Changing the Hardware

After almost a year of drooling over the Richelieu handles I had picked out for our cabinets, last week we happened upon a knob we like better. It's much more minimalist and quite contemporary, so this is the style we'll be ordering. It's made by Top Knobs and it's small, only uses one finger to pull.

Construction Mascots

Basil

Duncan

Duncan the guard dog

Basil cleans up

Our furry kids are always supervising the kitchen renovation.

The Inconveniences of Reconstruction

After two weeks of construction a few inconveniences are starting to get old. Mostly having all our belongings packed up & shifted to the center of every room so that the electrical outlets can be rewired. It makes for annoying flow patterns throughout the house. I already have matching bruises on each hip from bumping furniture corners. And of course as the rewire progresses, we're shifting boxes from one room to another, thus loosing track of where the hell to find things when we decide we need them. And then there's the constant drywall and plaster dust. Even with most things covered in plastic and their sweeping up after almost every hole they make, I still see a constant layer of dust everywhere I look. But hooray hooray, yesterday we passed the rough electrical inspection, so now we can proceed with patching up the holes and moving some things back. Of course, I'm wishing I had time to paint behind some of the larger pieces of furniture so I don't have to move them again later, but I'm needed to finish the floors, walls & cabinets in the kitchen.

Our New Bamboo Kitchen Cabinets

Removing Ugly Old Wallpaper

BEFORE

My husband spent a few hours working on getting rid of the ugly old wallpaper on the kitchen ceiling. As you can see in the BEFORE picture, we had attempted to take it down a while back. We pulled off one strip of the vinyl paper and the backing just dropped a tremendous bunch of dust down everywhere. So we decided it was best to wait till the kitchen was cleared out. After the rest of the demo, we pealed off the vinyl sheets, leaving a layer of the woven backing still on the ceiling. He used a spray bottle of water & white vinegar, let it soak in a while & scraped it off with a paint scraper. Thanks honey, so so happy to see that ugly stuff go!

Total House Rewire

This is what happens to your walls when you need to rewire your whole house. Since our 1947 home had mostly cloth insulated wire, lots of holes needed to be knocked out to accommodate the new electrical wires & to pull out that old unsafe, ungrounded antique stuff. That old woven covering gets caught up on nails, in tight holes in the studs & any sharp splinters on the old wood studs. Our house luckily has wood floors & joists and a crawl space under it which I hope made the job a bit easier for the contractors doing this messy job. Since we ripped out the kitchen floor to the joists, it gave them better access under the house although it's a tight squeeze with plenty of dirt and the Florida heat is killer. Before they started I was expecting we'd have long runs of wall gouged out between every outlet. But fortunately in our case the wires came down the wall under each outlet and draped under the crawlspace to the next outlet. It seem the electricians had a tougher time when the wires ran up the walls to light switches & into the ceiling, that being another horrible place for them to work since we have blown-in fiberglass insulation up there. These guys have been doing an excellent job keeping the holes to a minimum and cleaning up debris all along the way. I am so pleased with the work they are doing, as I was expecting a much bigger mess.

All The Way Down to The Floor Beams

half gone, a photo by BaubCat on Flickr.

Our new floating floor for the kitchen needs to be on a solid and level sub-floor. After walking around & feeling sections give & squeak under his feet, our contractor recommended that we go all the way down to the floor joists & reinforce them. Opening up the floor also make it much easier for the plumber to extend the gas line to the far wall for the new location of the range and a little easier for the electricians to crawl under for that complete house rewire. So all in all, we took up 3 layers of vinyl & original linoleum, one layer of 3" wide pine tongue & groove sub-floor and the final layer of 8" diagonal cross beams. The kitchen looks so much smaller now that everything is gone.
(you can follow the link from this photo to Baubcat's 'Kitchen Renovation' Set on Flickr)