Grout, paint, & trim

We came home from our relaxing vacation to find this wonderful sight:

The vent hood! Look, it's a thing of beauty:

There has never been a more exciting machine in this house. Except for Mars Master Tile Setter, AJ:

The grout came out very well: 

Still weird looking, but well installed.

After we finished the tile, we hung a heat shield for the new (old) stove, to protect the wall:

And then finished painting the walls:

We decided to bring the red walls on that side of the kitchen down to two stripes and the inside of the window as an experiment. Might do the cabinet doors red, too. We'll see.

The rails we'll hang the pots and pans on will probably go to the left of the window. Maybe with shelves, as well. We're waiting to get the new (old) stove in there, to see how it will all look together. We'll figure out what to put to the right of the sink in a couple weeks, as well -- we know that, whatever it is, it has to be tall enough for the dish drain to sit on top of, but we're not sure exactly what we want to do there. (The dish drain is currently sitting on a piece of plywood over the right half of the sink -- I'm not sure how easy it is to tell what's going on there in the photo.) It's nice to be able to sit back, live with the room for a while, and take our time with a choice, versus having to rush a decision because Mr. Bunkport is at the house and waiting for an answer.

Last job of the weekend was installing trim to finish off the walls:

Funny what an improvement something as simple as trim makes.

Next up: burly men will come on Tuesday to bring the new (old) stove and china cabinet up from the garage, and move the old (old) stove down to the garage. Once upon a time, we would have tried harder to haul all of this up and down ourselves, and probably would have attempted to rope our generous friends into the adventure, but we decided to face facts: we and all our friends are hitting or have already hit forty, and while we're all pretty fit, none of us is particularly beefy. Hey, how about we hire a couple guys and skip the sore backs this week?

Then, on Wednesday, a guy is scheduled to come install the new (old) stove.. I will be out of town that exciting day, sadly, but we may get lucky and have a guest post from Mars Master Appliance Inspector AJ.

After I get back from my trip, we'll move on to finishing touches like the rails and shelves. I'm also going to try my hand at building some furniture for the kitchen, including something that will incorporate this interesting little chest of drawers that AJ picked up on the sidewalk: