Back to being clever (or so I think). Looks like cabinet folks spent the day putting some handles on our cabinets. We really like them.
And here we have our floating shelves. Those too turned out super nice.
And finally, they have the outline of the table built. Love the legs we picked out.
Now we’re gonna have our first, change our mind and it’s gonna cost us, moment. We think the island is too short. That there is 9 feet long (or thereabouts). Our intention is for 4 people to sit in this area, one on each side and 2 on the end. That will work with what’s there, but if people are on the sides and the end, we think knees will be bumping. Probably not too bad, but we don’t want to feel cramped. We have the room, so we’re gonna ask them to re-do that portion and lengthen it out to 10 feet. This will give people on the sides plenty of room. Now I get to compose the email to the contractor.
That’s it. That was a nice anniversary present to us. Now we get to go out to dinner. Eating out at Clara Bo in Beloit, WI.
Yeah, no clever titles this time. Not feeling it. Got home yesterday and saw cabinets in the kitchen.
I gotta say, they look nice and this is starting to look like a kitchen.
This is where the range and range hood will go. We’re going to have white subway tile as a backsplash between the upper and lowers with an accent strip somewhere along there.
This is the view of the island and the cabinet wall (for lack of a better term. On that wall between the cabinets will be three floating shelves. Sink and dishwasher here up in the front of the picture.
And then another view of the kitchen back toward the range. The refrigerator will go in that opening to the right. The cabinets next to that are pull-out pantry-style cabinets. Those will be nice. On this end of the island the countertop will extend out a couple of feet and be our seating area. We’ll have room for one on each side and two on the end.
Next they have to finish up trim work. Put in a bit more crown molding and then the trim all around things. This was partly why I didn’t write up this post last night. We had to meet with the contractor to discuss what we wanted for trim. That took way longer than expected. With us, we take forever to really decide on things. We usually need time to let ideas settle and percolate through our minds before we’re happy with them. What makes this doubly hard is all the existing woodwork in the foyer and family room don’t really match each other and now we’re adding more stuff that doesn’t quite match any of that. Dena is having a hard time deciding what to do. We know the shape of the trim, just don’t quite know the color yet. I’m sure she’ll come up with something we’ll be happy with.
Progress! Next the counter people come in and measure so they can go make our counters. They already warned us that would take about 2 weeks so we should be patient and expect a bit of a lull again in work. So stay tuned and I’ll keep this blog updated.
Now I’m really cheating. I’m writing this two days after the date on this post. But it’s not really cheating because the work happened 2 days ago and I’m just getting around to writing about it today. Eh, who cares. I’m writing.
We had tile put in on Friday! Tile guys came, started at the far side of the kitchen and worked their way out the front door.
Here is the view from inside the kitchen.
And the view from my office.
I’m gonna blame my iPhone camera but, in person, the colors I see don’t really look like those pics. But that’s OK because I think I’m getting used to the idea that colors in general change constantly over the course of the day. Dena & I have seen this time and again, we pick out some color that’s brown, or blue, or green or whatever. We get it on the wall and say, “Whoa! that’s not the color we thought it was.” And then later in the day when the sun has moved, “Yeah! That’s the color we wanted.” Even in the same room at the same time, one wall will look one color and another, perpendicular wall will look to be a completely different color. It’s strange.
Bringing it back to the tile. What we picked out was kind of a granity-green-ish. Now that it’s in, at different times and in different places, it looks more grey or more brown. Go figure. Regardless, we like it a lot. It’s all really starting to come together. Looks good with the walls in both the foyer and the kitchen and will go nicely with the cabinets once they’re in place. Which should happen Monday because the cabinets were delivered Friday as well!
Now for the adventure part of this blog post. As many people know, when tile is laid, you have to stay off it for about 24 hours to allow the thinset (mortar) to set properly. Othewise, the tiles will shift or may even break. Given that the foyer and kitchen are central to our house we planned to spend the night in a hotel.
So I’m sitting here in my office after the guys left waiting for Dena to come home, when I hear a noise like ductwork flexing. We all know that sound from TV with the good-guy crawling through the ducts to get the bad-guy. So I start hearing that sound and I think, “Oh shit”.
See that?
That little hole way off in the corner of the kitchen is a vent. Of course the vent cover was removed for the tiling and I don’t see Molly (our cat) around anywhere. I’m convinced she went down that vent hole.
See, it’s OK for cats to walk on newly laid tile. They aren’t generally heavy enough to affect it, it’s just us fat humans that can’t walk on it. So I think I have a cat stuck in the duct work and we’re supposed to be leaving for the night and all the next day. We can’t leave her to wander around the ducts for a day. She’ll starve!
So Jim rigs up a way to spider-man-it from my office door to the basement door without disturbing too many tiles. I get down there and start moving aside those drop-ceiling tiles we have down there to try to find the duct work to see if I can somehow poke a cat out of there. Then, of course, Dena calls down, “I have Molly!” She was never in there.
Stupid cat.
So we went to dinner and stayed in a hotel here in town. Stopped back Saturday morning to feed and check on the cats (no cats in the ducts), spent a nice day with Dena’s mom helping her get some shopping done, got back last night (still not cats in ducts) and could finally walk all over it.
That’s the end of our tile adventure. Cabinets were delivered late Friday and should be put in place come Monday. Gonna really start looking like a kitchen now.
Tile guy came today. Bright and early, 7 a.m. there he was knocking on the door. Good thing I was up and showered and ready to go for the day already. Did mostly prep work and now we have orange flooring:
I had no idea what that stuff was or why it was on my floor. So I looked it up. Nice of Schluter to put their name so prominently on their product. Here is what they say it is:
Schluter®-DITRA is a polyethylene membrane with a grid structure of square cavities, each cut back in a dovetail configuration, and an anchoring fleece laminated to the underside. The anchoring fleece is embedded in thin-set mortar to provide a mechanical bond to the substrate. Tile is installed over DITRA using the thin-bed method in such a way that the mortar becomes mechanically anchored in the square, cutback cavities of the matting. Designed specifically for ceramic tile and dimension stone installations, DITRA serves as an uncoupling layer, waterproofing membrane, and vapor management layer that accommodates moisture from beneath the tile covering. Further, DITRA performs all these functions while still providing adequate support/load distribution for the tile covering. The combination of these four essential functions allows for the successful installation of tile over a wide range of substrates, including plywood/ OSB, concrete, gypsum, heated floors, etc.
So there you go. We have a plywood substrate in our kitchen so it seems to make sense use something like that to…oh hell, who am I kidding? I trust they know what they’re doing. I was just curious what that stuff was. I’m convinced by Schluter’s marketing.
Anyway, remember this?
They started to tear up the floor in the foyer and discovered another layer of tile under the existing tile. They thought they were going to have to jack-hammer up the concrete underneath it all and then decided to just remove the top layer and tile over it. Well, the tile guy fixed that all up too.
All better now full of nice, new concrete (or whatever that stuff is).
He says tomorrow he’ll be able to tile the entire floor. That’s great news, except that means we have to go spend the night somewhere. Once the tile is laid, we’re supposed to stay off it entirely for at least 24 hours to allow it to set. Otherwise we could break some of the tile. Since the foyer and kitchen completely block off all access to just about all the rest of the house, we’re gonna go get a room for the night.
I’ll still try to get some pix before we take off and post something.
That’s it for today. Tune in next time for the further adventures of Jim & Dena’s kitchen.
I’m slacking again. Sure there were a couple of days of inaction lately and they’ve been working the last few days but the progress has been somewhat minimal and hard to show off.
They basically took this
And turned it into this
And then turned it into this
The drywallers have been here finishing up the walls and today the painters showed up and painted it all green. That’s going to be the color of the kitchen. Or at least, those parts of the walls you’ll actually be able to see. That wall there you really won’t see much of because it’ll have cabinets on top and bottom, a range and range hood in the middle (you can see the venting sticking out of the wall there) and a tile backsplash where you’d expect backsplash to be.
Here you’ll see more of the green:
This will be the dining area and that green wall is pretty much what you’ll see when this is all finished.
Still looks like they need to do another coat over the whole room. Then the tile guy is supposed to show up and start laying tile.
This is beginning to look like a real room for a change.
I’m always amazed at what professional plasterers can do. And how quickly they can do it.
I’ve done my own drywalling and hole-patching over the years. Having kids, and life in general means you have to patch walls on occasion. I get it done, but it always takes me like 47 rounds of spackling, sanding, spackling some more and it end up looking…OK. Occasionally I achieve “good”. But professionals, in one day the get that whole edge cleaned up and looking like a real wall.
Then look at this. Here is before:
And now here it is after today:
That’s almost looking like a real wall. Not bad especially since almost that entire wall will be covered in cabinets.
Then we also had some venting installed. You’d think they’d have done this before they put all the drywall up, but what do I know?
I think they had scheduling difficulty with the HVAC guy so they kinda had to do that. This is going to be where and how the range hood vents. They ended up having to go down with the venting rather than up like we had wanted them to. They say it’ll be OK. I’m not sure I’m convinced of that, though I’m not sure what else can be done at this point.
Finally a lesson learned that has nothing to do with the remodeling project.
If you’re ever out in your backyard smoking some ribs, and you have left-over apple cider and oil you’ve been using to spray on the ribs to keep them moist during smoking, don’t just toss the remaining cider on the lawn. It’s not just like water.
Today the dry wall people came and patched things up.
You can see they got the left-over wall all covered up. Patched up the holes in the walls and fixed up the ceiling.
And over here is the other side of the opening to the family room. Guess we’ll have a little angle-thing in the corner there.
I cheated a bit. I know I said I’d blog every day someone was here doing something. Well, yesterday the electrician was back doing a couple more things. They put in one too many can-lights in the ceiling so he had to come back and remove the wiring for one of them. That was about it. Didn’t seem worth blogging about so I didn’t. Mea culpa.
Guess the city of Janesville is satisfied with their work. Yep, that’s all that was done today.
JIm
p.s. I got to help my son change the spark plugs in his car. OK, he did all the work and I stood around and made fun of him. That’s kind of like helping.
Today we got some electrical work done. How about that. Let’s look at a couple of views from the corners.
Each of those place where there are white wires hanging down out of holes in the ceiling is where can lights are supposed to go. Curiously, the plans called for 9 can lights to go into the ceiling. When I was speaking with Jerry a week or so ago I was questioning the need for 9 new can lights given that we’re supposed to have 3 pendants hanging over the island. He assured me we’d figure all that out when the electrician came and he’d make suggestions and we’d talk about it and I should not worry.
Now I got holes in the ceiling all wired up and I’m not quite sure I want them that way. And they never did talk with us about it beforehand. Is this normal for contractors? I also noticed there are only 2 pendants roughed in over the island where there’s supposed to be 3. Guess we have some talking to do. And probably a dreaded change order.
On the bright side, I figured out what “nailing plates” are. See these
Those are nailing plates. Imagine if you will, people hanging drywall with screws (or perhaps nails). They could easily drive that sucker right into the pipes. Hence, put in a nailing plate and that’ll stop any nails or screws from causing you a much bigger problem. I noticed we got a bunch of those nailed up all over the place where the wiring goes through the joists as well. Of course, if Wisconsin used conduit, they wouldn’t have to put in nailing plates to protect the wiring, but that’s a story for another day.
That brings us to the end of day 22. Hope you’ve been enjoying this. See you tomorrow.
What?!? Day 21! Yeah, I reconsidered my day numbering convention. At first, I was going to go by work-days. They started on Tuesday the first, worked through Friday the 4th, that’s 4 days, but then I counted the following Monday as day 5, not day 7. But now with this lull I realized, who cares about work-days, I want to keep count of how many days I’m without a functioning kitchen! So, this is Day 21. So there.
Finally got back to work today. Plumber came to remove some old plumbing and put in some new.
See those nice new pipes sticking up out of the floor? That’s our water for our sink and a drain. How nice.
See those tape lines on the floor? Dena and I got impatient and taped out where the island was going to go so we could get a better feel for what this will look like when it’s done. We like it so far.
They also took out that last little bit of wall. Cabinets will be all along that wall.
I thought about titling this post, “Another day, another change-order”. Any time something new comes up that wasn’t in the original estimate, they file what they call a change-order. It’s essentially a legal addendum to our contract specifying what additional thing we’re going to have to pay for. Some of these have been expected—money for the permits, credit for their not having to jack-hammer out the concrete in the foyer. That sort of things. Others not so expected, but I kinda feel like they should have been.
Take today for instance. We’re going to have another change order because, by code, when they put in new plumbing they also have to put in something called “nailing plates”. Now, if this is something required by code and they knew they were putting in new plumbing, don’t you think they would have known they also had to put in nailing plates and factored that into the estimate? I think so. smh
Anyway, it was good to once again see some progress. I’ll keep on blogging as long as they keep on working.
Another day, another senseless school shooting, and another round of politicians offering their “thoughts and prayers” while not actually doing anything about the epidemic of gun violence in this country. I’ve reached the point where all I can conclude from this is politicians want these shootings to continue.
Why they want this, I don’t know. I know if they actually wanted to reduce the number of people murdered every year by gun violence, they would take action by passing sensible laws to restrict or otherwise control the flood of arms and ammunition into our society. But they don’t. Hence I can only conclude they don’t want to. They want this violence to continue.
I know, they talk about second amendment rights and how they can’t do anything, but that’s bullshit plain and simple. We don’t let people in this country buy fully automatic weapons and that’s constitutional. Why not restrict the ownership of other types of weapons as well?
Because they don’t want to.
We already have laws that prevent certain people from owning guns and those laws are perfectly constitutional. Why not pass more laws expanding who can’t own a gun?
Because they don’t want to.
They’ll say laws like that don’t actually reduce gun violence but that’s a lie. Reduce the availability of guns and you’ll reduce gun violence. It’s that simple.
My own congressman, Paul Ryan, is the goddamn Speaker of the House! He sets the legislative agenda for the entire House of Representatives. He decides which bills come to the floor and which do not. Furthermore, he announced he’s retiring at the end of this term so he has nothing to fear from constituents or doners and yet…he’ll do nothing. All I can conclude is that he, like all the other politicians in congress, for some sick reason, wants this senseless slaughter of children to continue. I don’t understand it.
I don’t care what party any of these people belong to, they’re all at fault because they all clearly want this to continue. If they didn’t, they’d do something about it.
Well, today we got some good news and some bad news.
The good news: Got a call from the lead guy, Jerry, telling me things are going great. They got the inspection from the city today and all is well. They are happy with all the structural work and things can move ahead. Even better, the workers are ahead of schedule even, way ahead of schedule. Things are great.
The bad news: According to the schedule, the next step is to have the electrician and plumber come in and do the work they need to do. But, since we’re way ahead of schedule, they aren’t ready to be here until week after next. So…a bit of a “lull” in the project. If they can get the folks to come out sooner, great, but usually they’re pretty booked up so…be patient.
So, I missed Day 4. That was last Friday. I got home from work that day, took a couple of pics and then headed to the airport to go to Vegas to watch my older brother get married. That was fun, but no time for writing blog posts. So, today is a two-fer.
Recall, prior to Friday, the kitchen looked like this:
When I came home, it looked like this:
We’re opening up the wall to the family room to make the whole thing more open. To do that, they built a temp-wall to hold up the ceiling while they removed the old wall and put in a new beam to hold up the second floor. Like such:
and such:
That was about it from Friday.
Then today I come home and things are looking a bit more open.
A big improvement. Our family room is hidden behind that wall of plastic. A good look.
Then they turned their sights to soffits. Remember, way back when, when the one wall looked like this?
Well, now it looks like this:
We’re still gonna put cabinets in that opening. But for that, you’ll have to wait a while. I don’t want there to be any spoilers.
Continue to make slow but steady progress I guess. That whole wall, for the most part, is coming down and will then be open to the family room. Looks like they’ll need to move some plumbing I’m thinking.
Then in the foyer they got that top layer of tile off.
Maybe we should just leave it? Kinda trendy and plaid-looking with the old tile and the left-over grout. OK, maybe not.
I’m shocked. I honestly think never before in the history of home remodeling projects has a project been reduced in scope and price. But yet, that is exactly what happened to me today.
I generally approach this project with the thought that if the project lead ever calls me in the middle of the day, it’s gonna be bad news. Why else would they need to call, right? So today I get a call from Jerry and I’m thinking, “oh shit.”
phone rings
Jim: Hello.
Jerry: Hi Jim, this is Jerry, how you doing today?
Jim: Fine ’til you called. (Yes, I really said that, I know, I’m a jerk.)
But then he goes on to tell me that he actually had good news. Remember that tile over tile over concrete thing in the foyer? Well, turns out, he decided if he removed it all the way down, he would have to rebuild up the subfloor by 2–3” which seemed silly to him. So he had the bright idea to only remove the top layer of tile and then tile right back over the old layer. This means no jackhammering, no rebuilding up the subfloor which saves both time and money from the original quote! Yay me! So, all he has to do is fix up that area they already dug into and they’re good.
Will wonders never cease? Let’s hope so.
As for the rest of the kitchen, they basically got all the tile off. That was about it for the day. I’ll leave you with one glorious picture of a plywood floor and talk to you later.
Here it is! Day 1! The start of our kitchen remodel. I hope to post every day about how the changes went so everyone can share with me the joys of a full kitchen remodel.
First a reminder.
Before:
And after:
And I must say, this is going to be interesting:
They mentioned there being concrete below the tile in the foyer but they didn’t quite notice the layer of tile below the current tile, and then concrete below that. No word yet on if this’ll cost us extra. They were already anticipating having to jack-hammer all the concrete out—maybe that extra layer of tile won’t matter.
So we had our “final walkthrough” a couple of weeks ago, which really wasn’t final, cause we’re gonna have yet another “final walkthrough” just before they actually start – which is Tuesday, May 1. They wanted to start Monday, April 30 but Dena and I will be travelling back from Idyllwild, CA and we didn’t want them to start when no one was here. We figure someone should be here to let them in.
So, what have we been doing in the meanwhile? Cleaning out the kitchen! We have to get everything moved out so they can start demoing.
First we had to get everything out and our kitchen looked a bit like this.
Then today, Greta, Tom & Traigh came by to take our appliances. Turns out, they’re remodeling their kitchen as well and our appliances would go just fine in their new kitchen. So what the heck. They also took some of our countertop since they’re building a peninsula as well. Who knew you can just saw through a countertop with a circular saw? So our kitchen looks a bit different now.
The smart reader out there is asking, “What are you doing for eating?” Well, we moved into the basement!
We have this beautiful bar with a mini-fridge and a nice room behind it so we decked it out and we’re basically gonna live down here for the two months while our kitchen is being redone. It’s a bit cozy, but it’ll work.
That’s it for now. The next step is we meet with them this Thursday for our final-final-walkthrough and then they begin the following Tuesday. Once that happens, I plan to blog every day showing the progress and adding some pithy commentary (I hope). Keep coming back, should be fun!
Eh. Had our “final walk-through” with the builders. The lead guy came here with the lead builder-guy who will be doing most of the work. They pretty much agreed that, yep, work needed to be done. About the only new thing that came out of this meeting was our start date: May 1.
sigh
So hopefully we’ll have our new kitchen in place by July 1.
This is test of the emergency blogging system. If this had been an actual blogging emergency we would have provided information about what do to next. This is only a test.
Today we met with our project manager, Jerry, for our kitchen remodel. We went over the final estimates and the contract. He gave us a nice overview of how the process will work and what they’ll do. He says to be ready for some stressful times. I think we are.
Here is a picture of the new floor plan I talked about in the previous post.
Ignore the way the seating is drawn in there — otherwise its all correct. One big island, fridge built into the wall where we currently have pantry-style cabinets. Take out most of the wall between the kitchen and the family room. Gonna be messy around here for a while (9 weeks!) and Dena and I will be living in the basement that whole time. Should be “fun”.
We actually had a few questions about the contract after we read it over and sent off an email asking for clarification on a few issues. Mostly minor, we’ll see what they say. I’m not too worried. Next step is to get the revised contract signed, give them a bunch of money to start and off we go!
We decided to remodel our kitchen. Mind you, our kitchen looks fine the way it is…
but there are some problems. Mostly they stem from the fact that all the cabinet doors are falling off. You see, the previous owners seem to have had all the doors removed, stripped and restained to the color you see here. While that worked fine, one problem we’re finding is that the side walls of the cabinets are that cheap particle board and when you remove screws from it and then try to re-screw the hinges back into the same place, they just don’t stay. So we end up with a number of them looking like this.
To make matters worse in one place, they wanted a big cabinet, so they just cut out the center partition that holds things up and we now have this happening.
So we want a change.
Having watched plenty of HGTV over the years, we knew we wanted a design-build company to come in and help us decide on how it should look and then actually do the work and subcontracting.
We first found a local company who seemed interested, but after getting some preliminary renderings from them they went dark. No responses to our “We like this. We want to hire you. Please contact us.” emails so we gave up on them.
Then we went to Property Revival. They’ve been pretty good so far. We started with them almost a year ago. We’ve spent that time going over every little detail about what we want. Most of that time is Dena and I changing our minds on countertops, cabinets, faucets, sinks, etc. But we’re finally done picking things out and should be ready to start soon.
Here is how the kitchen is laid out now.
We’re going to remove the peninsula and replace it with a big island. We’re also going to remove the wall between the kitchen and the family room to go with a more open concept.
Soon we should be signing the contract and having our final walk though and then getting on the calendar. I plan to keep blogging our progress as we go. So stay tuned. More to come (and soon I hope).
I’m back to boating! Got off my butt recently and got started on it again. From the last blog post from, gosh, 2013 I was working on the nibbing strake on the foredeck. Wow, made a bit of progress since then.
First off, I got the aft deck completely planked.
Then I stained the whole deck
Why stain the deck now you ask? Well, the next step is to add the stanchions back on, finish planking above the waterway and paint all that white. By staining the deck now, I think it’ll make it easier to mask the deck and paint all the rest white. At least, I’ll find out eventually.
Next I had to re-attach all the stanchions I cut off before (see earlier post about creative destruction). So I built these guides I stuck to the outside so I could use them to make sure the stanchions all lined up properly.
As you can see, I think that worked. Also note my beautifully stained deck is now completely covered in blue painter’s tape. This is because once all the stanchions are on and the final two rows of planking are installed and the new rail put in place, I’ll have to paint all this white. And I’m gonna use spray paint for that.
Last but not least, I’m cutting notches (I’m sorry, scuppers), in my planks.
You see, the next row of planking has to go even with the waterway and there are supposed to be little tiny notches, I mean scuppers, cut into those planks on either side of nearly every stanchion. So, I laid out the planks, marked where all the stanchions are, measured and marked where all the fake stanchions will go between all those currently in place and now I’m cutting notches. I’m actually using a small file to file out those notches. Each one you see there is about 1/32” wide. Kinda small.
That’s it. Last of the updates for now. I hope to keep on working and keep on blogging about this. Feels good to be back into this.
