Countdown to floors

All of our worldly possessions are currently stacked up in our living room, in preparation for the floor guys tomorrow morning. It's like we're moving in all over again, except this time we have no floors. My father is coming in from Jersey to help Future Papa rotate the furniture and boxes around. Thanks, Dad!

Fun fact: Our current sticky, paint-covered, rusty-staple-studded floors are NOT the original thick pine, as we expected. They are actually the "new" hardwood, and were installed well over 50 years ago (the installer used hand-forged nails). More importantly, they are under 1/2" thick and patched in spots, which means they probably couldn't handle being sanded. So in retrospect, we would have been completely screwed if we had decided to simply refinish rather than replace.

We have learned to love our caulking gun. We used a half-dozen types of caulking and Liquid Nails to attach the baseboards, finish the countertops, seal cracks, and glue up the backsplash.

As I've posted before, the kitchen backsplash is custom-made pressed-tin, in a modern diamond pattern with a mocha glaze. We love how it ties together the old-fashioned apartment and the modern stainless/granite kitchen.

FP and I also screwed in under-counter lighting in the kitchen, swapped out the old outlet plates to match the backsplash, put plinths on the bottoms of the cabinets to hide the feet, and screwed on matching cabinet molding to hide the lighting. Somehow all these little changes made a big difference. Our next project is to attach molding on top of the cabinets, as well.

Another event was that I felt my first Braxton Hicks contractions. These fake contractions are totally normal and not at all painful, but they still feel sort of weird. All that hard work must have brought them on.