Day 63: Finally Cabinets

(Friday July 8, 2011)

Ok, more than two months into the project and we are finally ready to install some cabinets. Garden Girl spent most of her free time this past week painting the entire room. For cabinets, they aways say to start with the wall cabinets first so you have room to work. This isn't quite as crucial with Ikea cabinets because the wall cabinets hang on a mounting rail that makes them really easy to hang and adjust. The base cabinets sit on levelable feet at the front and are supposed to rest on a strip of 5/8 MDF at the back 4.5 inches off the ground. Since we're planning quartz countertops, I've replaced this with 2x6 lumber ripped down to 4.5 inches and have added other reinforcement. There was about 1 cm of unlevelness in the floor, mostly in the first metre from the exterior wall, but otherwise the floor was fairly flat.

Here's the inside wall, which will eventually house the fridge, microwave and a computer. The pocket door pocket is almost finished, except for one side. Our house has a very 1962 style of drywall-only door frames and we're trying to match this with the the new work. Our fridge has been blocking the bedroom hallway for over two months with the kids room and bathroom on one side and our room on the other.

This is the wall between the kitchen and bathroom. The corner cabinets are showing off the first door and drawer front. The cabinet over the stove is missing because I haven't cut a hole in it or in the ceiling for the range hood exhaust. (I installed a vent when we had the roof replaced in 2005, thinking the kitchen was just a year away!) The plan is to keep the 1982 stove until it dies. Why? Because we like the analog oven controls.

The dishwasher is shown in its final location, but the penninsula it will be in, and its cabinets, haven't even been assembled yet. The sink cabinet under the window is next.

And here's that weird wedge shape again, with two wall cabinets above it and now nicely painted "mushroom cap" colour.

Finally, Garden Girl took a picture of her best outside drywall corner. Eventuall this wall will separate the fridge from the dining room.

Day 55 and 56: Paint Ceiling and Walls

(Thursday June 30, 2011)

Now that the drywall is more or less repaired, time to paint and install cabinets. Our kitchen ceiling is smooth finished drywall (the rest of the house is that spray on popcorn stuff) so we wanted it to look good. We couldn't agree on the location of the ceiling light fixtures (in fact we hadn't bought them yet either), so we ended up temporarily removing both of them and repairing the holes. We decided to try some new high-tech pink ceiling paint that was supposed to go in pink and dry white with a matte finish. 

It's more of a purplish colour, and it really does work. My only complaint is that the pinkishness goes away very quicky as it drys, so when you're painting it looks terrible since some of drys faster than other bits leaving a streaky pink/white pattern. I put on a second coat of paint before all of the pink had faded and I went to bed that night thinking I'd wasted my evening and money, but the next morning, the ceiling looked great.

Day 56: Paint Walls

(Friday July 1, 2011)

So here's the result (and Garden Girl painting the inside wall the colour of the rest of our main floor).

 The plan now is to start installing cabinets on this wall while continuing to paint the rest of the room.

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.

Day 44: The Pocket Door

We decided to install a pocket door in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway that leads to the bedrooms.  We're hoping that this adds both some privacy to the bedroom area of our bungalow and some noise control.  We know of several neighbours who have done this and all of them strongly recommend it.  The only thing is that I didn't quite realize that to install the hardware for the door would involve a complete removal of part of our wall.  I guess I didn't really think about how it would work.  But after some fiddling and drywall cutting DH has gotten it all installed!  Yeah!  Here's what it looks like so far...

We bought a sliding pocket door kit from Home Depot.  It comes mostly assembled, we just had to slide it into the opening we'd created within the wall, after reinforcing with a header of course.

Now we are just going to start working on the repair of the wall.  We also haven't actually gotten a door yet.  We are thinking about this one from Rona.  I really like the horizontal window panels, plus we can stain it to match the kitchen cabinets.  Hopefully we can find some in stock.  Wish us luck!

Day 40: Where has the time gone?

It has just flown by!  I can't believe that we have been without a kitchen for over a month.  It is going well.  DH had some troubles with the wiring and has taken off a few pieces of drywall, but it feels like we are finally moving into the construction phase of the project instead of the destruction phase.  DH also installed the hardware for a sliding pocket door and I have started finishing the drywall.  Here is what it looks like so far...

I'm hoping that the project starts to speed up a little, but this is the last week of soccer, the jazz show was a success, the block party was a huge party and my little brownie and spark are on a break until next year.  Here's to some free time in the evenings!

Day 14: Garbage be gone!

Yeah!  We got the dumpster, hired the teenager next door and got all the garbage removed!  Yeah!  Now are garage is clean to make way for our delivery of IKEA cabinets.  Of course the other half of our garage is still a terrible jumble.  Oh well, it'll get cleaned eventually.  My DH also spent some time putting up some of the old kitchen cabinets into the garage to make a workbench area.  They look pretty good!  We've also been doing lots of gardening this week...check out my other blog!  The rest of our long weekend will be dedicated to patching up the drywall and maybe doing something fun with the kids!

Day 10: Rest

So we have been working on the kitchen for just over a week.  The plan this week is to hire the dumpster, so that we can empty out the garage, which is where we are currently keeping all the debris.  Then we need to arrange for the delivery of the cabinets.  And my DH is going to start on repairing some of the destroyed drywall.  But for the most part the kids and I need a break from living in the basement for the last few days, so we plan on taking it easy.  I'll keep you posted!