Day 50 (But really it's Day 196!)

(Saturday June 25, 2011)

Ok, it's been 122 days since the last update, and the project isn't done yet. Garden Girl got too busy with the project, her garden, summer holidays, and now the school year, so updating the blog kind of stopped. So DH (in blog speak, but he prefers his superhero name Handyman) has been given permission to update the blog, or at least post some of the photos proving that some progress has been made.

So lets start with Day 50, a Saturday way back in June before the end of the last school year. The task, get the drywall repaired. We replaced 75% of the drywall in the kitchen, including the inside wall with the fridge and the exterior wall (after re-insulating and properly vapour barrier-ing all of outlets.

Here is the inside wall. The plywood is the back of the alcove for the fridge, the plan is to fake a counter depth fridge by making a 4 inch deep opening in the wall. We had to build a load-bearing door frame since that wall is holding up our ceiling. Apparently we have one of the last houses built before they started using roof trusses. 

Here is Fireboy helping sand the mud on the outside wall. He seems to have forgotten his CSA-approved shoes. Beside him you can see the horrible pink colour that was inside the original 1960s cabinets that we discovered when we took down the 1980s ones. 

And here is Garden Girl reparing the ceiling and more interesting old colours.

That weird shape at the bottom right is actually the head room for the stairs to the basement. In the first two kitchens it was hidden by a corner cabinet. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with this and eventually adopted the solution of one of our neighbours. More on that later...

While this is going on inside, outside we're building cabinets. The trouble with Ikea cabinets is not that they're hard to build, but doing it is boring. They're basically the same layout as a Billy bookcase or any other Ikea furniture and our kitchen has 21 of them in total. We hired the very keen 17 year old next door to help and got 16 of them done in one day. The kids each helped with a few, but I wasn't paying them so it was hard to keep their attention.