Kitchen Reno: Installs Begin

Today was full of great and not so great news.

Great: cabinets are going in!

Not Great: two of the cabinets are the wrong size and need to be re-ordered. (Actually this one is a wash in the great/not great race for us since the two cabinets sit on top of the counter top and wouldn't get installed until counters were in anyway. The re-order should put them here at about the same time the counters get here.)

Great: dishwasher and sink are out,

Not Great: we found about half a bag of walnuts and other evidence of some type of rodent party behind the dishwasher. I feel bad...this whole time I've been accusing Elway of creating the odor.

Not great: electrician installed electrical lines for under cabinet lights where the open shelving goes. Now he needs to rewire that, and the dry wall crew has to come back and fix dry wall and I have to re-paint that area.

It's just so exciting to see the cabinets going in...I want to start putting things away!

 

 

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Kitchen Reno: Ending Week 2. Lessons Learned

Week two = two times the fun with drywall! We anticipated needing drywall repair behind the stove after the removal of the ceramic tile back splash and anywhere the electrician needed to remove dry wall to string electrical wire. It turns out he removed a few thin strips in the ceiling and some patches on two walls. We removed a large chunk from behind the stove. Not to bad.

Monday: no drywall crew.
Tuesday: no drywall crew.
Tuesday night: Lisa gets cranky and anxious about time. If drywall doesn't get done on Thursday, we can't paint with my parents on Friday & Saturday. I did not want to try to paint the ceilings and 18 foot walls with cabinets installed. Contractor assures us everything will get done, these guys know what they're doing...and then adds "we're not their bread and butter." This does not put me at ease.
Wednesday: drywall crew arrives. Huge mess.
Wednesday night: all the texture the dry wall crew has sprayed onto the ceiling patches has bubbled up and looks like it's about to fall off. Jamey leaves for a fishing trip.
Thursday: drywall crew returns and scraps bubbling texture off ceiling.
Friday: drywall crew returns again, re-sprays ceiling with a new layer of texture.

We were still able to paint on Saturday. We ended up buying a paint sprayer. This was a great purchase: it made painting the ceiling much easier. However, clean up was a b$%#h. Directions indicated the over spray area to be 2-3 feet. That thing shot paint ALL OVER. My mom and I were on our hands and knees brushing tiny little paint splatters off the tile floors for hours. Note to self: the next time we spray paint, make sure everything is hermetically sealed!

Wall paint is done! I can't believe how much I love a bit of color on a wall! The color is "mushroom bisque" and it already makes the whole space feel so much warmer than the "off-white" previously gracing these walls. My parents insisted we paint behind the fridge. My dad thought we should just go ahead and paint everything, but I insisted painting behind the cupboards was a waste of time and paint. Jamey came home late Sunday night from his fishing trip and the first thing he said about the kitchen was "why didn't you just paint the whole thing?" Did I marry a younger version of my father? WTH?

Lessons learned: 1) have a much better understanding with your contractor: find out if your job will be the main job for a crew during the duration of the project, or if it's a "fill-in" type job for his/her company. In hindsight, we've now figured out that we're a fill-in job. The problem with that, is this is not a fill-in job for us. If I could offer any advice to a contractor it would be: treat every job like it's the most important one you've got going on. What was the point of our contractor telling me our job wasn't "the bread and butter for these guys [dry wall guys]"?  I don't know, but the point I got was that I probably should have hired a different contractor.

2) Construction is dirtier than one imagines and clean up takes forever. I've mopped the floors twice now (once with a mop and once on my hands and knees with a rag) and there still seems to be a layer of construction dust settling.

3) When using a paint sprayer tightly cover everything in a half-mile radius.

Kitchen Reno: One Week Down

It's officially been one week (and a day, by the time I'm getting to post) in to our kitchen renovation. Over the weekend, Jamey ordered the exhaust hood and started relocating the duct work. The original kitchen didn't really have a hood, but instead a built in fan with a shelf over it. New plans call for a stainless decorative hood (no cupboards on top).

Today the sheetrock crew comes in and starts repairing. The big mess will get bigger. We left the plastic coverings over everything in the family room. I'm afraid to go home tonight. Elway is lit because he's locked up in the laundry room (the kitchen is his usual day-time hang out spot).

Last night Willa and I made no-bake cookies. They never actually formed balls (we're eating them with spoons), but they're delicious.

Here's what we used:

1 cup oats
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup honey
1 cup coconut
1/3 cup ground flax
3/4 cup mini-chocolate chips

Mixed it all together, dished it into a bowl (like chunky granola) and had it with a glass of milk as our night-time snack. Delicious!

Kitchen Reno Day 5

We have lights! We have a BIG mess. Good bye to the sad, old track lights, hello to five bright recessed lights. I can't believe putting five little holes in the ceiling generated enough drywall dust to coat the entire family room. I'm glad I ran home in the afternoon and at least covered up the couches, ottoman and rug with plastic. Still it looks like someone exploded a powdered sugar bomb in the house.

Jamey brought Cam to the pool after his gymnastics class so we could all watch Willa swim for awhile. When Cam and I got home, the electrical guys were hard at work in the kitchen. Then Willa and Jamey came home. There were ladders in front of the fridge and blocking the doorway back to the pantry. I ended up going out the slider and sneaking back in through the garage to at least get to the pantry. Crackers, yogurt covered pretzels and leftover brownies from a catering job I helped with on Wednesday made up the dinner and night-time snack menu.

 

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Kitchen Reno Day 4

The electrician came last night; our first step in re-construction (instead of DEconstruction).  I didn't realize or know that our job isn't that big, therefor he's doing this job AFTER "real" day jobs. He showed up around 4:30 and worked till 8ish. He'll come back and do the same Thursday and Friday. Our make-shift cooking/eating set up still revolves around the location of the kitchen; so when he's here working, making a dinner in any form is not really possible. I've packed most of the foods/daily dishes into the pantry, the refridgerator is still in it's original location, the sink is still functional in it's original spot and the microwave has moved on to a small table directly outside of the kitchen (along with bowls of fruits and boxes of cups).

Since I didn't actually know this was all going to down as it was until about 4pm yesterday, Willa and I punted on dinner. She had swimming at 6pm, we got home at 4:45 and found Andy working away. So we hung out a bit, catching up on homework, then hit Blimpies on the way to swimming. I'm not sure what J & C did, but we found them hanging out downstairs when we got home.

Tomorrow, the recessed lights will get installed, and the wiring for the hanging pendants and under cabinet lighting will go in. The pendants I ordered arrived yesterday, so hopefully they'll get installed also. "Let there by light!" Lighting was a major problem in this kitchen. Daytime? No problem. Two nice windows to the back yard and a giant skylight. Any other time it's a cave. There were two lights left on an old track-lighting set up, no lights over the peninsula, no lights under the cabinets and one light above the stove.  The new plan includes five recessed lights, lights under the cabinets on both sides, lights above the stove and three hanging 10-inch pendant lamps.

Tonight, in order to be prepared for the rest of the electrical, we'll rip out the rest of the counter under the windows. We'll keep the sink in tact for another week. Whew.

Free Pallet Ottoman

I saw a post for a pallet ottoman on Pinterest this fall that consisted of two pallets stacked together with industrial wheels underneath. That looked do-able. Pallets are all over - usually free. I tucked it into my mental 'projects' bucket and randomly thought about it whenever I'd see pallets lying around.

Then, after the Turkey Trot in mid-November, my friend Larisa was helping me finish my barn-wood table. That project didn't take as long as we thought it would, so we decided to tackle the ottoman project. Her idea included padding though - so....

Project: turn an old piece of crappy-wood pallet into a really cool, padded ottoman.

Step 1:
Find a pallet. We found ours for free at a tile shop. Mine is 34 inchs by 35 inches. ($ = 0)

Step 2:
Shore up the pallet. We moved most of the boards from one side (so it was hollow on the bottom). We then used two of these boards to fill in the sides. We wanted all four sides to be solid (the pallet originally had two sides open). We used some left over luan (a thin plywood) on top. The other boards we trashed. Loosing a few boards made the pallet only slightly less HEAVY. ($ = 0)

Step 3:
Install foam. I used 16x16x5 inch foam squares. These were cheaper than getting the big giant foam cut to the exact size. I attached the foam to the pallet with spray adhesive, but I'm not sure this actually did anything or not. I ended up using three squares of foam; I cut the three squares down to size, and used left over chunks to piecemeal the fourth square area.

I'm not sure the spray adhesive did anything to hold my foam to the base or to each other, but I used it generously, anyway.  ($ = $16/per foam square = $54)

Step 4:
I collected old towels and wrapped the wood base/sides. I wanted to soften the hard edges of the pallet base and wanted padding all the way around. I used staples to attach the towels to the bottom and sides of the pallet. After this, I needed something to "tighten" everything up. I deconstructed an old fleece blanket (you know the kind where two chunks of fleece are tied together at the edges?). A single-yard baby-blanket size was perfect. I took one piece and stapled it underneath one edge, then tightly pulled to the opposite side and stapled it down. I took the second piece, layer it perpendicular to the first, and stapled at both sides. This created a taute finish. ($ = 0)

Step 5:
Upholstery. I bought a yard and one fourth in standard width of upholstery. I did not want to sew any pieces together; my pallet size was almost perfectly proportioned to the width of my upholstery. Almost...is the key word. I did not have enough fabric to get completely all the way under the pallet to staple; on two sides I had to staple at the very bottom edge of the pallet (more photos coming to demonstrate). This was OK, except I needed something to finish or cover the selvege edge which now showed at the base of my ottoman. My initial thought was a leather strip, about the size of a belt, attached with upholstery tacks all the way around. I haunted Michael's craft story, JoAnn's fabric, Hobby Lobby and online retailers looking for this material, which apparently doesn't exist. I bought small samples of several other materials (canvas belt material, quilt bindings, etc) with no satisfactory results. In an effort to help me finally get this bad-boy done, my partner graciously offered up his old belts. Four "vintage" leather belts, complete with buckles (for a touch of whimsy) now finish the pallet. We had to improvise the attachment. The upholstery tacks I had were 7/16th of an inch: much too small to go through a layer of leather, a layer of fleece and a couple of layers of towels. We ended up using wide screws to attach the leather belt. Then we removed the actual tack part of the upholstery tack and I  used Gorilla Glue to attach the decorative tack head to the screws. Worked like a charm, except for the heavy amount of glue on my finger tips (which stayed on for about a week before it finally wore away). ($ = $33 [purchased on sale])

Step 6:
I pre-stained and waxed four wooden furniture legs before attaching them. We had some black landscaping mesh (the stuff you put down to prevent weeds from growing up through your mulch) that we used to finish off the bottom (to essentially hid the mess of layers underneath). This is totally unnecessary; this thing is so heavy no one would EVER lift it up to look underneath. ($ = $6 x 4 legs = $24)

I couldn't have purchased an ottoman for this space for what I've invested in my "free" pallet ottoman. Plus, I never would have gotten this perfect color pattern for my space. We've been using it now for the past five months and it's very sturdy; I have a four year that uses it as a launching pad between couch jumping. It's solid, so it never shifts, or moves and it's easy to care for (I just lift the vacuum up and vacuum the top occasionally).

Kitchen Reno Day 3

The $19.99 single burner hot plate is being put to good use. I bought it at Target, mainly because I couldn't think of a way to prepare oatmeal every morning without a stove. Both Jamey and Cam eat it daily. I buy oatmeal in 25lb bags through the North Linn Food Buying Club, and I didn't want to switch over to instant packets; mainly because I'm sure Cam would get hooked on the sugar!

We've enjoyed our oatmeal for two days, and last night, for the UNO game, we even made popcorn on this little contraption. It's much slower to heat than the gas stove we're used to, but it's doing it's job. Willa has requested ownership of the hotplate after the reno. She has visions of getting electricity in the yet-to-be-completed tree house/fort structure. She thinks after hooking her crib up with electricity, she'll be able to put in a mini-kitchen, so she and Will B. can experiment with snack recipes. I'm sure a mini-fridge request will also be in the works.