Lots of changes this week that are making the kitchen area look finished, at least from the waist up.

The cabinet trim is installed on the upper cabinets.

The hood is installed and it works great.

The contractor was able to modify the cabinet doors above the oven stack but they now need to be painted because one corner got a little banged up. He has them sanded and ready to paint. He has a paint that should be the color of the cabinets but the reality won’t be known until he paints them and holds them next to the existing ones. If you’re thinking like I used to “Hey, it’s white – how hard is that?”, let me tell you that it’s mind-boggling how many shades of white there are! Our mantel is ‘flour’. The kitchen cabinets are ‘linen’.

The laundry cabinets are in.

The garage light switches and door switches are moved so they are located next to the exterior door that was moved earlier. This is a detail I didn’t think about but we’re used to opening the garage door and touching those switches without actually going into the garage.

The pendant lights are installed over peninsula. The globes are clear and it took three rounds for me to find bulbs that didn’t blind me when looking at them while on but do provide useful light onto the soon-to-be countertop area.

I’m late with this update. This week the walls and stubborn ceiling spots were painted. The baseboards were removed to prepare for the floor tile to come. But the significant eye-candy part was the backsplash. The kitchen backsplash is done. In the area around the stove, the backsplash goes all the way to the top of the wall. It’s the same charcoal grey glass backsplash that we used in the kitchen corner #1 project. I still love it. The tiling took a long time though and the first grout color was too dark. The contractor was annoyed with himself because he had to go to the store and repurchase grout after he’d mixed up the original one and started to apply it.