6.5 Weeks of Hell
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-a home improvement story in two parts- Part 1 So I just completed another renovation project. This time it was so intense I couldn't even muster the energy to blog about it in progress. It took me about 2 years to recover from the porch rehab a couple of summers ago. This one was worse. So, let's start the beginning and bring you up to speed. The house we bought in 2001 was a trash house. You can read all about that ordeal at this old page I wrote back in 2002 or so. Below is the only picture of the kitchen I could find from before. This is what it looked like when we bought the place. Now, we had done a few things to it in the interim, but you get the idea.  Anyway, on April 14th (yes I did write down the date for just this reason) we began taking the kitchen apart. The remodel was going to run on a tight budget so we were going to have to do most of the work ourselves with only a few experts for stuff I couldn't do (or do legally). Here's two pictures from about a week after that.   Here you can get a better view of the radiator under the sink. Such creativity abounded in this home. Everything had to be handcrafted to fit the situation. Anyway, demolition continued for a couple of weeks total and finally we had all the cabinets out of the way.   At this point Jacob start working on removing the wallpaper... or what we thought was wallpaper. After buying several different chemical stripping agents and having no luck, we determined that (in order to save money) the walls had been done with (wait for it...) contact paper. Ugh... Well no choice but to go get a steamer. And Jacob then spent several days doing the whole room. We got the cabinets and countertops ordered and called a plumber to come take out both radiators (the one in the back corner was going to be relocated). That pretty much brought the demolition phase to a conclusion. Let the rebuilding begin.First order of business was to recreate that wall. We kept the sink in the same place and decided to put in a passthrough so light from the breakfast nook windows would come all the way in. Thanks to Mark and his hunky friend Ben who came by to do some carpentry for me. But the award for most valuable construction worker goes to David for his expert dry wall mudding which only took about 6 times longer (and more mud) than he had planned on when he volunteered to help. That'll learn him. :) The next step was putting up the beadboard (real tongue and groove stuff, not that crappy sheets of it). All the exposed walls would be beadboarded up to 5.5 feet (varying between 65 and 67 inches due to the undulating hardwood floor). Then the first cabinets started arriving. Jacob had the idea to use the beadboard above the upper cabinets as a kind of soffet. It was hard to figure out how to do it and do it well, but it turned out to be a smashing idea.  Here you can see things starting to take shape.But we got held up for a couple of weeks by backups on the cabinets and countertops. We needed to make a change on each of those which sent the whole timeline into a tailspin. But it isn't like there weren't a million other things to be doing. So we kept moving forward on as many fronts as possible. All that new beadboard had to get primed. The ceiling had to have some touch ups. Priming in the breakfast nook. New light fixtures. Trim along the top of the beadboard.  Then, miraculously, the final cabinets and counters arrived on about the same day and PRESTO! Almost usable kitchen. So the last big pieces were to get the walls painted and the flooring down. We didn't have the time or money to have the hardwoods refinished so we went with a non-adhesive vinyl so as to leave them accessible for future work. And Jacob picked a khaki-ish color called Elephant Watch. Don't ya love that?! Here's a taste of it. Add in the floors, move the appliances back in, add all the final pieces or trim work, plus the rolling kitchen cart/island from IKEA and VOILA!!  Finished. At least to 99%. We could futz with detail work for the rest of our lives.And I'm tired. So the question that I know you're all asking yourselves... "Why the hell would they do that to themselves right now?!" The answer to that, my friends, will have to wait for tomorrow... Labels: personal |
posted by John at 9:57 AM
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5 Comments:
I think you liked the TI hammer most of all! Nice job...it's tomorrow...what's the big secret!?!? ;)
By
Mark, at 7:10 AM
p.s. and as I said Ben is a confirmed straight man...sorry ;P
By
mark, at 3:35 PM
< sarcasm >
No worries. Everyone know that us fags are always lusting after every straight man we see...
< /sarcasm >
By
John, at 3:38 PM
still waiting for this "tomorrow" post! :D
By
mark, at 7:41 AM
You need to come back to NC and do my kitchen for me!
PS the old 1859 house looks HOT. Almost good enough to make it worth living there through the long arctic winters... (almost... but not enough)
Rich
By
Rich, at 1:51 PM
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