Kitchen Renovation: Electrical and Plumbing

Last Monday things didn't look drastically different in our kitchen, but if one wondered downstairs to our basement it was clearly evident that something was going on. Thankfully, by Tuesday the work had migrated upstairs and things were starting to look vastly different. 

Our house, while structurally sound, has a hidden evil - we have aluminum wiring. And I've been told that's bad. Again, this is just another one of those instances where I'm incredibly happy the hubs is an engineer because once people start talking about metal conductivity, coefficients, and galvanic corrosion I start to get a tad bit out of my league.  And I'm a nerd! To sum up, this is why we hired professionals because the decision was made to pull all the wiring in our kitchen and dining room and replace all of the aluminum wires with copper wires. We have an unfinished basement which meant pulling wires was a lot easier than if we had a finished basement - tedious, but easier. 

These photos are pretty dark because they were taken at night and with limited light available in the kitchen. Not all of our new lights were hooked up at this point. And the external flash for my Canon is packed away somewhere. 

We now have 13 recessed lights throughout our kitchen and dining room. We decided to go with recessed lights in the dining room because our dining room table will not be centered with the window and at this point in time we didn't have an exact table in mind and therefore we couldn't commit to the exact placement of the table. We didn't want to risk hanging a pendant light now and then it wouldn't be in the right spot when we bought a new dining room table. We can always change the lighting later if needed.

Our new sink hook up! The bay window was supposed to come out on Day 11, but the weather didn't cooperate.  That pushed our schedule back a day because the rest of the drywall couldn't be done until after the window was replaced. 

Victory! No more gaudy chandelier in the dining room. I don't know why, but we have huge windows in our house and while I initially fell in love with them, they've turned into a pain when trying to find curtains, especially roman shades. 

That little pipe at the floor might not look like much, but that's our new gas hookup! I know it sounds weird to get that excited over natural gas, but I've wanted a gas range my whole life. Our house used to have gas and there were a few questions as to whether the old pipes were still functional.  I'm very excited to have this feature in our new kitchen. 

I'm still a nerd at heart and I was actually excited to see when drywall was taken out. I was that person who took a flashlight to look over every nook and cranny of our house's inner workings. I have no idea what I was looking for, but I didn't find anything that looked damaged to me! That made me happy. 

When I had heard last Tuesday (Day 11) that our window wasn't replaced yet I was a tad bit bummed. Both the hubs and I knew any type of delay to our schedule would probably push our final finish date back because we were working with such a tight timeline. However, no one can control the weather and it isn't a good idea to do outdoor siding work in the pouring rain. Oh yeah, it poured, not just a little mist! 

That tiny bit of sadness was replaced with absolute giddiness when I came home on Tuesday night and saw the new state of our living room. It was absolute chaos, but seeing that all of our new cabinets had been delivered was the best feeling in the world. 

Up next - a new window! 

Kitchen Renovation: New Hickory Floors

Okay, please forgive me, but this is a long post. I combined prepping and installing the hardwood floors because I just wanted to show pictures of the final floors. I know they aren't for everyone, but I'm obsessed and smitten with our hickory floors.

Again, when we went over the final budget for our kitchen the hubs and I made a bold decision and decided that we would install our own floors. We were originally quoted a price of $4,000.00 for both the materials and installation for our dining room and kitchen floors.  We then found Mohawk solid hickory floors on clearance at a local wood supply store for $3.49 a square foot. Hickory is usually $5+ a square foot which meant this was a great deal and this even added more to our savings.

Total Cost: $1,659.05 (this price does not include the cost of the dumpster we rented for demolition)

• Hickory Wood Floors - $1,237.09 (Wood Floors Plus )
• Wood accessories        - $41.31 (Wood Floors Plus felt paper, nails, wood putty)
• Nail Gun Rental           - $60.00 (Wood Floors Plus two-day rental)
• Transitions/Toe Kick   - $171.78 (Lumber Liquidators $6.99/ft for transitions, $2.19/ft) 
• Subflooring                  - $148.87 (Lowes) 

That's a savings of over $2,300! That's a big deal and that savings allowed me to go big and get the massive double oven I wanted. Okay fine, the hubs was also able to get some nerdy dishwasher that's even quieter than a standard model. We each have our quirks! 

Flooring Prep: Day 6 of the Renovation.  After much back and forth we decided to lay a 1/4 inch level of plywood over our subfloor. The subfloor in our kitchen was mildly damaged in a few places (most likely from installing different floors over the years) and the kitchen was slightly uneven. After looking at multiple options we decided this route for peace of mind and for the adding cushioning the extra layer of plywood would provide.  

The hubs was able to bribe a friend (thank goodness for pizza and beer favors!) into helping him with the floors. Thankfully our friend had done this before and had all the additional tools we needed (scroll saw, table saw, air compressor, etc). I see a large fruit basket in our friend's future or perhaps we should send him bison (the hubs is making that his "thing" to send people from a local bison farm).  The guys got all the prep work done after work on Day 6. 

Late Thursday night the hubs and I laid out a rough flow of our favorite boards. We deliberately planned on placing plainer hickory boards where the cabinets would be placed in order to concentrate the darker and more interesting boards in the the open areas of our floor plan. 

I guess if you spend all day wearing a hard hat and safety glass while inspecting a bridge you can skip those things while at home.  For the record, I've lost count of how many times I've asked, "where are your safety glasses?"

 (They even remembered to cut out hole for our air vent!) 

Floor Installation: Day 7 of the renovation.  The executive decision was made for me to save my vacation time for another day, go to work, and miss out on this project. We consciously decided to do this on a Friday and that way we could finish up on Saturday and Sunday if needed. We had to be done by Sunday night so that our contractor could come in on Monday morning.  Since this was our first time doing this type of project we decided to go ahead and start on Friday just in case this took longer than anticipated. 

The guys got to work bright and early in the morning. The hubs was even kind enough to send me a few text photos throughout the day of the progress and he went above and beyond the call of duty for taking a few photos with my DSLR. Call of duty reference was intentional - the hubs loves playing those games and will not hear a peep from me about playing them for the next six months.  

As soon as I got home from work on Friday I jumped right in and started using a regular old hammer to help nail in the last few rows of boards. I figured the guys had been working all day so I volunteered to carry, hammer, or move anything that needed to be done. This also included ordering chinese food for dinner!  The floor was finished on Friday evening. 

We rented the nail gun Wednesday night and returned it first thing Saturday morning. The kind folks at Wood Floors Plus only charged us for a two-day rental period, which was really nice.  They also assisted the hubs with a few technical questions over the phone at the beginning of the installation. 

On Saturday the hubs and I went back and filled in any nail holes with wood putty and did a massive cleanup.  The big nail gun couldn't be used for first few and last few of rows because of how close the rows are to the wall which meant that each nail hole had to be drilled and then hammered down the old fashioned way.  I was also banned from making any Thor references on Saturday because it seems I went over my allotment for them on Friday evening.  

We still have to install our toe-kick (quarter round) and transitions. We're waiting for the base cabinets to be installed in order to put in the toe-kick.  The hubs and I are still going back and forth on the transitions because I don't want to put them in at all! Honestly, I wanted to take our cost savings for doing this project ourselves and use those funds to buy enough additional materials to continue the hickory floors into our living room.  The hubs disagrees with me to a point. As soon as the floor was finished he said, "we have to put those floors in the living room."  We're just waiting to see if our contingency budget is enough to get us through the kitchen renovation and if so then expect these floors to go in sooner rather than later.  We actually have 4 boxes of flooring and a box of cleat nails left over from our kitchen renovation and I'm stalking the stock at flooring store to make sure they have enough remaining :) Really those four boxes of flooring bring down the price of this project another $250 (this $250 was not subtracted out of the budget above since we already paid for this quantity of flooring). 

Our living room was finally puppy friendly Sunday! There was so much dust that we used our shop vac, old vacuum, and even our new vacuum to clean up everything and get our room back to this stage. Thank goodness we did because our cabinets were just delivered and now our living room is a complete disaster area again. 

Looking back, putting in the floors was definitely a big undertaking. I was paranoid we would mess them up, which was probably another reason the hubs told me to go to work! In the end, it really wasn't all that difficult, just very time consuming and tedious. It couldn't have been that bad if the hubs is entertaining the idea of doing another room :)  We probably won't even take off work for that project and will hope to bang that out in one weekend. 

Up next - electrical! Which we don't touch with a 10 foot pole!  We're leaving the rest of this kitchen renovation up to the professionals until it's time to paint. That probably means we should go pick out a paint color this weekend.

Kitchen Renovation Demolition Complete

Super quick post today! This was Day 4 of our renovation and this is the final day of demolition. These photos were actually taken on Day 5 right before I left for work. I had to crank up my ISO in order to use the limited natural light available at 7:15am. 

Random sidebar: I got extremely nauseous every time I went into our dining room once the dividing wall was taken out. For some reason I was fine in the kitchen, but the moment I walked through where the wall used to be located I entered into a weird twilight zone and my stomach wasn't cool with it. I was paranoid that our house was going to fall down even though more than one engineer said it wouldn't (the hubs wasn't the final voice on this one). 

Our living room has been in various stages of controlled chaos during this process. We didn't have room to move our sofa during the renovation so instead we covered it with the thick blankets and sheets to ensure it stayed dust free. 

Up next: floor prep and then the finished shots of our new hickory floors. They're amazing, we both love them, and we're already planning on putting them in our living room. 

Day 5: Floor prep - rented the nail gun and purchased the remaining floor items (fiber paper, nails, wood filler)

Day 6: Floor prep - laid out the underlayment and general flow of the boards

Day 7: Floor installation. 

We're officially past the point of no return! 

Kitchen Demolition: Part 1

Let's get this kitchen renovation started! One of the final deciding factors in choosing a kitchen designer and contracting company was whether or not the firm would let us do any of the work. The firm we ultimately ended up hiring said during the first meeting that if there were any portions of the renovation that we wanted to do we could do them and those line items would be removed from the final budget.  The hubs and I quickly agreed that we could do most of the demolition and leave taking the wall out to the professionals. That decision saved us almost a thousand dollars. 

I'm a week behind in posting in terms of where we are, but I hope to catch up soon. I naively thought I would be able to blog this renovation in "real time" but quickly realized after the first night of demolition that my fingers were too sore to do anything besides drink beer on the couch. Actually, I couldn't even open my beer and the hubs had to do it for me. Yeah, that happened. 

Day 1: Go! 

We found out that the only thing securing our dining room floor was the quarter round. Awesome. After prying off the quarter round, and being careful not to ruin the molding, it took all of five minutes to get the dining room floor out of the house. 

  

We were thrilled to find that the plywood subflooring in our dining room was in near perfect condition. The lack of nails or adhesive holding down the floor probably assisted in that manner.  This meant we wouldn't need any major underlayment when it came time to put in our hardwood floors. 

One of the biggest time drains during the demolition was dismantling the sink, garbage disposal, and dishwasher. The dishwasher was hardwired into its own box in the basement. The hubs cut the power at the main breaker to the entire house to detach the dish washer's wiring.  He was terrified of getting electrocuted so it took a few minutes longer than anticipated.  I was there, with a flashlight, and with my cell phone ready to call 911 if needed. The flashlight was needed, the cell phone was not. Hurray! 

However, the garbage disposal still has us completely stumped. It was hardwired into a GFI box in the basement and that box also housed a light socket. So we left it to the professional electrician who is coming this week. Being wired into a light socket really threw us for a loop. 

We left the actual wall dismantling to the professionals, but we wanted to pound out some of the drywall for dramatic effect. That plug at the bottom right corner was not connected to any structure and was just hanging on the drywall. Once we saw that we just let it be. Another awesome find! 

The dining room all finished! Well, we took off the outlet covers on the wall since the wall is coming down and did a ton of sweeping and vacuuming.  Everything was look great at this point. My brother-in-law and his wonderful girlfriend had came over to help out with everything up until this point. It was around 3pm in the day and we told them to go home so they could watch the afternoon football game. They got out just in time! 

Then, we hit a major speed bump. We could see that the vinyl flooring in our kitchen was applied to the same laminate flooring that was in our dining room. The kitchen floor appeared to be higher up and we couldn't figure out where that difference was coming from.  Well, we found it! 

For some reason there was this backerboard-type underlayment in our kitchen. The laminate floor and vinyl were just dropped on top of this.  We had to get this sucker out in order to install our hardwood floors because we didn't know how crappy this thing was or how to match it in height to our dining room. 

It was laid out in 4x4 feet squares. We found the best removal technique was to use a small pry bar (best $3 spent ever!) to pry up one of the ends of the square. Thankfully, my brother-in-law happened to have a full size crowbar in his car that we thought to borrow right before he left. With the edge of the square up, the hubs would just use brute force to lift up the rest of the square. The key was to not damage the plywood floor underneath during this process.  

Then it was death by fasteners.  So many freaking fasteners. Each and every one of them had to be pried up. We didn't want to nail them into the plywood for fear that when we were nailing the floor it might cause a problem with putting in the nails.  If neither one of us could get a particular fastener up then we'd nail it into the plywood and just hope we didn't hit it with a nail when we installed the floors. 

Nearing the finish line! We did the vast majority of the demolition on one Saturday. We left the last few underlayment pieces in the kitchen wall by the plumbing fixtures for Sunday.  Then it was just cleanup, checking for more evil fasteners, and re-checking for more fasteners. The hubs swore there was an evil elf coming in behind us and putting more into the floor because we would continue to find more random ones every time we went through the room.  Also, the dogs were blocked out of the kitchen, dining room, and living room for this entire process because we didn't want them to get into something they shouldn't have or risk them stepping on something sharp.  Jax would just sit by the puppy gate and whimper every time you made eye contact with him.  Jewels was upstairs probably trying to figure out how to book a vacation to the dessert soaking up the sun. 

After measuring it 800 different times we decided to leave the fridge alone. Moving the fridge meant we would have to take the doors off and we ultimately figured once the wall came down it would be incredibly easy to roll the fridge out to its temporary resting place in the living room.  

Most random find of the day (besides two outlets not connected to any studs) was we found the shipping receipt for the laminate floors. They were shipped in March 1999. We found more old wallpaper and what looked like another sink hookup. We think that kitchen layout was moved around using those fancy European cabinets when the new floors were put in. 

Up next: the professionals come in and take down the wall! And then we finish the demolition. 

Kitchen Renovation - The Before Photos

Now that I have shown the new kitchen design mockups it makes a bit of sense to show what we had to work with... and it wasn't pretty!  Let's take a tour of our lovely '80s kitchen! For the record, everything looks pretty clean in these photos, but trust me those counter tops never came clean no matter how hard I scrubbed or what product I used. 

Here is the view of our kitchen from the exit to the den.  When the hubs and I first saw the house I fell in love with the bay window in the kitchen. My childhood home in New Jersey had a bay window and I always wanted one.  We'll come back to that point.  Please note that the window is not centered on the way at all! 

Now here's the view from the opposite wall and this exit leads to our separate dining room.  Yes, there's a broken cabinet at the far left and there's more of them sprinkled throughout the room.  On the plus side the MASSIVE overhead light matches the cabinets perfectly. That's a keeper! (insert copious amounts of sarcasm here)

And finally here's the view from the bay window across to the door to the basement, the pantry, and the fridge.  Now, when we bought the house there wasn't a fridge in the kitchen. The hubs and I bought a fridge and we didn't care how tall it was because we knew we could rip down the upper cabinets. Sure enough, we had to rip out those cabinets to fit our new fridge because the fridge was 1/8th of an inch too tall. That led us to finding that this kitchen wasn't original to the house because we found the original wall paper behind the cabinets. AWESOME! 

That big, beautiful, bay window that first captured my heart soon became the biggest pain in my rear. The window is low and sits only 29.5 inches off from the floor. It had this odd overhang which wasn't exactly sturdy or finished underneath. I tried sitting on it once and the entire window moved. Not awesome! This meant the window area was basically useless and the biggest waste of space. 

Other random tidbits about our kitchen:

- most of the cabinet panels were broken and half the pulls were cracked.  

- duct tape kept our sliding drawers together

- only one hinge on our pantry door was functional, so we took the doors off and just incorporated some very trendy open shelving. 

- Jax would routinely lose tennis balls under the cabinets because the cabinets were open at the bottom in random places

- our dishwasher didn't work and rather than spend money getting it fixed we ignored it. Actually, this is terrible, but when we moved in there were still dishes in the dishwasher. I knew this house was a foreclosure and there was a chance for something fishy, but the sight of those dishes made me cry. 

- every single electrical outlet plate in the kitchen was a different finish. Someone clearly couldn't make a decision! 

So as you can see we took the approach that everything goes! The wall between the dining room and kitchen is out and in goes a peninsula.  At this very second the only things remaining in the kitchen are the overhead light (taken out next week) and the electrical boxes. We're prepping to put in the floors this weekend and I can't wait. 

What's the quirkiest thing in your kitchen? Our random outlet covers win in my book. The kitchen might be old, but it's just weird that all of the covers are mismatched. 

New Kitchen Design

The hubs and I are knee deep in the kitchen renovation process at the moment. We're literally eating, sleeping, and breathing drywall all things kitchen related right now. This ol' blog is probably going to be completely dedicated to our kitchen renovation during the month of January or until this baby is finished! 

They say a photo is worth a thousand words and who am I to argue with such sound logic.  Without further ado, here is our new kitchen design in mockup form. Please keep in mind that these are mockups that we received from our kitchen designer. Those stools will never make an appearance in my house! 

What we're doing in terms of layout:
- Taking down a wall between our kitchen and dining room. Moving in will be a peninsula.
- Removing a bay window and putting in a smaller picture window in its place. Our current bay window is 29.5 inches off the ground and makes the back wall of our kitchen functionally useless. We need more cabinet space!
- Relocating the sink to be in front of the new window.
- Switching from an electric range to a gas range. Our house and kitchen already have the natural gas hookups and we're hoping this is a relatively easy move.
- Sliding the range down to where our sink used to be.
- Sliding our refrigerator down a tad and putting in small pantries on both sides of the kitchen.

Later this week I'll share the "before" kitchens of our kitchen. Take my word, they're scary because that kitchen was such a crazed mess. I didn't even want to take photos of it, but figured, "oh the before and afters on this one will be awesome!" I didn't want to start out with the before photos. If I've learned anything from Quentin Tarantino over the years is that you never tell a story in a perfect linear fashion!  Here is the inspiration board for our materials, although I might make a new board because all of our materials are finalized at this time.

And if you haven't seen it, here's a quick video of me busting out some drywall over the weekend. Please note, I had safety goggles on, but the hubs couldn't figure out how to take video so I took the googles off, showed him, bunched out some drywall, and the second dust flew in the air I giggled and realized I didn't have my goggles on anymore. They went back on that very nanosecond!

Any and all home renovation tips are welcome and most appreciated!

Get Fit, Get Organized

Get Fit: Water Bottle // Tech Shirt // Yoga Mat // Sports Bra // New Balance Cross Trainers

Get Organized: Acrylic Desk Storage // Rhombins Desktop Organizer // Over the Door Jewelry Armoire // Acrylic Cosmetic Organizers // Jewelry Trays 

Ah the New Year. So much hope, so much promise, and a chance to start anew.  Now that the sequin dresses have been dry cleaned (if they haven't you should probably drop that off this weekend), the funky eyeglasses have been tossed, and the first weekend of the year is here, it's time to get the resolutions started.

The two biggest resolutions every year: get fit and get organized. 

Get Fit:  Once again I'm making my personal fitness a priority this year. Last year I didn't have a great running year due to nagging injuries and this year I want to nip those in the bud! I'm committing to more cross training and doing at least one yoga session a week.  Which means I need to actually buy a pair of cross trainers and a yoga mat! 

Get Organized: I have three areas of my house that are exceptionally cluttered and have gotten slightly out of control: jewelry collection, lip/nail products,  and my desk. The jewelry collection has outgrown my old jewelry box and I'm literally keeping necklaces on hangers.  I gave up buying clothes at Target last year because nothing was made in the USA, but every time I went to Target I ended up picking up a new lipstick/lipgloss or nail polish. It's got to the point where I keep a note on my iPhone of what colors I have so I don't repurchase something unintentionally. Also, if it's made in the USA, at Target, and has the name 'Berry' in the title there's a 99% chance I own it! So I need to organize my bathroom vanity. And finally, my dear office - I have 8 mason jars filled with assorted pencils, pens, markers, etc. I get that mason jars are cute and everyone uses them, but it's actually a pain in the butt to get something out of them! 

I need to de-clutter, purge, and get organized. Thank goodness for The Container Store and their nearly 900 made in USA items. I just need to make a commitment to either jewelry trays or go big and get a much larger over-the-door system. 

New Year's Resolutions: Hate 'em? Love 'em? Keep 'em? Break 'em? What's your story?