Category: Houseblog

I have come to realize over the past weeks that a kitchen is something that is never truly finished. You just keep working at it until you stop.

This weekend I did the last major structural work on the kitchen prior to the arrival of the countertop and subsequent completion of the plumbing work (sink, dishwasher): I fastened all the assembled base cabinets to the back wall. I took a deep breath and looked at what I had done, and then thought, Argh. Filler panels and molding. So next steps are to scribe the filler panels on the right end of the cabinet run, where we ended up with about two inches of space between the last cabinet and the wall, and screw them into place; figure out how the molding strips are attached and get them installed; then probably (if I’m lucky) install the countertop.

Of course, our stuff hasn’t been waiting for kitchen completion to start sneaking its way back in. I cooked Julia’s French “hamburgers” last night and now there are a few extra pans in one of the cupboards. And this morning I placed a couple of salvaged pieces of the old counter on the cabinets by the stove so that we could cook safely and keep the cooking spatters out of the new cabinets. Now all we have to do is get the oven working…

And in this case, I mean the closure of the walls over the new pipes and electrical. But I’m not ready to show that yet, so I’ve just uploaded a few details of some of the finished work for your enjoyment. I’ve decided to keep one big photoset of the renovation as it progresses, so you can find all the newest photo-y goodness in one place (the same photoset about which I wrote before).

Basic status update: the new plumbing and electrical was completed and inspected week before last. Last week the wall was taken down, the new structural beam was installed, and the plasterers closed up the existing wall openings (as well as some old ceiling holes…yay…)

So what’s next? Well, the responsibility is back on our shoulders this weekend. I need to prime and paint the new plaster surfaces, install the base cabinets, and probably properly hang the cabinet above the fridge. Then next week our contractor’s team will hook up the stove in its new location (and, I think, install the fan hood, though I need to confirm that) and run a line for the fridge’s icemaker up into its opening. So at some point next week we will be able to move much of our kitchen operation back out of the dining room. (The photoset has a glimpse of how we’ve temporarily set things up.)

The long pole in the tent is the countertop, but I expect that to arrive so that we can install it soon. Then our contractor will re-install the sink (along with a much needed sink-side drinking water filter) and… drum roll please… our new dishwasher. This will be the first dishwasher the house has ever had, and it is the reason for the whole renovation. Funny how a few thousand dollars to create space for the dishwasher among the existing cabinets (the house has never had one and there was no easy way to hook it into the current plumbing or electrical) turned into a whole kitchen renovation.

It seems like a long time since we’ve written anything substantial in the houseblog—and that’s because, after two bathroom remodels and a full HVAC system replacement, we were on Houseblog Hiatus. But no longer. We’ve been removing bits and pieces of the kitchen over the last month and this weekend everything else came out. Yes, we’re in the throes of a kitchen remodel—but this is going to be a remodel on a budget. Alas, no granite for us.

You could really say that this project started shortly after we moved in, when we realized that we couldn’t get our new fridge into the kitchen. As part of that effort, I ripped out the cabinet above the fridge and realized that the plaster ceiling above it was in pieces. Since then we’ve dealt with freezing pipes, leaks from ice dams through the kitchen ceiling, kitchen cabinets that don’t close and drawers that shower sawdust on the cabinet areas below each time they are opened and closed…

So we decided that it was time to bite the bullet and remodel. I wrote about the general scope a while ago, but didn’t get into any details. So here is the plan:

1. Set up temporary kitchen in the dining room, complete with fridge, microwave, toaster, coffee pot, and hot plate. Done, and let me tell ya, it’s compact. As they say, we are camping with a mortgage…
2. Rip out all the old cabinets. Done, finally (see the photoset).
3. Have plumber reroute the sink plumbing and the gas line. In progress.
4. Remove the wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
5. Install new cabinets.
6. Hook up old stove and sink and new dishwasher (finally) and fan in their new locations (a picture is forthcoming).
7. New countertops.

And now we’re on the way. The photoset gives some interesting glimpses of the things that we’ve found in the demolition, and I will annotate each photo over the next day or two.

A fortuitous and formidable gadget showed up on our doorstop yesterday: a Roomba. (What can I say? It’s the Jarrett House. Gadgets have a way of finding their way here.) This particular Roomba was a Roomba Red, the entry level model, but I’m not complaining. It charged all day today, and tonight while we ate dinner it vacuumed our bedroom. With the door closed we couldn’t hear it, but it is a little noisy as it cleans the hall at the top of the stairs. Next time we’ll wait until we go out before we do that part.

The dogs seem quietly curious about it. Jefferson got up off the sofa, walked to the foot of the stairs, and looked up for about ten seconds. Now he’s happily ignoring it.

And the results? Well, the bedroom smells much less dusty—and the vast quantities of dustbunnies that I emptied out of the dust chamber suggest that it’s done a pretty good job. I’ll take a look at the other rooms later, but the fact that I’m not having to get up to deal with much of anything (other than removing the hall rug while it sweeps) tells me that we may finally have licked our bedroom dust problem—which has collided with our “no time for housework” problem too many times.

—Oh yes. We had noticed a gas smell near our next-door neighbor’s house, and they don’t have a gas hookup so we figured it must have been a leak in the main. So Sunday afternoon the crew from Keyspan was out there digging. They found a stub that would have been used to connect our neighbors, but which hadn’t been touched in sixty years and was corroded. They also, unfortunately, found a water main that crossed right over it. Needless to say our new neighbors spent the night with friends while Keyspan and the water company fixed the problem.

Then Keyspan came next door. There had been no detectable gas when they probed our lawn—and a good thing too, since we depend on gas for hot water, cooking and, later this year, heat—but our neighbor across the street showed signs of a subsurface leak. So they had to check the integrity of the main. Of course, that ran in the street right in front of our house, so there were big holes in front of our yard for a few days while they worked on the problem.

My favorite one, though, was coming home late Wednesday night to a big hole in front of our driveway with two cones in it. I had to drive over my neighbor’s lawn to get in my driveway. I called and bitched, and they never did come by to put a steel plate over it, but they patched it yesterday afternoon.

They also did us what they supposed was a favor: having scooped out the loose sandy fill (comprised of years of road sand and salt build up) in front of our curb to dig, they replaced it afterwards. Unfortunately they chose to use topsoil instead. So now we’ll have a guaranteed mudhole plus lots of weeds.

Sigh. At least there’s no more gas leak.

…is carpet and pad saturated with floodwater. On Saturday Lisa and I stripped the carpet out of the basement, where it got flooded last Sunday. It was a slow job. We had to gingerly move all the bookshelves, CD racks, and other furniture pieces, which fortunately kept all my media up, dry, and out of harm’s way; we opted to just kind of shift them fully loaded rather than try to unload them, since there was no dry surface to put anything. The carpet fibers were tenaciously holding onto the water they had absorbed—until you tilted a piece of the carpet, at which point everything ran down in streams onto the floor. And there is no better sponge than the miscellaneous processed lint pieces that constituted the carpet pad that was under that rug. All told it took about fifteen garbage bags, two utility knife blades, a few bandaids, and a lot of cursing and Advil. But it was worth it; except for one remaining utility room carpet, everything is now dry in the basement and garage. Do we wish we had gone with home oriental rug cleaning for our more delicate carpets? Maybe. We had no choice though with this floodwater, hopefully insurance will take care of us.

We did make an interesting discovery: a pit covered with a few boards toward the front of the house concealed the original cleanout for the house’s drainage line. A plumber who was looking at the cleanouts on Saturday reported that the cleanout couldn’t be shifted any more, but cheerfully pointed out that we had multiple other entry points into the line if it ever needed to be snaked. The good news about the pit is that it might be a good location to place a sump pump.

And anyone who knew anything about floods would have known, as I didn’t, that emptying the basement once wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference with how high the water table is right now. Neither of course did the French drain. I now feel a little better about having let it get clogged, knowing it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. (Yes, all the work I did earlier is for nought. Oh well. We’ll see where we are in the morning.)

Is there such a thing as a slow, incremental kitchen renovation? Beats me, but Lisa and I are hypothesizing that, up to a point, it can be done, and we’re moving forward with a plan to do one.

The first part will be to take the outside wall of the kitchen, which until this weekend housed a stand-alone cabinet, and install a set of actual cabinetry there, complete with countertop. This will require some work, namely removing a built in ironing board (which is cute, but essentially useless to us) and a rudimentary chair rail molding, but should otherwise be straightforward–especially since we’re using Ikea’s modular Akurum system.

It’s the second step, where we rip out the rest of the old cabinets, install a dishwasher and an outside-venting hood, and move the stove—and maybe rip down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room—that will be the fun part. The theory about doing incremental changes kind of breaks down at that point.

So many decisions. At least with the Ikea system there are some constraints. We’ve already picked the cabinet bodies and doors, and will try out one of the counter surfaces on the first two cabinets we bought—at $50 for six feet of counter space, it’s a cheap enough experiment. But then the other questions come: what kind of dishwasher? What about the floor? Can we fix the sag in the floor that is ominously under the refrigerator?

As they say, stay tuned…

I awoke this morning to realize that the heat was offline and the temperature on the main floor was about 55 ° F. Oy, I thought, and checked the boiler and the circuits. All the breakers seemed to be fine but the voltage converter (the Viessmann high efficiency unit that is the core of our system runs on 230V AC) wasn’t lit up. Fortunately there was enough hot water in the tank for a few showers. We called the HVAC guys.

Three hours later there was egg on our face and a new factoid in our brains: the supposedly dead cut-out switch at the top of the basement stairs that used to power off the oil furnace but was supposed to be inactive is still alive and now cuts power to the Viessmann. Someone inadvertently did just that last night. Nurr two masters degrees in this house nurr. We’ll have a little conversation with the electrician about that. But the house is warm now.

Not too much otherwise going on with the house right now. We have baseboard molding to replace, one more phone jack to install and wire, two more new plaster walls to paint, a basement to redo… but we’re a little hung over with home improvement projects right now and are enjoying the respite.

On New Years Eve, I got a chance to work on a long stalled project—hooking up the cable wiring in our distributed media outlets. As you may recall, back in June and July I ran coax to outlets in the first and second floor bedrooms and connected them to a distribution block—really an oversized panel-mounted tee connector—in our structured wiring panel. That left the last step: connecting the distribution block to a live cable feed.

On Saturday, Lisa and I (with help from Esta) mostly finished this part of the job. What was required:

First: Reroute the existing cable hookup in the basement back behind the fake wall. This takes some explaining: Our basement is built with one finished room, which has drywall walls at a standoff (about six inches) from the actual foundation wall. This leaves a convenient space to run electrical cables back and forth to the service panel, since the panel is mounted in the false wall, as well as for other kinds of cabling projects. There is even a door in the false wall, which is for accessing the house water shutoff but which works well for fishing wire.

Back in 2004 when cable was installed in the basement, the installer drilled a hole through the left top of the window frame and dropped the cable directly into the room. I drilled a hole through the false wall on the upper right side of the window and pulled the cable across behind the blind hardware at the top of the window and through the hole into the access space.

Second: Fish coax cable from the media panel into the laundry room. This was straightforward, since there are lots of cables and ducts passing through openings in the wall between these two rooms that will be boxed in at some point in the future. With everything still open, I could just pass the cable by hand through the wall into the laundry room.

Third: Fish coax from the laundry room, inside the finished ceiling of the library, and down into the access space and connect it to the live feed. This was the nightmare. The last time I looked at the access space, it wasn’t too bad: just a few cables strung across. One of our electricians had even been thoughtful enough to leave a nylon string in place for pulling future cables through. Unfortunately, that was before the first floor ductwork and the bathroom renovations were completed. End result: it took about two hours to work my hand up and fish the coax across, without getting snagged on any live electrical wires or puncturing the insulated ducts, and then to retrieve the fish tape.

Oy. Finally, though, almost all the connections have been made. Still remaining: actually test the cable outlets in the two bedrooms; insert one more tee in the false wall; install an outlet on the wall in the library bedroom; and tack up the cables in the library and the utility room. I’m most nervous about the first item. Anything could have gone wrong with the coax going up to the bedrooms, including bad connector attachment (by me), drywall nails driven into the coax (also me), insulation damaged by the HVAC guys… etc. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

As I washed paint off my hands this afternoon, I reflected: You can always tell the housebloggers among us. They are the ones who have to finish priming and painting a wall before they can put up their Christmas tree in front of it.

To backtrack a bit: I wrote back in October about our finishing the framing for the radiator niches, and in November about getting some of the finished plaster sanded and painted. But I left out a detail—because of time constraints, we had to leave some of the work undone. We opted not to work on the two patches of walls that were obscured—one by a sofa, the other by a freestanding Ikea cabinet unit.

Unfortunately, we subsequently figured out that the only place to put the Christmas tree was next to the sofa, and that the new wall section would be exposed. So of course, now that we are all home from our respective business trips, that meant the wall had to be sanded and painted before the tree could go up.

So here I am having finished sanding and priming, gathering strength before going on to the finish coat (hopefully that’s singular). It’s not that there is so much work to be done; more that I have so little energy left, after a week spent with a prospective customer and back to back Pops concerts yesterday, with which to do the job.

Ah well. Perhaps some photos of the finished product, with a tree in front of it, later.

It felt nice to have a three day blog hiatus over the weekend, just as it feels nice to get back on the horse this morning. I guess sometimes just the change of routine is important.

I got a fair amount done on the house over the holiday. I primed the plaster in the newly finished upstairs bathroom (in the process doing a very nice job of painting my hair—must remember to wear a cap next time), replaced light fixtures in our upstairs and downstairs halls, and assembled much of the organizational furniture that Lisa and I purchased during an Ikea run on Wednesday night.

One of these days I’ll have pictures; unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find the cable that connects my camera to my computer. (Yes, I see the irony; I said we assembled the organizers, not that we actually got organized. Big difference.)

I’m going to try to go to IKEA later today, so the concept of “flat pack” refugee housing—an entire dwelling for four designed to be assembled into a shipping container sized package—tickled me. 10 feet by 9.5 feet by 8 feet is not exactly a flat pack, but Vestal Design, the project creators, explicitly credit IKEA with the idea to use space saving techniques to enable mass deployment of housing. They say that, with a typical cargo ship that holds 6400 containers, one can ship housing for up to 100,000 people on a single ship. Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

Cool new feature on Houseblogs.net, the site that aggregates the home improvement ramblings of housebloggers worldwide: Ask.Houseblogs.net. It’s still in beta, in fact there’s only one question posted right now. But I can think of no better way to leverage the collective bruised fingers and hard learned lessons of all us amateur contractor types than through a model like this. Brilliant, and kudos to Aaron and Jeannie for putting it together.

You can subscribe to the Ask feed via RSS.

Whew. Lisa and I are finally starting to feel as though we are over the hump for our renovation projects. The tile guy is a day ahead and will finish our upstairs bathroom today, meaning that the remaining fixtures will be installed by the end of the week and we can start painting. Last night I sanded the new plaster on the first floor—in the process realizing we had unpainted surfaces in every room in the house, thanks to the new shower and the radiator niche patching—and Lisa tacked the dust away. We’ll paint tonight.

Incidentally, for the sanding we used a vacuum equipped sander with drywall sanding screens, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Very little mess was created and it did the trick, removing the few ridges and blots left behind by the plastering work. We didn’t use a name-brand sander, just a generic kit from one of the home warehouses, and it seemed to work just fine.

There are still a few loose ends that I need to make sure the contractors get wrapped up, though. In particular, the grab bars for the downstairs shower, which we need for her dad, haven’t arrived yet, and we are still waiting for a few odds and ends of trim—soap dishes and such. But we’ve come a long way and I am looking forward to having the final stages over and done with.

Oh—and they might even be able to get the front door and storm door replaced this week, too. Swoon. Likely later, though.

Just in time, too: Lisa’s folks arrive Wednesday for the holidays, and her brother will fly in late Thursday—while her niece will drive down from Vermont on Friday or Saturday to hang out with us for a few days. The new bathrooms will get a real workout.