Our House: Operation "Open Up The Kitchen"

As I said in my earlier post, we have an 8 month old and a 3 year old.  They are an absolute blast!  They are also very busy and still learning to play together "nicely" :)  Keeping an eye on these two is a bit challenging when you are in the kitchen due to the layout of our main level.  You cannot see them eating at the table and you definitely cannot see them playing in the living room.  We have a galley kitchen and anyone's first thought would be to knock down a wall and open it up, right?  The problem is that we have a staircase right along that wall that would come out. This is what our main level looks like:

So we figured the next best thing to taking out a wall would be to take out part of two walls.
You can see in this first picture James has started taking out the drywall.

And in the next picture James has taken all of the posts and drywall out.  He put a new header in (and don't worry after I took this picture, he also put in the studs above the new header).

Drywall is up!  It looks like it is finally coming together!

In the picture below James is testing out the placement of the new butcher block countertop and cutting it.  After this he used a router on the edges and sanded the entire thing.  P.S. We found this butcher block on craigslist!  It was a round table someone was selling and we already wanted our counter to have a rounded edge (less sharp corners for the kids to run into), so this meant one less cut for James to make.  He took the legs off and cut it to size.  Best part:  rather than spending upwards of $200 on the butcher block, we ended up only spending $40!

I will post a new picture soon!  James has now painted the walls and built a frame with two pillars as the legs for the counter.  I have started to oil the butcher block.  So we are almost to the finish line on this project!  Wohoo!