And the kitchen remodel goes on (and on and on and on...)

Yep, that's The Mess. Good thing I am not much into cooking!

This is starting to get old. I feel like we are just making a bigger mess every day rather than making progress. Friday I got all the wood parts of the railing system stained, and Saturday they all received 2-3 coats of polyurethane. Naturally, I wore my respirator the whole time, had the windows all over the house open and ran a commercial air scrubber too (thanks to work for letting me bring it home). Saturday we finished taking the carpet *carefully* off the stairs so we can re-cut and install it later, got the edges where the wall meets the stairs mudded (the carpet staples chewed it up pretty nicely), I emptied all the upper cabinets in the kitchen, drew a layout of the kitchen and labeled all the doors and drawers accordingly. The Hubby will use that layout and the doors to make the new doors and the drawings with labels will make it LOTS easier to get each door back to where it needs to hang. Sunday will bring sanding of the cabinet boxes and face frames (the fronts). I also played around with stain options for the cabinets. We want to go lots darker and I am having trouble getting the new wood, which will be used for the doors and drawers, to match the sanded "old wood" of the cabinet boxes. I am using a combo of wood dye and stain and am still not happy. So, off to the wood working store tomorrow to see what else I can find. I would love to get these things stained this week and polyed, but without a viable color option I am stuck. And no, I can't paint them, they're oak and I would get put in jail for painting oak. It's ok to paint woods like pine, ash, poplar. But it's NEVER, EVER, EVER ok to paint woods like, oak, cherry, hickory, maple. It's just wrong.

The stairs, (my mud job) ready for a new look!

Above, stain matching that is just NOT working. On the left is the old wood sample that I am trying to get to match the new wood sample on the right.