Send more Diet Coke. | Update #2 of the Kitchen Renovation

I may or may not be consuming a daily diet coke these days. It may or may not be a problem. Thankfully, we survived the second working weekend of our kitchen renovation. On Sunday evening, it felt like we’d done a ton and also absolutely nothing.

It’s now Tuesday, Sept. 15, and we are finally feeling like we’re making good progress. Fingers crossed, we can conquer sink install and plumbing this weekend.

In case you missed our first blog in these series, Jared and I are renovating our kitchen entirely by ourselves on a $4,000 budget. (I’ll spoil the ending now; we are definitely going over budget. More on that later.)

Jared — being the money guy he is — is tracking our spending in a Google sheet. We’ve spent around $2,400. The countertops are going to cost approximately $1,000. Also, we still need to buy all the cabinet face frames, tiles, backsplash, etc.

The original budget didn’t include cabinets. That’s what is pushing us over the limit. We are centering the stove in its opening, so we needed to make one cabinet wider and the other side shorter. That seemed complicated with how the cabinets were built in place, and I think our cabinets are gross anyway. Jared did lots of researching between buying stock cabinets and building custom ones. Ultimately, building custom is our best bet. It took me a day or two to agree, but as we continue to make progress, I love that I get to make the kitchen function in the best way.

I don’t know what people did before the internet. We’re relying entirely on the pros shooting YouTube videos and blogging about their processes.