Tag: kitchen

Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Kitchen

August 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Kitchen taped

Things are starting to come together at the house. Let’s see if I can touch on all the things that have happened in the last ten days. First, we got the bedrooms and kitchen taped off and I took my second try at the paint sprayer. I’m going to say that I like the results better with the pressure higher. A good primer/sealer and high pressure and you can do one coat of paint. The trick is to not put on too much paint (it starts to run) and follow along right away with a brush to touch up any spots that need it. It’s not easy when the goggles continually fog up and the paint coats the outside, but frequent breaks to improve visibility help a lot. The paint we bought stinks like ammonia, which made it hard to go for long stretches, but I got through it. Unfortunately it went through more paint than expected and we had to run out and get more.

Kitchen painted

After we got the painting done we brought in the cabinets. We got the cabinets second-hand, so they aren’t exactly designed to fit, but we came up with a combination that works pretty well and used most of them. We got a used dishwasher from some friends and got that installed next to the base cabinet for the sink. I got the plumbing mapped out and installed after only six trips to the hardware store. The girl at the return desk at The Home Depot suggested (on our second visit) that maybe I should hire someone. Ha!

Cabinet and dishwasher

Leveling the cabinets was interesting. The floor is not very flat and it took several shims to get everything straight-ish enough to get the counter top installed.  Once the sink was installed, the faucet was working, and the counter was screwed down, that’s when I decided to replace the faucet with the single handle model from the other sink. Of course, it turned out that one leaked and the hex bolt to remove the handle and fix the leak was stripped. So we wound up buying a new, cheapo kitchen faucet (did I mention the six trips to the store).

Sink installed, cupboards going in

We of course didn’t install the upper cabinets first, because it would have been the right way to do it. Sarah said it was fine to put them up high, but when she saw what we meant by “high” she said they needed to be lower. We got all the upper cupboards in and the next step is the range hood and the stove.

Cupboards installed

There’s another section of cabinets over by the refrigerator. We carefully measured to make sure the back door would open and still let us fit as many cabinets in as possible. It’s really starting to feel like a kitchen! I still need to attach the counter top to the other cabinets, but everything else is looking pretty good. Sorry the pictures are a bit fuzzy, the phone isn’t doing a great job. We took photos with the camera too, but they still need to be uploaded.

More cabinets

We’re probably going to put another tall cupboard above the refrigerator, just to maximize the storage space. It might look a bit strange because it’s one of the tall ones, and getting to the top will require a step ladder. Oh well. It’s getting there!

On other fronts, I’ve been working on electrical rewiring and installing ceiling fans, and Sarah installed carpeting in the bedroom and office. We’ll have posts for those items shortly. The big news is that we’re planning on moving in this weekend! It will be two months to the day from when we closed, and it’s time. We’re both tired from working every day on the house and driving back and forth from the condo is getting old. We started bring over some boxes and stashing them in the front room. Sarah’s going to clear out the living room so we can install quarter-round on the trim, and then make way for furniture.

It Can Be Fixed!

July 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Towards the beginning I decided to tear some tiles off the wall in the second story kitchen by the living room door.  Here is a picture of me in the process…

You may be wondering why I did it?  Well, the tiles were only half-glued on in the first place.  And, there were cockroaches running under them.  So, I tore them off.

But, I had to fix the mess I made…

Aside from the chimney stains already coming through the Spackle, it doesn’t look too bad.  I will need to prime it before painting it (maybe a couple of times), but I generally pretty proud of the Spackling job that I did. 🙂

Kitchen Outlet

July 15, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Scary Electrical

Let me start by saying that the electrical situation in the house is, in a word, scary. We have two 100-amp service lines coming in with separate breakers for the first and second floor units. This seems fairly normal. However, the basement was finished into an illegal apartment. When they did this, or maybe just in the course of doing all of the other terrible things, they spliced into the main for the upstairs unit before the breaker, added some wires, and wrapped it up (poorly) with electrical tape, like some sort of gift that is also a fire hazard. Of course nothing is labelled, and strung together, taped, patched, and generally awful wiring pervades the house. We have the old fabric-wrapped wire, lengths of live wire less than a couple of feet long spliced in at each end in the laundry room, draped over water pipes.

The house is a hundred and fifteen years old. When it was built, electricity was still something for expositions and rich people, which is why the house still has gas light fixtures here and there and a place where the wood stove used to sit. It was eventually electrified, of course, though it was done –shall we say– “sparingly”. There are two outlets in the kitchen, and just one in every other room upstairs, except for the tiny front bedroom which has none at all.

Unfortunately, the two outlets in the kitchen are positioned as far as possible from where the cabinet and counters were and will be again. There’s no outlet for the stove, no electric for a dishwasher or range hood, and no outlet for the kitchen counter, where we might want, say, a toaster. We’re not even sure where we’ll plug in the microwave, and we’re slightly concerned that when we do find a place, making popcorn will burn the house down.

All of this brings us to one of the myriad projects underway in the kitchen: adding an outlet. As luck would have it, there’s an outlet on the opposite side of the wall in the bathroom. We replaced the existing outlet with a GFCI (because, duh, it’s a bathroom). We need to get some spacers so that it will sit flush with the tile in the bathroom because at the moment it’s sunk three-eights of an inch into the wall.

Bathroom outlet

The challenge was that the opposite side of the wall in the kitchen is tiled, and cutting through the tile proved to be more difficult than expected. For starters, I didn’t own a Dremel. I tried using a drill, a jigsaw, and a trim router, but without the right bit, blade, or bit the results were less than stellar. I managed to grind off all the teeth on the jigsaw bit, but eventually I got a decent outlet-sized hole in the wall. Not long after, Sarah’s dad returned from Home Depot with a Dremel.

Cutting the tile

The Dremel quickly straightened out the hole and made it usable. We got the wire connected to the GFCI in the bathroom and ran it out of the wall in the kitchen. For the time being that’s as far as we’ve gotten, because we need to patch in a line for the range hood and the dishwasher. We’re not sure yet if the dishwasher will fit next to the stove or if we need to put it on the wall to the left. That will determine where we need to run the wire.

Kitchen outlet hole

We also tried to put an outlet behind the stove, but the tile there is different and proved quite resilient to my efforts. I decided that we can just plug the stove into the counter outlet. It isn’t permanent, after all, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. As usual, what seemed like a small project took much longer than expected and the result –aside from the new hole in the wall with a wire sticking out of it– was an impressive mess of tools in the kitchen.

Kitchen mess

If nothing else, you can see the new peel-and-stick tile Sarah and Meg put down, as well as the no-longer-crazy plumbing that Sarah’s dad helped me straighten out.