Kitchen before/after

Sorry for the hiatus! School has turned me into an ice cold Terminator - huzzah for only 7 more weeks until graduation! - and work, well craziness continues.

I tend to try not to chat too much work, but I've been spending all summer doing my best to lead comms efforts should our proposed deals close with Motorola Mobility and IBM x 86 close. Kind of hard to do this, when you don't know the date...

Anyways, I was browsing through some pictures yesterday before class, and saw one of our old kitchen. Comparing this bad boy to recent renovations is night and day. Some tips if you embark on a kitchen redo:

• If you're doing granite, go to Lowe's for a price compare, but I wouldn't recommend doing the final buy there. They will send you to a granite warehouse to look at large slabs - so I would recommend after getting a sense of the price, to just go straight to a couple of granite warehouses.
• Remember that the granite guys are picking up, carrying, and laying down a very heavy piece of stone. Expect dings, scuffs, holes, etc. in walls, doorways, and perhaps even cabinets. Ours said this in the contract we signed, which I saw before signing. I talked with some friends who've gone through this and they all said that their contractor had similar clauses in there as well.
• Since the walls got dinged here and there, we tried matching some paint found under the house to the kitchen walls, but to no avail. In a span of 30 minutes or so, we decided to repaint the kitchen and were at Lowe's within the hour. Since I can be a cheapo some...well most of the time, I got the 3M painting tape which worked just fine and was at least half the cost of Frog or Gorilla tape.
• Over communicate with your granite guy on: 1) the sink you want, 2) the faucet you want, and 3) the space behind your sink to the wall. Just trust me here. Some faucets have three hole connections, some one, some two, etc. Definitely worth the extra, extra planning.
• I opted to not use a plumber for disconnecting the kitchen sink, the experience of which was...fun? Turn the water valves to the right under your sink, run the remaining water in your faucet out, and then get to work! Taking off the main drain and disposal wasn't too hard, I'd just recommend getting a tiny screw driver because using a normal-sized one in a tight space can be unwieldy.  The toughest part for me was getting the connections for water out. After a lot of various efforts, I ended up using a crescent adjustable wrench for this part which ended up working the best.

Ok, that's it. Hopefully will report in with how the yard is doing before and after a party we're hosting next month, and my adventures in renting / operating a lawn aerator!