The Kitchen...

You may recall way back when I said I was refinishing my kitchen cabinets that I would show off the finished product once it was done...  Turns out that I opened a bit of a can of worms by starting the project and I didn't want to show the photos until I had finished everything!

So here we go with the tour!

The original kitchen cabinets in all their pale oaky glory...please note the off white laminate counter tops...(the glass mosaic backsplash went in a few years ago to cover up ceramic tiles that had been painted white by the previous owners).

The refinished cabinets which took me 5 weeks instead of the couple of weekends that I anticipated... Love the brushed nickel hardware, got a huge bargain at Overstock.com. It's hard to tell because of the florescent lighting but the cabinets have a nice overglaze finish that gives them more depth.

The problem with redoing the cabinets was that it made the counter top and florescent lighting look even worse so I decided I had no choice but to keep going!  We had led lights put in and I found granite that I fell in love with.  The added bonus was that I got to put in a new sink that's double the depth of my old one and we were able to extend out the counter ledge so it's wide enough for big platters or even barstools if we were ever so inclined.

I just love how it turned out!  Even with my itty-bitty kitchen it makes a big difference.  There may be a couple more projects in the fall (including a built in bookshelf along my staircase) if my friend's father is particularly bored during their visit in November!

In beady news, I finished the big update of new items to my website...including these...

and these...

and this...

and then went and fired my big daddy kiln loaded to the brim with more pieces! Of course halfway through loading the kiln I realized that I didn't have as many pieces glazed as I needed in order to fill the kiln, so I had to stop loading it in order to make a bunch more pieces to single fire and cross my fingers that they wouldn't warp.  Luckily almost everything decided to cooperate and other than some interesting glaze results that weren't quite what I was going for, it was a good batch overall.

Which meant that I photographed, cropped and resized over 140 pictures yesterday...whew! We'll see how many of those I can get on the website tomorrow, which sadly is my last day of summer break.

How about you?  Is your summer winding down or are you still going strong?  Is there anything you wanted to do this summer but didn't get around to or did you have one of those wonderful summers where you're completely relaxed and rejuvenated?