With the happy interruption of a pup visit from the cutest puppy ever, we are now scrambling to get the posts for the floating shelves installed before the tile guy comes early this week. With Andrew’s help, they were able to get three out of four posts installed with the last destined to be up by the time the Cowboys lose later today.
There is absolutely no room for error (on the shelf installation — the Cowboys are another story — also, Fly Eagles Fly!), so the amount of measuring devices currently littering our counters could land a space shuttle.
The next terrifying step is to drill holes in our precious walnut wood in exactly the right spots so that they slide seamlessly onto the posts, hence the floating shelf effect. Except that these are going to be strong enough to hold an overweight fullback during the off season.
Once the tiling goes on, we’re going to start taking down the pantry wall trim that the contractor installed incorrectly and doing it right. Yay
A big kitchen update covering a lot of ground ahead. We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it is the size of a pin head. We think we should be much farther along, but we keep running into unexpected issues that were not on our bingo card.
We are not novices to DIY or home renovation, and we were really hands on with our contractor — I like to think in a not-very-annoying way, probably because we sorta/kinda understand the complexity of some of our requests and we really appreciate our contractor allowing us to do some of the reno ourselves to reduce our costs. In doing the budget, now over a year ago, and talking with our contractor about what itemized projects within the kitchen reno would cost if we had his crew do them, we estimate, overall, by doing some of the stuff ourselves, we have saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000. Not chump change, for sure, but if you count time as money, that savings goes way down, of course. Still, in a large kitchen reno, one that tripled the footprint, we were able to apply those savings to premium appliances and custom tile and trim work.
First, the good stuff:
After a week of meticulous measuring and hole-drilling trepidation, THE CABINET HARDWARE IS FINALLY INSTALLED and it is straight as an arrow. Of all the things, these old-soul beauties have to be our favorite, even if the installation of 23 handles took years off our lives. It was one of those jobs we just had to do ourselves and, although it took forever-and-a-day, totally worth it to have it done and dusted perfectly.
We are also making progress on installing the support posts for the floating shelves. It is a p-r-o-c-e-s-s, lemme tell ya. There is fancy-schmancy company out there that does a whole floating shelf system we had our eye on — until the price tag came to well over $600 A SHELF, which just wasn’t in the budget.
Instead, we opted to purchase these highly reviewed floating shelf posts, each having a weight capacity of 100 pounds (we’ll be installing four on each long shelf). The walnut wood is heavier than you might imagine and we are keen to over-support rather than under-support since they will be loaded down with dishes, glasses, and other kitchen bits.
The downside to these posts is that they must be installed individually (rather than being welded onto one long bar like the expensive kind is.) These are about $32 apiece, and so, in the end, if you count the wood we fetched from a mill in Pennsylvania, each shelf will run about $130 each (versus the aforementioned $600/ea), so once again, our labor is where the money saving comes in.
Having crowed about the money savings, the fact is, we still have to install the dang things. And they need to be dead-on level. And we are drilling into studs. All of it is hive-inducing, but when we opened the wall up to get at the electrical many moons ago, one of us had the foresight to lay a piece of cardboard over the opening and trace a template of every single stud. That would be my contribution to the project, I’ll have you know. I’m nothing if not a fore-thinker 🙂
After the posts are installed on the wall, we still have to drill holes in the back of our swanky new wood, another terrifying process, but thankfully, the mill gave us a few scrap pieces on which to practice before we do it for realz!
The Bad
Not everything is perfect on this project. As I said, we keep running into work-arounds, some expected, some surprises, and some downright confounding.
At the end of our wet wall, there is a two-foot “bump-out” that simply needed painting. A simple job I could knock out in an hour. Unfortunately, I was so busy looking down at the sparkly new handles on the cabinets that I forgot to look up at the damage to the wall when the cabinets were ripped out. Chipped old paint needed to be scraped. And once we started that, we realized the former homeowner or the original builder must have built up a crooked wall with plaster and that, too, has dinner-plate sized chips in it. WAY too much to sand out. Nope, in order to have a nice smooth wall, we would need to patch and repair, sand, sand again, sand a third time, and then start a skim coat. I’ve always said dry wall workers are the artists of the construction world. Even our contractor hires out a pro to get a perfect look. Tapering in mud is a skillset neither of us have, that’s for sure.
But, we already spent over $1,000 having a ceiling repaired and painted — money unbudgeted for, but well spent. So, hiring someone to do this one small, but very central, wall was just out of the question. Thankfully, we have a solution — stay tuned for a future update 🙂
Another issue that popped up — choosing our base trim. We simply could not find the cabinet bead trim piece for the baseboards we had our hearts set on, so we scrapped the whole plan and reconsidered. Because the base trim in the entire house is going to be changed, little by little, and because we want to make sure we can get whatever we choose well into the future when we get around to changing the rest of the house, we need to build trim from pieces that are readily available and fairly simple and clean-looking.
Because we had planned to do board and batten in our master bath during the 2020 renovation, but scrapped those plans at the last flipping moment, I had insisted we could use all that trim at some point, for something down the line. Welp, that something is going to be our new base trim 🙂 We’ll be doing a 5″ x 1″ with a quarter round topper. Simple, but impactful at about 6″ high. Following the rule of thumb that base trim should be roughly 7% of the height of a room ceiling, or in our case, roughly 7 inches, we are pretty darn close.
Depending on how much gapping we have between the new floor and the base, we will likely also add a shor moulding at the floor level, so lots of visual impact. We had to purchase another batch of quarter round, which brings total bill for doing all the base trim in the new kitchen, hallway, and the entire 11.5 ft x 8.5 ft island will be roughly $75. Not bad, I tell you. Not bad at all.
The Utterly Intolerable
I’m not into zodiac woo-woo, but I am a libra, and whatever the woo-woo sites tell you about each zodiac sign, one thing is certain — libras need balance in scale, texture, and symmetry. How this happened on our pantry/fridge wall is beyond me (see the purple line to pinpoint the exact spots my head explodes…)
I can only say that our old-school contractor was probably not a libra.
More bewildering, we were on site every. single. day. We missed it and we missed the trim at the bottom not hitting the ground. This was an easy install and we could have done it ourselves (and, in retrospect, should have.) I think the lessons we are learning is that when it comes to the meticulous stuff (okay, picky stuff), those are the jobs we should just opt to handle ourselves – even if it takes weeks longer than a pro could do it.
Unfortunately, we will have to rip out ALL of the trim, rehang the cabinets on that side to re-install properly. It will be one of the last things on the punch list and something neither of us is looking forward to.
As we barrel toward the finish line, the main tasks remaining are installing the floating shelves, finishing out the tile work, installing the baseboards, installing all new electrical outlets, and doing all the box trim on the island. We also have to finish the utility cabinets on the other side of the room which will involve assembling, trimming, priming, and painting. Fun times ahead, but our patience has worn thin and we are focused on getting this done by the one year mark (in just three weeks.)
The pin prick of light at the end of the tunnel is taunting us.
I am sure I’m not the only one, but just getting that blue cabinet protective film off and putting the gorgeous handles and knobs on has allowed us to see ahead into the future to what our kitchen might actually look like if it ever gets completed!
This is actually the first time we have seen the cabinets since we saw them in the showroom! Seems a bit risky now looking back, but thankfully, all’s well that ends well because we sure do love them and their crisp, clean lines.
Even more, we love the hardware we chose (the aforementioned jewelry!) We did have one minor setback. We held up the handles we were installing in our 24-in cabinets to the very large, 36-in drawers that go under the cooktop. Yikes! They looked puny! We thought about using two of them, but I really did not want to clutter up the drawer with two handles. Thankfully, we lucked out because the company had the same exact handle in the next larger size. There arrived yesterday, and we now have a winner for those large oversized drawers and pantry!
Our contractor would have installed all of the hardware for us, but I had major reservations about letting anyone else drill into our cabinets. I don’t think I could handle a crooked fixture (pun!) and I felt better having that in our control. At least this way, if we screwed it up, it was on us.
We did buy a cabinet fixture installation tool that has helped to insure every single handle or knob is spot on perfect. We have used the plastic kind of templates in the past, but for this renovation, and the expense of these cabinets, we invested in this tool which, to be honest, has a bit of a learning curve, but more than paid off to get perfectly installed fixtures.
A few tips for those who may be new to installing cabinet hardware. Go ahead and clamp a scrap block of wood on the backside of the cabinet as you are drilling. This will help prevent any blowouts on the back side. We also use a piece of masking tape on the front to prevent any splintering as the drill begins.
The last tip, make sure to measure anew each and every handle placement. Don’t assume your tool remained accurate. We found that we bumped it or dropped it several times and that changed the reading just a tad. So, go back and make sure everything is correct for each and every cabinet. We also double checked each mark before drilling with a tape measure just to be certain. It was probably overkill, all that measuring, but we are thrilled that with 15 cabinets down and eight more to go, our track record is strong.
It’s finally time! Installing hardware is absolutely terrifying. But, once he figured out the swanky tool we bought, the first only took two hours. One of those hours was spent giving ourselves a pep talk. Beside the gorgeous eye candy that was installed, we FINALLY were able to remove the blue protective covering for our first glimpse of our cabinets. One down, 21 more to go
Nothing sexy to see here. All about the punch list this week and moving back into a kitchen we’ve been displaced from for months.
We finally got the kitchen faucet touch system working after Kraus (an awesome company, btw) sent us a brand new faucet just to replace one of the faulty parts on our brand new faucet. The hubs got that done tonight.
After three months, we did our first load of dishes in the dishwasher. Glory be!
The outlets with USB ports were finally installed and operational on the island.
We are currently debating whether to hire out for a tiler or just do it ourselves, which neither of us have the energy for at the moment. And, we are searching for courage to drill holes in those beautiful slices of Walnutwood for our floating shelves.
Baseboards are on the back burner until we figure out what we want. Who knew there were so many choices?! And, finally, the punch list continues to grow.
We made it to Central Pennsylvania — or, at least, I think it’s Central Pennsylvania. Maybe it’s a little East Central Pennsylvania. In any event, we hugged the Susquehanna River all the way up through Harrisburg and then about 45 minutes north to tiny little Mount Pleasant Mills, our destination to pick up the most glorious walnut wood. Well worth the trip. We couldn’t miss the opportunity to stop at an old timey Italian bakery in Harrisburg to pick up goodies before heading back from our day-long odyssey to find the perfect wood for our open shelving. Would definitely recommend this mill who sold us the wood, planed and cut it all to size for less than half of the $1,200 we received estimates for in DC.
In other news, our hard-working contractor was here this morning to make sure we had a working oven for the Christmas weekend. They arrived in sleet and snow and finished the oven electrical and even put the range hood up! The hood still needs to be leveled, but because we aren’t having pendant lights, we thought this architectural feature would serve as both a rangehood and a futuristic pendant. Unironically from a company called Futuro Futuro. This is the “Balance” model — who doesn’t need more of that in your life?!
Had a lot of questions about the “bright blue” cabinet color. Nope, that color is just the outer protective plastic that we are leaving on until the messy stuff is over (grouting, painting, etc.) Rest assured, the cabinets will be classic white.
The Samsung Duo Flex oven also feels futuristic and could probably manage everything from cooking a meal to washing dishes and ironing clothes with all of its features.
We still have to paint, which happens on Monday, we have to trim everything, and then we can start tiling next week. Then we can finally remove the ugly blue cabinet coverings and attach the gorgeous cabinet hardware, which certainly beats green painters tape handles. A long way to go, but we have an oven!
When it finally starts, it goes fast! Not all cheering, because as soon as they come and measure for the counters on Thursday, we have one week to paint the entire ceiling. I don’t know why we agreed to do that. I hate painting ceilings. My hair hates painting ceilings.
Then the counters come in one week before the Christmas holiday and then the contractor returns to connect all the appliances and our plumbing.
Then we do the tile and we do the open shelving. And build out the pantry wall and cabinets. And caulk, so much caulk. And wall painting. And all of the trim work and baseboards. And over sink lighting.
Our punch list is long and growing. But we’ll have running water, so that’s something to look forward to…in 10 days.
Christine Anne Scott 