It is a milestone day for us! After three months of work, the raised floor is down, the wall completely demoed, as well as the tile, and the electrical all secured and labeled, today marks the end of our part of the construction (for now). The contractor is due here early tomorrow morning to start their end of things.
Once they are done building the knee walls for the massive island, installing upgraded electrical, and installing the lower cabinets, JohnR, Andrew, and I will take over again to install all of the open shelving, all of the tile work, and the pantry cabinets, as well as painting the cabinetry on the pantry wall, the ceiling, and all of the touch-up work. Fun times to come, but for now, our work here is done. Yay!!!
I now completely understand why contractors don’t like removing cabinets intact. It takes for-flipping-ever. We had to be extra careful because they were going off to another home.
From the onset, we thought removing the granite was going to be our biggest headache.
Our contractor told us to give the granite a rap with a small sized sledgehammer, which we did. And, just like he said, it cracked easily without damaging the cabinets below. We had the most incompetent counter installer for our last renovation, but we sent them a silent thanks for not properly gluing the countertops down, which made for unexpectedly easier removal.
The large pieces were easy to smash into manageable bits to haul away, although we still have three modest sized pieces we’d love to give away if anyone is interested.
The thing that gave us fits was the 96-in tall pantry cabinet, which not only weighed a ton, but had to be lowered on its side in order to get it through the front door. Even the young one will be popping Advil tonight.
The folks that purchased the cabinets were at our house bright and early this morning, we helped them load up their two trucks, and off our old cabinets went to their new home in Baltimore. The couple was gracious enough to allow us to keep our oven through the Thanksgiving holiday before they come to pick that up as well as a few other appliances.
With that, we are done until the day after Thanksgiving when we finish taking down the partition wall to get ready for the pros to come in. (We are currently without running water in our kitchen, which is exactly as bad as it sounds. We are hopeful a temporary sink will be delivered by the end of the week.)
Welp, womp womp. Kitchen construction is now delayed until after TG holiday.
Damn it all. This time, due to an illness in our contractor’s family, so understandable, but still disappointing.
We have lived in a construction zone for the better part of three months, and with the holidays, we will likely still be sweeping up dry wall bits well into the new year. We definitely won’t have the counters installed before then, that is now certain.
Worse yet, our old cabinets are on their way out this weekend, which means by Sunday afternoon, Operation Campsite will commence when we lose our kitchen sink and move full time to our temporary set-up. We are going to have the contractor swing by with a sink cabinet and hook the plumbing back up to get us through. I mean, it is better than washing dishes in the powder room sink for two months, but still.
Some major updates from the self-styled demo team, though:
1) The upper cabinets are down! The lowers will be removed this weekend. Contractor thinks we are going to have a major problem with the weight of the granite. We don’t disagree.
We got a very nice text from our GC saying that we do such good work, he’d like to hire us (he was joking), and continued, “the work doesn’t pay much, but the job satisfaction is up there.” JohnR told him we’d be happy to be paid in Advil at this point
2) The load-bearing/not load-bearing wall dilemma. Five days, three holes, two professionals, and one husband have now had a turn at sticking their heads into our ceiling to see what they can see. There was some creative connecting of the partition wall to the joists above by the original builder, to be sure, but the word this morning is: go for it!
Nobody has a Plan B (or, rather, the contractor doesn’t want to say what Plan B is out loud to me for fear of a full-on grown up melt down), but I’m pretty sure it begins with “support” and ends with “post.” Before anyone changes their minds, we are going to start chopping on Sunday. If you are a church-goer, throw a prayer or two our way.
3) We finally, FINALLY, made a decision on the range hood fiasco. We SO wanted to go with an in-ceiling flush mount ceiling hood, but in the end, venting it outside would have required pulling a permit AND, because of the long struggle to understand a puzzled-together overhead joist system, our contractor was VERY reluctant to cut through any. Budget-wise, we could either hire a structural engineer or have pretty things. I’m going with the latter.
Luckily, we had our heads turned by this stunner! The company, Futuro Futuro, is one of few that do pendant range hoods with 960 whopping CFM. We are goo-goo eyed over the 36″ Balance model and it should be here in time for Thanksgiving. Not that anyone here will be cooking any damn thing on Thanksgiving, but we can gather ’round the swanky range-hood and give thanks.
The device will act as a pendant light as well as function as a powerful range hood, so a win-win in our books. And, the charcoal filter doesn’t need changed for five years. Not exactly what we thought we wanted, but something tells me this is going to be one of our favorite purchases.
One side done! Still not sure if this is a load-bearing wall. All evidence points to it not being one — we even poked our heads in the ceiling to reassure ourselves. Still, we want the all-clear from the contractor before the actual wall comes down. Neither of us is eager to take a stud down and watch our offices above crash into our former dining room
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, who knew taking down cabinets would be such a bitch?! The problem, as probably everyone else knew except us, is that a lot of hidden finishing nails go into cabinet crannies to keep them nice and tight and together. Trying to pry those loose without damaging the cabinets is a fool’s errand and we are not enjoying it.
Save some money and do the demo yourselves, they said. Ha.
Day 3 of the “drop-the-raised-floor” phase of the project. VERY slow progress. Three days in and here we are. JRL is doing the work, I’m just the photographer. Quickly rethinking whether saving this stupid wood is worth it as each piece has to be gently nudged free…
Day 7 of the “drop-the-raised-floor” phase of the project. You’ll remember the initial plan was to save all of the wood floor so that we didn’t have to repurchase new floor that would be primarily located under cabinetry and island. After a week and only 20% done, we have called in the calvary for reinforcement labor. We are also reevaluating the plan. To speed things up, we are going to be moving much more quickly, spending less time saving every single piece of wood, salvaging what we can, and flipping purchasing what we destroy in the process.
Slow going as we handle the prep work ourselves. Between the kitchen and the dining room is a partition wall, which we will be taking down ourselves (or, so we hope), but before that, we have to remove the raised floor on which our dining room now sits. It’s about an 8-in rise/step up that apparently was all the rage in the late ’80s but has only served to contribute to falls, trips, and what seems to be a very low ceiling.
Our hope was that we could save the hardwoods currently in the dining room to replace once the flooring was dropped to be level with the rest of the main floor.
Four hours in, we only have two pieces off, and it looks like much of it has been glued down, along with a massive amount of stapling, each of which has to be individually removed. We are hoping the glue was only for these edging pieces and the rest will be simply stapled, but even that maybe too time intensive. And, honestly, we haven’t saved even one piece that has the tongue and groove intact.
It may just be that we have to scrap the plan to reuse and order brand new. Sucks from both a savings standpoint and a landfill standpoint.
The second load of 5 (three more to go!) was delivered 8:30 a.m. this morning. We decided, after a lot of discussion, to go with RTA cabinet boxes from Ikea after a ton of research and talking to others who have done a similar project about their take on the quality.
Initially, we thought we could supplement our current cabinets with additional cabinets from the original company we used when we did our first kitchen reno. But, we became increasingly concerned that the color from old cabinet to new wouldn’t match and our kitchen would end up looking like a multi-white-shaded zebra
We then began thinking about replacing ALL of our cabinets, instead. Because the cost to do so would double our renovation budget, we opted to save money where we could without sacrificing quality. To that end, we went with the pricier all wood boxes and will get quotes for custom cabinet doors from another company.
The downside is, the money we saved will go into time spent as we put close to 20 cabinets together. Another downside is that Ikea is no unicorn where back orders are concerned. We only have five more cabinets — and all their bits — on back order, but the best estimate we can get out of them is somewhere in between 3 and 6 months. And because you can’t start a kitchen renovation without your boxes, it means, our living room is going to look like this through Thanksgiving.
Yay
(JohnR and I going through the checklist of items and inspecting them. Fun fact, they give you 48 hours to do so, so I guess that puts a lid on our Sunday!)
Kitchen reno update. Miles to go before we sleep, but the big news is…
We found an oven! It will take a decade (or like, three months) to make its pretty self to us, but the order is done and dusted. Woo hoo! We already have the dreamiest cooktop sitting on our dining room floor, and the fridge was able to be installed so we can use it while we wait for eternity to arrive.
Cabinets will be ordered this week at which time we will be told when we can expect them. I am stocking up on hair coloring because I know the gray will be here before the cabinets.
I also spent the wee hours of the morning researching kitchen sinks. This seems like a no-brainer, but it ain’t. Steel gauge is apparently something we should pay attention to. And we might consider a ceramic sink. Crazy!
We are looking for a range hood for an island 36 inch cooktop. We are thinking of going with an in-ceiling range vent. See sample photo below. Has anyone ever used one?
Next item on the to do list is for us to remove the flooring and try to save the hardwoods for replacement once we drop the dining room step down. Has anyone ever removed flooring and actually been able to save the tongue and groove? Apparently, the eye roll our contractor gave us when we told him what we planned to do doesn’t bode well for success.
Kitchen reno update: two major appliances are in!! (36″ Dacor Induction Cooktop and a swanky showcase fridge — we’ve lived with the teensiest fridge for a decade — we were due.) Unfortunately, the arrival of cabinets and wall oven (when we find the model we want) are months and months away. The fridge is already in use, the cooktop will sit in our dining room and smirk at me until Thanksgiving.
Progress on the appliance front. We found a guy in NY who talked to a guy in NJ who talked to another guy. The other guy, Victor, has the very 36″ Dacor cooktop model we were looking ages for and is going to personally deliver it to us. I do believe I’ve just made a deal with the mafia and I don’t care, that’s how desperate we are.
No wall oven until October. Victor had indicated he’d be willing to put out some feelers. Oh Lord.
Our refrigerator, ordered back in April, is due to be delivered and installed in the next few hours. I’ll believe it when they ring our doorbell.**
The rest of the kitchen will be in shambles until Christmas. At least.
**Update: Despite paying in advance for the fridge install, they said they didn’t like our copper tubing and the fact that our shut off valve was not behind the fridge. So, we currently have one massive brand new refrigerator in our garage, and another massive 10-year-old refrigerator sitting in the middle of our kitchen. I knew it was too good to be true. Womp. Womp.
Christine Anne Scott 