Kitchen -Day 23 (8/16)

Today: The plumber came and hooked up the sink, faucet and dishwasher, and also rerouted the gas line for the range. Our contractor was not due to be here today, but because of a bad weather forecast preventing him from getting in a couple of days on an outdoor job as he had planned, he and his guys showed up to do the tile back splash and prep for the range hood installation.

I am very happy at the color of the tile back splash. It is a grayish white marble that contrasts nicely with the dark gray counter tops and is not too white. I was worried that it would be more white than it turned out to be.

We have a functioning kitchen again. I am thrilled. We even unwrapped the appliances, and can now see what they look like.

Still to do: The tile needs to be grouted, the range hood installed, and finish detailing, including a little more drywall work. Then painting.

Kitchen - Day 22 (8/15)

Today: A huge step forward today, as the granite on the cabinets and the marble on the island are in, and they look fantastic. The place that did the countertops really did a great job of accounting for all the little irregularities in our kitchen (the never quite square walls), the tight tolerances around the appliances and every other piece of detail. It took about three hours for a team of three installers to finish everything, as there was one piece of countertop, the largest one on the sink side of the "L", that just didn't want to go in easily due to some irregularities in the shape of the bay window cutout. Some judicious trimming of moldings, cutting of drywall, and then good old fashioned brute force got it into place, and once the trim is touched up you would never know there was an issue. They also glued in the under mount sink, which will dry overnight and be ready for the plumber to work on it tomorrow.

Tomorrow: The plumber comes to complete the work required around the sink. This includes installation of the garbage disposal, putting in the faucet, hooking up all the water supply and drain lines, and then connecting the dishwasher output in through the disposal and drain system. When that is complete, we will have a functioning kitchen again, with running water and the ability to clean dishes. The plumber is also the one licensed to move the gas supply line behind the range to get that into place and hooked up. It has been sitting there disconnected since it was delivered on day 5 because it hasn't been hooked up. Without running water in the kitchen, there was no sense of urgency to get that done, as we wouldn't be cooking anyway.

If all goes well tomorrow, the remaining tasks will be limited to putting in the tile backsplash, installing the hood over the range, and then all the final detail work such as trim moldings and the like. Painting will be the very last step.

Kitchen - Day 21 (8/14)

It's almost not fair to count this as day 21, although in terms of elapsed days since demolition began, that is the proper count. The first 5 days were very eventful, and then on day 8, the counter tops were templated for manufacture. In the two weeks it takes to cut the counter tops out of the stone slabs, only sporadic bits of progress have been made, mainly in the area of electrical work. Lights have been added and moved around, and the remainder of the work to prep for installing the hood over the range has been completed. Tomorrow should be a huge step forward toward being done, as the counter tops are being installed. This has been the critical path task that is holding up every other remaining task. It will be nice to be moving forward again, as I am getting very very sick of eating takeout and dining out.

Also today, we purchased and I installed an entire pantry full of Closet Maid Shelf Track adjustable wire shelving. I would probably prefer something other than wire shelving, but it is easy to clean in this kind of application as it doesn't collect dust readily. The modular/adjustable benefits are nice, and we have used it in bedrooms and been very happy. It isn't the cheapest stuff in the world, but it goes up easily, is very sturdy and is functional.

Kitchen - Day 5 (7/29)

Today: A very eventful day. Appliances were delivered and put into place. Old appliances have been moved to the garage, where they will sit for a few days until Habitat for Humanity comes to pick them up and take them away as a donation. I love the look of the kitchen. The appliances are stainless steel; we are just leaving the heavy blue plastic protective film on them until everything is done.

While this is all going on I am putting the finishing touches on my trip packing. Checking and re-checking. Dave and Leo arrive at around 3pm to head to the airport. Excited would be an understatement...

Kitchen - Day 4 (7/28)

Today: The remainder of the cabinets have been installed and the last sections of hardwood flooring completed. The ongoing string of electrical work continues as well. Having the upper cabinets in finally gives us a really good idea of exactly what the finished kitchen will look like. I like it very much so far.

Tomorrow: Appliances get delivered and roughly put into place. Plumbing work that needs to occur after the granite and marble countertops get installed will prevent the gas range and the dishwasher from being hooked up. Without a sink, we will not have a truly functional kitchen, although we will be able to do some things. The microwave will allow us to warm things up at home, and we can grill outside if we want to. Soon we will be into a 2-week waiting period for the granite countertops to be manufactured and installed. Tomorrow afternoon I leave for eight days in the Dakotas, but as of now there will be very little that happens while I am gone.

Kitchen - Day 3 (7/27)

Today: Once again, I continue to be amazed at the speed at which things are moving along. Speed by itself is nice, but only if you are getting quality work and attention to detail, and watching these guys work and seeing the results I am convinced we are getting that. The hardwood floor is complete everywhere but in the laundry room, and it looks absolutely fantastic. This isn't a surprise, because the neighbors have this exact flooring in this exact color, and we loved it when they did it, so we chose the same floor. Drywall work continues, but is a somewhat slow process to do properly as it takes several coats and rounds of sanding to make it look nice. Electrical work continued throughout the day, as there is a lot of not very glamorous effort that goes into making everything is set up properly for future steps (like appliances and under cabinet lighting).

By far the biggest leap forward is the installation of the cabinet bases and the assembly of some of the clusters of uppers. The base units are all in, and now that we can see them in place, we are thrilled that we chose (at the last minute) to change the door styles from a plainer one to the one shown here. I couldn't love them more. The uppers are a fascinating thing to watch go together. There will be a very plain crown molding detail around the tops of the cabinets, and that molding will be slightly offset and resting on a three inch filler strip. The result of this arrangement is that the contractor won't be able to get a nail gun in between the ceiling and the final molding pieces. To get everything lined up properly, and not have to nail at an angle and hope for a good result, the uppers are being assembled on the floor in clusters, complete with the molding, and then will be installed in bunches. That can't be an easy way to do it, and the contractor says he has never done it like that before, but it seems to be working ok. I just hope they can lift these things and get them on the walls.

As for the quality of the KraftMaid cabinets themselves, I think we will be pleased. After the workers left today, it was fun to play with the self-closing drawers and other features and compare them to what we had before. Fun fun fun.

Tomorrow: Day 4 should see the completion of the drywall, the hanging of the upper cabinets, and the flooring of the laundry room. Additional electrical odds and ends are still on the docket I believe, and some other minor things. The Contractor says that tomorrow should see the end of the major tasks. Which is not to say that we are anywhere near done, in terms of time, or all the little things remaining to be done. Appliances are to be delivered and installed on day 5 (which includes plumbing and gas line work), countertops are to be templated on day 6. A range hood still needs to be installed. Countertops need to be fabricated, which will take an estimated two weeks. The sink, and its related plumbing (which includes the dishwasher drain line), cannot be completed until the under mount sink can be installed in the finished countertops.

This means that in fairly short order we will have a somewhat functional kitchen in terms of being able to refrigerate, cook, microwave, and restock the finished pantry. But we will be without countertops until mid-August, and therefore no running water in the kitchen. We will make do.

Kitchen - Day 2 (7/26)

Today: I am amazed at how much progress was made in one day. The demolition of the soffits was completed, and those areas of wall and ceiling have been drywalled, taped, and mudded. Additional sanding and skim coats are needed, but the configuration of the walls and ceilings is complete. The hardwood flooring was installed in most of the main kitchen area as well as half of the walk-in pantry. In addition, lot of electrical work was accomplished, which included on-the-spot decisions on location of many switches, outlets and light fixtures. Now is the time to make all the little tweaks that we have always wished we could do, like moving phone jacks around.

Tomorrow: Day 3 will see the completion of the hardwood floor in all areas but the laundry room, more work on the drywall and some additional electrical. The biggest thing will be the cabinets starting to go in. The base cabinets should all be placed, and depending on how the drywalling goes, some uppers may be put in places as well. The drywall work is messy and dusty, but our contractors are doing a pretty good job of containing the mess. Tomorrow it should begin to look a little like a kitchen again.

Kitchen - Day 1 (7/25)

Today: The big demolition day. By the end of the day, all cabinets and countertops were gone, the soffits were half removed, and the old vinyl flooring and underlayment were mostly torn up and removed.  There weren't too many surprises, and those that we did find were small. We were hoping that there was nothing buried in the soffits but dead space, and that turned out to be mostly true. There was some wiring and phone cable that can easily be tucked into the new ceiling, and one small elbow of vent pipe above where the dishwasher goes that the contractor doesn't think should be tough to re-route and bury back in the wall. One minor concern was some water damage to the subfloor near the vent at the corner of the sliding door, but we were moving that vent 90 degrees to its current orientation to put it along the side of the cabinets as opposed to in front of the door, so that flooring was going to be cut out anyway. Hopefully there isn't damage under the subfloor.

Tomorrow: The completion of the demolition (mainly the soffit above what we call the butler's pantry - picture at right above) and the reconstruction and drywalling of where the soffits used to be. Moving two floor vents and fixing the minor issues noted above. Some electrical work to rewire some things and prep for future light installation. Perhaps if all goes smoothly, the beginning of the hardwood floor installation. The hardwood is being installed first so that it runs wall to wall under everything throughout the whole kitchen as opposed to not running under the island or under the cabinets. Cabinets and the island then go on top.

The Kitchen - What Will Be

I've posted a couple of pictures of what the soon-to-be-gone kitchen looks like; so what are we planning? I wouldn't say that it is our absolute dream kitchen, because if money were no object, and we had a bigger kitchen footprint to deal with we would almost certainly do some things differently than what we are planning. None of those extra things are all that important to us though, and the kitchen we are going to get has everything we really want. So while it is fair to say that is not absolutely our dream kitchen, I think it will be awfully close.

Harrington Dove White

The parameters we needed to work within, and what we decided on was this:

No substantial change to the footprint of the kitchen is feasible. The garage prevents us from going in one direction. The inability to easily move the laundry room prevents us from doing much to move the pantry around. Lastly, our house has a walkout basement in the back and therefore the kitchen is really on the second floor from the point of view of the back of the house. Plus there is an expensive deck back there, so pushing an extension out the back would cost a fortune. So what we have to work with is basically what we have now.

We considered a few different layout changes to the arrangement of cabinets, appliances and the island. After scribbling a bunch of alternate plans we came to the conclusion that the kitchen is laid out the way it is now for a good reason - it is the best and most functional use of the available space.The renovation therefore would be focused mainly on upgrading the quality of everything in the kitchen rather than making any dramatic layout changes.

The cabinets are Kraftmaid in Dove White. The door style is Harrington. Having chosen this, the rest of the choices were made to fit this style and color scheme. I was a bit of a skeptic on a white kitchen to begin with, but once the rest of the plan came together, I became a believer.

Steel Gray and Carrera

We considered tile and hardwood flooring, and decided on hardwood. We chose a Bruce wide plank oak floor in "gunstock", which is a rich medium brown color. It should contrast with the white cabinets nicely.

For countertops, I have always wanted stone of some sort. We love to cook and spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and nothing beats natural stone to me. We settled on granite ("Steel Gray") around the perimeter and "Carrera" marble on the island. The granite is a dark grayish black with the slightest hints of dark blue, and the marble is a nice white veined stone.

The appliances will be mostly new. We are reusing a Kitchenaid dishwasher that is only a year or two old, but it is black and the new appliances will all be stainless, so I don't know that we will end up keeping it in the long term. Most of the other appliances are from GE's Cafe line. We are replacing the current configuration of a drop-in cooktop and a set of smallish double wall ovens with a slide-in range that has the conventional oven on the bottom and gas burners on top. It will have a hood vented to the outside. We will lose a bit of refrigerator space with a counter-depth model, but not as much as I would have thought. We will no longer have a microwave over the range; it will be in the island instead.

As I finish writing this, it is less than 14 hours until the contractor arrives in the morning to start turning these piles of boxes and cartons into a new kitchen. In the meantime I guess we will be eating out...

Tick tick tick- Kitchen Renovation - Day minus 2

Two different major events are in count-down mode around here: it is 6 days until the long-awaited Dakotas trip (more on that soon), and 2 days until a total kitchen renovation kicks off with full demolition commencing on Monday. The timing of the kitchen reno isn't great, as I will be away for the middle week of the three total weeks it is expected to take from start to finish. I would like to be here to see it all unfold, but Amp has promised to take daily pictures, and she has been the driving force behind this whole project and I know everything will go well.

Amp has been researching, designing and investigating various things since we made the decision to move ahead with this project several months ago. When we bought our house new 14 years ago, the builder's kitchen seemed alright. We upgraded the floor to a high end vinyl, the cabinets were mediocre but acceptable, and the countertops were a typical laminate. As the years have gone by, we have become less and less satisfied with the crappy cabinets, the floor is very worn, and the countertops should be something nicer. Every time we have considered upgrading something though, we keep coming back to the same problem - it's almost impossible to do just one item at a time.

The part of the kitchen that we like the least is the cabinets. The drawers are not the nice self-closing drawers that all good cabinets come standard with. The doors rattle. The laminate ends of the exposed runs have weathered and faded with time and light to an ugly purply-brown color. Now, I like the color purple as much as the next person, but it's not a great look for kitchen cabinets. The overall effect by now is that they just look and feel cheap. And I hate looking at them.

But the cabinets are the keystone part of a kitchen. We can't change the flooring if the footprint of the cabinets may change. And it makes no sense to put nice granite countertops on top of crappy base cabinets.  If you are going to replace the cabinets, then you have to change the flooring and the countertops.

So the cabinets are the single domino that has brought down our entire kitchen.

After a flurry of planning, ordering and buying, we are ready to begin. There is a dumpster in the street outside our house, and the contractor will be here at 7am sharp Monday morning to get started. I can't wait.