Jammin in the Kitchen

Ames and I have done a lot of DIY home improvement projects over the last couple years, but we’re just now about knee deep in one of our biggest projects yet, a full Ikea kitchen remodel. We’ve had our entire kitchen mapped out using Ikea’s kitchen planner tool software for several months. We bought most of our stainless appliances back in November at Lowe’s amidst the unbeatable Black Friday deals. We’ve had the slate-like tile for the flooring stored under our porch deck for well over a year. We didn’t actually get started on all this though until June 2^nd when we drove the 3½ hours to the Atlanta Ikea in a rented cargo van to bring home all the cabinetry.

Since then, our non-work life has been a whirlwind of cam locks, hinges, and drawer pulls. As of last night though, we’re finished with the majority of the assembly, have removed all the old cabinet doors and it’s time to start packing everything in boxes. Once that’s all done, it’s popcorn scraping, sawzall cutting, sledgehammer demolition time. As you may have guessed, this is the part of the project that I’ve been anticipating the most and I’d like to get started this weekend if possible. My wife (and super project coordinator) pointed out though that as soon as it’s all gone, we’ll be without a real kitchen until all work is finished; so we may end up delaying the sledgehammer slinging until the following weekend. Either way, it’s going to be beautiful when it’s all done.

In other news, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design still seems to be selling well even after its place at the top of the Sitepoint books page has been taken by The Art and Science of CSS. Although I’ve really been looking forward to this book I still haven’t bought my copy, but I’ll have to wait as it seems the first print run has already sold out! Congrats to Cameron, Jina, David, Steve, and Jonathan!

And last by not least, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Webmaster Jam Session on September 21 & 22 at the Adam’s Mark in Dallas, Texas. From what I heard about last year’s event, I am both excited and humbled to be a part of this year’s Jam Session. I also can’t believe the list of confirmed speakers that I’ll get to meet up with. Some of these folks have been an inspiration to me for a long time, and I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting a handful of them in person so far. Should be a whole ton of fun.