Well guys, we’re officially done to one project left in the giant, never-ending kitchen renovation project. Last night, Wyatt finished up the touch up paint on the new cabinet trim while I had a call for work and let me tell you, it looks fantastic, if we do say so ourselves, which we do.

The whole goal of the trim was to cover some of the rough edges and imperfections from the rest of the renovation. We had some caps between the cabinets and the ceiling because you can’t hang cabinets directly touching the ceiling unless your ceiling is super-duper straight and square, which I’m guessing it isn’t. So, you’re left with a little gap, or a big gap if you hang your cabinets lower…

We went with as small of a gap as possible so we could have the most storage space possible. Which meant we only had room for a tiny piece of trim rather than some chunky crown molding or something bigger like that.

We decided to use a 1×2 board for our trim, and Wyatt cut it down to fit perfectly to match our very unsquare ceilings, so it ranged from around 1/5 inches to .75 inches. He used some scrap blocks to help test his measurements.

That seems like a big difference, and it is, but when it’s all attached to the ceiling and painted to perfectly match the cabinets, the difference in sizes isn’t very noticeable at all unless you know to look for it.

We also had some trim to install along the base of the cabinets in the nook area because there wasn’t any toe-kick there and we needed something to cover the small gap we had to leave when we installed the new wood flooring.

For that, Wyatt ripped a 1X2 in half and then rounded the edges with his router so give it a softer look and less of a dust-catching edge along the top.

 

For the corners, he angled them off so there wasn’t a square, blunt edge sticking out.

I think it blends in with the baseboard trim really well, even though we didn’t want to use that trim exactly because it was way too thick, and too tall for the space.

 

He did this all around the custom nook cabinet as well.

We also had a couple pieces of trim to add in the stairway to finish up the built in bookcase trim.

He used the same trim from the kitchen floor (which I just described above) and cut a couple pieces to cover that gap.

We found this area to be really frustrating, because not only is the wall not straight (there’s a huge bulge in it that makes the trim really uneven), but it also had so many existing layers of trim to work around. Crazy. But, we ended up coming up with a solution that worked.

Wyatt also had to do a little carpet work in this area, leftover from the flooring project. We were missing the carpet from the first riser (We had to remove it down to the first stair when we added the wood flooring. At first, we were stumped with how to cover the bare wood that was left…but we ended up just deciding to nail up a small piece since we plan to remove/replace the carpet on these stairs in the next few years anyway.

Ta-da!

He had to make a special piece of trim to fit around the rounded edge of our wood flooring trim piece, too. I’m telling you, so much custom work….so frustrating.

Luckily, he’s a rockstar when it comes to woodworking. And caulk hides a multitude of sins on painted trim. Ha!

(Yes, we know we need to do something with the horribly scuffed wood stair trim, too. It’s probably going to eventually be white as well.)

Luckily, this was a pretty quick project and we were able to do the entire thing in a week. Now all that’s left is the new lights over the dining room table! Woohoo–the kitchen is going to be finished before the baby gets here…which was the ultimate deadline.  No matter that we missed being done by Thanksgiving, and Christmas…and April 1…we’re still getting it finished. And that’s what counts, right?

As we wrap up the final touches (we still have some decorating and such to do as well) we will be sharing some overview posts about our cost break down on the entire project and how we’ve managed to do this huge project by ourselves. Sorry if you’be been bored by all these tedious trim updates. That’s just how we’ve found the ends of projects to be…lots of finishing touches that a lot of people gloss over. Since we try to be honest about all our projects, we figured it was better to tell you just how time-consuming, but rewarding, all these little last-minute steps can be. Don’t worry, we’re hoping to tackle bigger projects (nursery!!) soon.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to a weekend of progress…hopefully we’ll be able to see the walls in our garage by Sunday night at bedtime. And maybe even have a way to consistently park both cars in there!

What are your weekend plans? I’d love to hear what’s going on with you guys!