I feel like a fattie...

My dad comes over twice a week to help us renovate.  We're cleaning the dust and debris for the other five days.  Renovations are stressful and exhausting.

Back to the title, after a month of eating out EVERY DAY, my clothes are getting tighter.  I think we have at least another month to go.  I am so afraid my pants won't fit after that. 

I've spent the past two months looking for Ikea's Varde kitchen pieces.  It isn't my first choice in cabinetry, but we had really limited choices because of our kitchen layout.  Varde is one of Ikea's more sturdy and free-moving pieces, which is why we decided on that.

It all began more than a year ago when R and I wandered into the as-is section at Ikea.  He saw this sink base on sale for $105.  We also bought a discontinued sink/countertop for $50.

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We picked it up despite not ever knowing whether or not my FIL would ever do renovations.  It sat in our apartment for until we began renovations last month.

The matching cabinets also went on sale for $50 each.  I didn't know that they were on sale because they were going to get discontinued!  I became very weary and decided not to purchase them because it seemed like renovations just wasn't in the picture.  The cabinets looked like this:

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The new version came out a few months later, they look like this:

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Double the size of what we wanted. Damn it. At this point, I had given up and decided to buy them later.  It turns out my FIL bought a few cabinet bases without consulting us.  The return date had already passed, so I decided to be cheapskate and hack them. I'll post pics when they're up.

Another issue we had was tracking down this piece:

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This one left me with many sleepless nights.  We did not buy it in the beginning because it was regular-priced, which meant it wasn't getting discontiued any time soon. We saw it in stock many times at our Ikea trips, but I decided that we should wait for renovations to commence before I made the committment.

The week before renovations, we went to Ikea and found out that it was out of stock.  Everywhere.  At every Ikea in California.  I panicked and craiglist-ed the damn thing for two weeks straight.  After two major disappointments, I found one in San Francisco for $100.  It needed serious TLC.  It is currently living in the basement until we finish the kitchen renovations, so I have no pictures again.

So really, I don't have any actual kitchen pictures to show you yet.