Kitchen

Thankfully, Julio’s dad came out for a couple of weeks to help tie up some of the major loose ends.  His tips and tricks allowed the cabinet installation to go very smoothly.  Without his help, the job would have taken MUCH longer and would not have turned out so well.

Julio holds up a piece of the moulding.  This was another great moulding from McCoy Millwork.  It has a nice, simple angular design that really fit well with the Craftsman aesthetic of the house.  It would not have been appropriate to install anything curved or frilly in this kitchen.  The angle is later mirrored in the window/door trim, as well as the piece on top of the cabinets.  We got a great color match with our cabinets with one of the stock Minwax stains, plus a satin poly finish.

Because the price difference was huge, we chose to use hemlock instead of fir for this moulding.  Like so many other details, it became much less noticeable once the whole room was put together.  Even though it doesn’t really match the trim in our other rooms, the “feel” is the same, so nobody ever notices.

This was one of the very few items that we hired out.  Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s one of the best not to do yourself.  We have had enough experience with drywalling in the past to know that it’s very time-consuming, and it’s much easier to have someone else wrap it up in less than a week, while you’re at work.  It would have taken many, many weekends to do the job, and we were getting desperate to get into the house and stop paying rent on top of our mortgage.

This was a great point, to finally have the room ready for drywall.  It felt like six tons being lifted off of our shoulders.

The bad part of the story was that we were on a really, really tight timeline, due to being squeezed between a Friday inspection (for rough-ins) and a Monday inspection (insulation) in order to be ready for our drywaller to start on Tuesday morn.  Julio’s dad was coming into town to help put the kitchen together the next weekend, so it was very important to have the drywalling done by then.  Both the kitchen and bath had to be done over the weekend, and some delays forced Julio to pull an all-nighter on Sunday night.  It all worked out as we needed it to, but the weekend was one that we didn’t want to think about for a long time.

Because it’s almost impossible to keep Kraft paper intact and to maintain a good, continuous barrier, we like to use a sheet of plastic as the vapor barrier.  It’s much easier to add the plastic after the insulation than it is to try to night tear and rip the Kraft paper.

One of the areas where we splurged was on the Simpson basement and closet doors. They make a fantastic five-paneled door that is an exact match to our existing doors in the rest of the house. More than just about anything we did, these add to the authentic feel of our remodel.

You can also see that much of the rewiring is done in this picture.

We removed the chimney to create space for a bigger pantry closet and a chase for heat ducts to the upstairs.  This was possible to do, because our new furnace and tankless water heater duct directly out the side of the house, making the chimney obsolete.  Our friend James pitched in once again to help take us take it down.  He worked like crazy with the cold chisel and sledgehammer, while Julio carted the bricks out to the backyard.  They were able to get the whole thing down in only 2 hours.  The old mortar helped a lot, as there wasn’t much holding the bricks together.

The wiring is much of the way done in this picture. Julio has a tendency to really overdo wiring and run individual circuits for just about everything. On the plus side, though, we’ve never, ever tripped a breaker in this house. You can run a table saw or air compressor in just about any room;)

Notice the black ABS pipe in the lower right side of the picture. That was the washer drain for the previous owner, and you can see the dryer’s gas valve just next to it on the floor.

The long wall of the kitchen had been completely reframed by this point.  There was one stud (along the right edge of the plywood) that was untouched.  Every other stud had been moved or replaced to accommodate the new window openings.

Several people have commented on the size of the header.  Yes, a 12″ header may be considered overkill for an opening that’s about 5.5′ across!  However, we had taken down the header that had divided the kitchen from the eating nook, so it was easy to recycle by cutting it to length and reusing it above the new windows.  While it may be excessive, at least we can be confident that it will never, ever sag…

The back windows was complete, and now the rest of the wall was opened up to start the re-framing of the one above the sink.  As a result of moving all the openings,  the plumbing venting had to be re-routed, since it used to go right up through where the new windows were going.

 View from the inside, just before the old window was ripped out.

The old framing was carefully dismantled, and most of it was reused as possible during the rest of the remodel.