Tuesday, November 15, 2011

the kitchen project : what we did

I've struggled with how to share the scoop on our kitchen renovation.  I started to go all Young House Love and write entire posts about every single decision we made. Which, on the one hand, would provide solid blogging content for the next four months, but on the other hand would probably drive everyone away (I just can't spell it out as well as the YSL crew!)

So this is the process post. With a list of everything we did (and what we hired someone to do) and next I'll do a post of progress photos.

For the dramatic effect of keeping you all on your toes, I'll post the finished product in yet another post. For the drama or for the fact that I haven't taken final pictures yet. It's one of those.

What we did (in order):
1. Ripped down the sexy coffee-house cartoon border. It took about 46 seconds because they put it up with a child's glue stick.

2. Ripped out the wall of cabinets above our stove - along with the microwave. I hate microwaves and I'm determined to never have one again. This microwave was giant and sitting way to low over the stove. Peace out radiant lover.

3. Painted the upper cabinets white.

4. Realized we used the wrong kind of paint on the upper cabinets. Stripped, sanded and primed every single one.

5. Painted the upper cabinets white.

6. Ripped out the plastic laminate counters.

7. Hired some nice young men to come and install new quartz counters.

8. Hire another nice man to come patch the wall where the previous owners had chipped out all of the plaster to put in the old counters. And also shot at the walls with a machine gun by the look of it.

9. Painted the walls.

10. Ripped out the fake-wood/laminate floor. Completely didn't match the rest of the house and was a floating floor (meaning not glued down) on a non-level substrate. So it was bouncy and needed to go. This took us 20 minutes - heck yes on the not being glued down.

11. Tiled the walls, backsplash and window sill. This literally took us over 30 hours spread over a few weekends but it was important to us that it was done carefully (we worried anyone we hired would rush vs. measure and level every damn tile). I tiled while my husband used the tile saw. Then I grouted while he went behind and cleaned. Probably my favorite part of the whole kitchen project and so happy with how it turned out.

12. Had the floor installed. We chose old-school linoleum (not vinyl floor that people call linoleum) This is a product that used to be used a lot - it's made from cork, linseed oil and jute.

13. Covered the asbestos encased stripper pole radiator pipe with a paintable wallcovering. Much easier/safer than the process of cutting it out.

14. Retrofit some of our cabinet doors with glass fronts (this does deserve a post of it's own as I did it by myself in an afternoon for $30 after a cabinet company quoted us $250).

15. Hung a stainless steel shelf over the stove.

16. Replaced all of the dingy, unmatched outlet covers with stainless steel.

16. Removed the ceiling fan that hung way, way to low in the room. I'd love to say we then put a finished plate over the whole, but to be honest there is still a hole in the middle of our kitchen ceiling.

Things that we still need to do:
-put trim back on the cabinets at the floor and re-install the transition strips in the doorways.
-install the new glass cooktop after I leaned on ours while tiling and cracked it. sonofa.
-eventually replace the lighting - very cheap track lighting that we don't love but it's not terrible. Someday.

Next up, progress photos!

1 comment:

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