Pictures...Finally

I finally took some pictures of the completed backsplash!  Jerry did all the tiling and most of the grouting, but I did help with the last bit of grouting and the washing.  It is so beautiful!

In this picture, I've leaned a drawer front to show the color we're staining the cabinets with the counter tops, sink, and backsplash.  Doesn't it look great?

(Notice my remaining yummy onions up there on the ledge?)

We also pulled out an old, semi-working trash compactor and Jerry built a cabinet to fit the spot.  We ordered a door to match our existing doors, and we didn't realize looking at the pictures online that we ordered one that was split half and half, while ours have a smaller cutout on bottom than on top.  So we ordered the correct door and decided that our mistake door would now be our experiment door to decide on stain color and hinges.  We got the new door yesterday, and it's wrong too!  We checked and we didn't order wrong, but they made it wrong!  I guess we'll have two experiment doors now. 

(Please ignore all the dishes along the counter tops...)

Now comes the huge task of stripping all of our cabinets to restain them!  It is going to take a long time, and we'll have lots of times where one door is missing or things are different colors.  In the end, though, I think it will all be worth it.  We are taking the wood a very dark brown.  We started with the biggest panels right in the front of our kitchen, and this is how the wood looks after just one coat of stain.  I'm getting excited!!

(A missing cabinet door here and there is going to be the norm around here for a while!)

(Jerry did a lot of hard work stripping off all of this old, stubborn stain.)

(One coat of stain.  It will get quite a bit darker with the next coat!)