WOOOOOOO WEEEEEEEE!

Kitchen Project week is complete. Insert virtual cartwheels here.

Well it’s not actually complete. Not by a long shot, but the work my dad set out to do for the week is finished. Cabinets are installed with doors and handles. All the electrical and plumbing work is done, and the sink is temporarily set up.

And my incomplete kitchen is fucking awesome! I have a long ass list of things I need to finish – painting, sanding, ordering some doors, but as is, this kitchen is a million times better than before.



This weekend will be spent finishing up some of the quick tasks and cleaning the beezejesus out of my house so I can put all my dishes away.

We put in a few hours yesterday morning, sniffing a neighbor’s roasting turkey as we worked. For lunch, we ate cold Lo Mein standing up in the dining room. Mom and I worked on cabinet doors while Fred continued to be surprised by the electric wiring.

I discovered just how rancid the inside of a garbage disposal can get when it’s disconnected before making sure there is no partially mashed food inside.

I had gloves and a big bottle of lemon juice, but that didn’t make the fly encircled bit of smell goo less revolting.

After the disposal incident and another surprise zap by live wiring, we called it quits since it was a holiday and all.

We did, in fact, have Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy the chefs at the Four Seasons. We followed our gluttony up with some very long naps, and some cards and drinks at Brian & Erik’s with the cooking night crew.

This morning started early, with yet another Home Depot trip, and finished early with beers on the deck. Dad finished plumbing, I worked on door hardware, and Mom helped with cleaning and microwave installation.

My kitchen is far from complete, but it’s already awesome. I have a ton more space, it’s bright and clean, and the layout is much more efficient. I am going to giggle with delight over all the details for weeks.

We topped off a week of hard labor with celebratory dinner at Austin Land & Cattle. Tomorrow my parents head home. I bet they can’t wait to plop down on the couch in NJ and only move to get ice cubes and water from the fridge whenever they want.

See more pics on Flickr

Day 6 & 7 Stats
Times "fuck" uttered: um, a few
Trips to Home Depot: 1! (thank god for national holidays)
Near Electrocutions: 1
Times I gagged cleaning out nasty garbage disposal: 3
Number of times my dad's eyes rolled back in head upon tasting delicious steak: 1

The sandbox in my kitchen

Day 4 started with another layer of spackle, followed by a long stretch of putting together cabinets. Pointing a hair dryer at the joint compound, willing it to dry faster happened occasionally.

Cabinets took over the entire dining room. The chair was pushed in front of the TV, the coffee pot is on the side table next to my couch. It was like an Army obstacle course in my upstairs. Generally, my place was a disaster.

Day 4 = chaos.

Day 5 started with sanding. There is a layer of dust everywhere in my house. The remotes are covered, and the couch and floor could be swept down to make a little sandbox.

Cabinet installations are where the excitement is at, apparently. Walls are rarely even, and it’s difficult to get cabinets lined up exactly level in all the right places. However, the plans I have assumed that we could do that, and after spending 45 minutes working on the first one, it became clear that the plans were… incorrect.

We needed a slightly smaller SPECIAL ORDER cabinet “like we need air,” according to Fred. Lucky, lucky, lucky us were able to get exactly what we needed from the first Home Depot I called on a return. It was discounted even. If we didn’t, we would have been totally screwed.

Anyone need a 33x30 inch white wall cabinet? I have one to spare.

With our emergency revision, all the cabinets were installed in a quick 9 hours with a lot of shims, some 1x2, a good level and copious cursing. But the cabinets are in! And I am getting my house back. The table is back in the middle of my dirty dining area, the fridge opens all the way, and I am envisioning what is going to go in all my new awesome cabinets.

Stats:
Times “fuck” uttered: Fred 15, Kristine 5
Trips to Home Depot: 3
Person we want to meet: Guy (or girl) who designed the cabinet drawers
Best way to ease the pain: Tito’s

Kitchen – days 2 & 3

The notable events of yesterday & today are sneezing and errands. My sore throat has turned into full-blown sickness, which is really fucking bad timing.

Yesterday started with a 2-hour trip to Home Depot run to pick up the supplies for plumbing and electrical work. My dad spent most of the day untangling the puzzle known as the crazy, yet brilliant electrician’s wiring scheme so he could get it to do his biding. As far I can tell, it’s a miracle that this condo didn’t combust into flames in the last couple of decades.

Yesterday wasn’t exciting, but it was crucial, and involved lots of last minute supplies. Mom and I made 4 runs to Home Depot, one of which involved renting another gigantic truck to haul sheetrock home.

Today started with another Home Depot run, and then the plumbing work to run a copper line behind the wall from the sink to the fridge for the ice maker. This involved using a blow torch near insulation with a fire extinguisher near by, just in case.

Once the copper pipes were welded in place, we moved on to hanging sheetrock. Well, I made it about one screw into hanging sheetrock and then disappeared into a fog of sickness. I was pretty much useless all day. My sneezes outweighed my Dad’s cursing, by a factor of 10. If I could find a way to harness the energy of my sneezes, I think I could provide enough energy to fuel my morning commute.

After my parents finished sheet rocking, I mustered enough energy to help tape and float the walls. This too, involved another emergency Depot run.

We, OK dad, made a ton of progress today. We capped off the work with some delivered pizza. Tomorrow we’ll add another layer or two of joint compound and put together the cabinets.



Day 2 & 3 Stats
Times “fuck” uttered: Notably, not enough to count
Trips to Home Depot: 8
Near accidents in Home Depot’s rented truck: 1
Sneezes: 50 would a be a conservative guess
Definitions for the word “compass”: 2
Miscommunications stemming from the engineer and the camper discussing a compass: 1
Person we are in awe of: electrician
Notable injuries: 0

See pictures on flickr!

Incident free…. Almost

All in all, day one went well, though not without some….. excitement. Demolition, as it turns out, doesn’t have to take a long time. By 11 am, most of the heavy work was done. Ripping that god awful Formica off the walls was delightful.

We threw all the cabinet and countertop pieces off the back of the deck into the bed of the GIGANTIC DIESEL truck that I rented. I could swim laps in the bed of thing.

While I’ve known that the builders took every short cut they could when they built this place, I learned today what that really meant.
- No sheetrock on one of the walls behind the cabinets.
- Random live wires hidden behind or on top of cabinets
- A plug installed into the outside of a cabinet…. The outside that was flush against a wall.
- 3 power lines into one circuit box that took my Dad at least an hour to decipher, and caused the second incident of near electrocution.

There was much puzzlement and cursing over the specific choices that were made in building this kitchen. Arguably, there were several options that were “the stupidest (bleep)ing thing” my dad had ever seen.

By 2 pm, we had pulled off all the sheetrock (and by we, I mostly mean my dad and Kent). Dad and I headed to the dump, and afterwards sat in terrible traffic bringing back the truck.

Delighted to be rid of the truck, I got into my car and rolled into a parked truck behind me. Neither car was damaged, though I knocked off the license plate holder. Woops. I hope the handwritten note I left on the windshield expresses my sincerest apologies.

The afternoon was spent puzzling over the mysterious wiring in the kitchen. After several circuit tests, and half a dozen theories, and re-labeling of circuit breakers, Dad determined a plan for tomorrow’s work.

This was followed by showers, dinner and cocktails. Theoretically, today was the hardest day. However, it went fairly smoothly, so I expect we still have some hard work ahead of us

Now, I am off to take some Advil to pre-emptively convince my back and shoulders that they aren’t sore from all the lugging and throwing.

Today’s Stats
Times “fuck” uttered: ~20
Times “fuck” uttered in close session with many other curse words: 0
Close calls with electrocution: 2
Parked cars backed into: 1
Person we want to meet: the electrician who wired this house
Notable injuries: 0

See the pics on Flickr

all the boxes (post 3)

i just finished packing my kitchen into many boxes. All the cabinets are empty. See! It's pretty much impossible to show my kitchen in entirety, which might make it difficult to show daily work progress.




But today's work is finished. The kitchen is packed. And as a bonus, I cleaned the weird gross sticky stain I discovered on the top of my fridge. I suspect fruit rotted, since it where I kept my fruit bowl.

The Final Countdown (kitchen post #2)

I could build some housing out of all the cardboard in my dining area. And I’m not talking about a shanty either. It’ll be more like a condo with a couple bathrooms.

There are the gigantic collapsed boxes that will soon be spread on my wood floors to protect them. There are the fruit boxes from the kind pomegranate stocker at Whole Foods where I will pack my dishes.

Then there are the 30+ boxes of flat cabinets that a forklift placed on my driveway Friday morning, which gave Kent and I our morning cardio as we made many trips upstairs.

And just for good measure the rest of the recently purchased items that will make up my kitchen – a sink, microwave, and ceiling fan - are boxed up as well.

Oh, the door handles! Those are in plastic. Sadly, not enough to make windows in my cardboard house.

So the oft-mentioned kitchen project starts in full force next weekend, and lasts…well that’s a variable. My Dad and I should be able to do a bulk of the work in a week. But it will be 4-6 weeks before the countertop is installed. And I can’t install the sink until I have the countertop. Good thing I am traveling a lot in December. I can keep my paper plate usage low.

My remodel is modest, but it’s going to be fantastic. It’ll be modern, but warm. I will have a ton more cabinet space and a much more practical layout. It will inspire new greatness in cooking!


It will be MUCH BETTER than this

The project schedule should go something like this:

- 1 day demolition
- 1-2 days electrical & plumbing work
- 1 day installing sheetrock
- 1 day for Turkey or at least a few hours of it part of it
- 1-2 days cabinet building installations
- 1 day (hopefully) to install temporary countertop & sink

This is, of course, assuming we don’t discover disaster behind the walls – like terrifying mold, or plumbing that doesn’t make sense. Since every other project in this house demonstrated that the builders took every shortcut known to man, there is a fair chance that at least one unexpected challenge awaits us.

My mom just got an awesome new camera, so she’s appointed project photographer. She can start with the grumpy look on my face when we start knocking shit down at 8 am on Saturday.