students learned a lot.
Dave, Jacob, and I certainly learned a lot. We had never seen a competition like that! More »
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