Final Preparations for Kitchen Cabinet Install

So remember that we originally thought we'd have the kitchen done in a couple weeks? Well, obviously that didn't happen. Things take longer than you think, and there are also things that pop up that you don't expect, don't even know about! And since this was (obviously) our first time doing anything like this, we really didn't know what to expect. So here was one of the original ideas on the project:

1. Order cabinets
2. Demolition (wall, cabinets, countertop, ceiling, etc.)
3. Paint
4. Install the subfloor and tile floor
5. Install the cabinets
6. Install the countertop

All ready to go in about a month, right?!  :)

Well, we didn't take into consideration the electrical work that needed to be done and redone, and we didn't anticipate how big a project the ceiling and wall rebuilding would be (i.e. after you remove what you don't want, how do you get it back to looking like something you do want!?).

So when we took everything out of the kitchen, this is basically what we were left with:

The dirty white areas are just drywall behind the cabinets, no big deal since we were planning to paint everything. But the yellow brown areas are 55 year old glue that held the "backsplash" onto the wall for so many years. That had to be scraped off and plastered over in many cases to get it looking like something you'd want to paint.

Thanks so much to our friend who is a plastering genius, he spent many afternoons and evenings working and helping us get our walls and ceilings back in order. Plaster, dry, sand, repeat. (This also made for a very messy workspace - but at least we tried to contain it to the kitchen and dining room with plastic coverings for the entry points.)

Finally, the walls were ready to get painted, and just in time - only the night before our cabinet installer arrived. Since this was now the first week of school and volleyball was in full swing, Robbie and Mom went at it while I was at practice one night. This is what I came home to find!

Maybe you're thinking - this looks a little odd, and it did - but we tried to focus just on the areas that would be exposed versus those areas that would be covered by cabinets.

We went with our designer friend's suggestion of doing two tones of grey in the kitchen, to help blend the dining room into the kitchen. The lighter gray color would run from the dining room into the kitchen where the bar area would be, and the darker gray color would be mostly on the "L" shape of the kitchen where the cabinets were. Above you can see that at the time we only focused on the kitchen area to paint before the cabinets were installed. Later we had to go back and do the dining room area.

And of course painting is fun! You may not be able to tell really well, but the darker gray was a brownish gray (called Warm Stone) and the lighter gray had more of your traditional black with white mix. It's amazing how a fresh coat of paint can change the feel of a room! And barely did the paint have a chance to dry before it was time to install the cabinets!

Time is running out!

Originally, our idea was that we would take 2 weeks to gut the kitchen. Then, once we moved in and got started, figured we could at least have it done before school started. Now we're hoping (and praying) it will be done before Thanksgiving (and maybe Christmas!).

Obviously, we weren't very experienced with estimating how much time things would take, but we also didn't take into account that most of the time, there's SOMETHING that doesn't work out the way you expected it to. Then throw school and coaching into the mix and you have -- nearly zero time to do anything on the house!

Right around this point in the renovating process (mid-August), we realized we weren't going to be able to do as much as we wanted to ourselves. So after we had our electric problems fixed, there wasn't time for us to take care of the floor ourselves before school started.

One of our friends mentioned an online service they used for projects around the house - service magic - and so we tried it out. You put your "service needed" out for grabs and then get calls back from local vendors who are willing to take the project on and give you an estimate. We found a contractor who was able to do everything we wanted and more, and was able to start almost immediately.

In about 16 hours (spread over 3 days), he was able to tear up our old floor, lay the subfloor, tile & grout! Yahoo! Part 2 of our renovations complete! See some pictures of the masterpiece below!

After the grout had cured for a day, we got my whole family together and had a "painting" party - not with paint, but painting sealer on the grout! At last, it was starting to come together, piece by piece (or tile by tile!).

The Drywall Machine

Over the course of this long adventure (buying a house and redoing the kitchen), we've accumulated a lot of tools, big and small. But this one took the cake! Thankfully we don't have to permanently store it (we rented it from Home Depot).

We also got some help from our friends on this project as it takes more than one to operate the machine (and put it together). One was an engineer, so we figured he could put it together. (That was the first challenge - only, of course, because reading directions would be just tooo easy!)

Once we got it together, and figured out where the drywall pieces were going, and cut them to the right size (fyi - this took a lot more time than using the actual machine!), we were finally able to put it to work! And because it's just that cool, I'll let the pictures do (most of) the talking :) .

Lock and load!

Hoist her up and we're ready to go!

Securing the drywall with screws and a power drill

The machine makes holding it up a LOT easier!

Guys and their power drills!

The best part about this (besides seeing the ugly ceiling disappear) was that this was the first reconstruction we did in the kitchen! Yay! Finally, it seemed that we were making (slight) progress on the way to our new kitchen, thanks to the help of several great friends and this cool machine!

Kitchen Demolition: Part 5 - The Appliances

Since we've never done anything like this before (isn't it obvious?!), we decided to get some help from others when disconnecting things like a water line and electricity! Thankfully we had some friends that just did some redecorating in their own kitchen this summer, and they're only a couple minutes away, so he came down to help us disconnect the sink and dishwasher.

I wanted to postpone this moment as long as possible, because this officially meant we had no water in the kitchen :( but it had to happen for the project to move forward. (PS - On a side note, this actually happened in mid-August, and to date we still are without water in the kitchen!)

This also meant no more automatic dishwashing for us, so we decided to go out and invest in paper and plastic everything! (And sadly, some manual dishwashing must still be done as they don't make paper and plastic cookware - can't imagine why!) Our laundry room on the 1st floor has a fairly big utility sink, so that is really our only source of water for the kitchen now.

Wow - they just don't make them like that anymore!   ;)

The stove (and adjoining convection oven) was another beast itself, partly due to the fact that we didn't want to rupture a gas line (yikes!) and partly due to the fact that it also had a vent connected from the stove through cabinets above it, into the attic and out the roof!

As you can see, we did manage to get it out successfully between the 5 of us (me, Robbie, and my family) - without breaking either the gas line or the structures supporting the vent through the roof. (Unfortunately, what we found out a couple days later - during a big rainstorm - was that there was an entrance from the roof into our kitchen now that the vent was gone! A little surprise to have water dripping into our kitchen!)

This isn't water damage :) just what was left after we got the sink, dishwater and cabinets out.

Finally, down to the walls (and floor!), we were ready to start fresh and start the rebuilding phase of the project! Yahoooooo!!!

Kitchen Demolition: Part 4 - The Cabinets

This was the fun part (for me at least), as we could see a lot of progress being made in a short time. We knew that in order to get the ceiling & floor installed and the kitchen painted before the new cabinets arrived, we had to start taking apart the old ones. So here you can see how the kitchen came apart, piece by piece, as we prepared to move into the reconstruction phase of the project (yay!).

Robbie loved using his power drill for pretty much anything - but it made the cabinets come down a lot easier too!

You can see where the refrigerator used to be in the corner, and the cabinets above it with dirt stains.

Another interesting piece of the kitchen was the "wallpaper" between the cabinets and countertop, which was actually just a thin piece of the countertop glued to the wall!

While the countertop "wallpaper" came off pretty easily, the glue left behind was another story.

The cabinet over the oven was left because the exhaust vent went right through it.

Dad and Robbie get ready to take out the bottom cabinets and cleaning up some of the mess left behind.

Lots of demolition and hauling away cabinets! Initially we took them out to our back porch, but eventually they made their way into the garage, back in the "man cave" as Robbie likes to call it. All this work was done on a Friday night, in preparation for more demolition and our first step of reconstruction coming the next day! More on that fun adventure next!

Major Project: Kitchen Electrical Work

In taking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, we decided that we should put in some lights over the area that would be the bar.

The first task was finishing off some of those electrical wires hanging from the ceiling that were previously in the wall.

Next we moved an outlet from the middle wall (that wasn't there anymore) to the side wall between the dining room & kitchen.

The final piece was adding 3 recessed lighting areas over the "wall" that would become the bar.

This project seemed easy enough, even though we didn't have a clue what we were doing - we were confident in a few of our friends who had experience with wiring. So after a couple afternoons of thinking, discussing, and finally working, we had three light fixtures installed and ready to go (or so we thought).

What we didn't find out until later was that the light fixtures were wired to be on all the time, and weren't connected to any switches! Oops! 

Seemed like a simple problem to fix, so they went to work again, thinking, discussing, and testing different switch configurations to see if they could get something to work. The other light fixtures in the kitchen needed to be replaced as well (square box lights for circular recessed lights), so they started fiddling with those connections too. Before we knew what had happened, we realized one wall of the house had no power whatsoever, and the kitchen lights were permanently on!

Realizing we were in over our heads, we called one of Robbie's student's dad, who is an electrician, to help us get power back to our house the way it should be.

Above the kitchen is an attic crawl space, which became very helpful for getting the switch configuration sorted out.

After several hours of his work over several hot evenings (and lots of those in the steaming attic), he was able to figure out the problem and get the light boxes properly installed to the switches available. It turns out we had several 4-way switches in our kitchen, and quite the complex configuration.

Important lesson learned: Don't take it apart unless you know how to put it back together! (And taking pictures never hurts!)

Mini Project #2: Family Room Plastering

So when we first got the house, we thought the Family room would be one of the first rooms to be done and move our furniture into as we moved into the house. BUT...as I'm sure all homeowners know from experience, things never quite go as you planned in your head!

This is what the Family room (1st room to the left as you enter the house) looked like when we got the house.

The very first thing we did (before we even moved in) was tear down the heavy curtains and curtain rods. This was actually no easy feat, as the rods were bolted into the wall in such a way that on several occasions, there was a gaping hole left in the wall after the rods came out. FUN!! So there was definitely a lot of putty used in this room.

The second thing we did was tear down the wood paneling wall and all the wood trim around the floor. We didn't particularly care for the wood paneling look, and the trim had marker written on it and holes drilled into a lot of the doorway due to some sort of exercise bar contraption (another interesting quirk of the house).

The next thing was to see if the carpets could be salvaged. After moving the interesting chairs left behind (in particular the goldish "recliner" that plugged into the wall), we noticed some rust stains, but my mom did a SUPER job in getting a carpet cleaner machine and making it look almost new!

Then it was time to move into the house, and although we hadn't originally planned it this way, the family room ended up being the throw room for everything that didn't have a home (as well as the kitchen stuff we didn't want to move in quite yet). We didn't get a chance to paint that room because we still needed to put up drywall, so we decided to leave it for storage and finish it as soon as the kitchen was done. (Little did we know how long the kitchen would take!)

Somewhere in the midst of the kitchen project we managed to get something done with this family room, thanks to one of our good friend's superior knowledge of plastering!

Nothing some plastering tape and putty can't fix!

Showing off his hard work

Thanks to our friend, the wall is pretty much ready for painting - now we just have to decide what color! Another thing to consider was this new wall is smooth, while the other walls (and most of our house) has a swirl pattern in the plaster. Another one of our friends suggested we use that wall as our "accent" wall in the room and paint it a different color than the other walls. We're still considering this, as I was thinking it might be neat to have some navy in this room, but thought an entirely navy room might be too much!

While we're eagerly anticipating painting and finishing this room, it has taken a backseat to our kitchen project, so until that gets finished, it's still our storage room!