Remodeling

26
May 09

Kitchen Remodel 3: Making Progress

After last week’s work, I started stressing about how to frame the rear wall in a way that would be either inconspicuous or elegant. In other words, my options were to try to hide the laundry area or to accentuate it. I actually lost sleep about it. I wasn’t happy with either option, and I felt relieved when my wife emailed me on Tuesday to say she’d figured out what she wants. She put together a portfolio of kitchen images that had design concepts she liked, and she drew out this design for our rear wall:

kitchenwalldesign

It’s a blessing and a curse.

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19
May 09

Kitchen Remodel 2: It Begins

Although the cabinets aren’t scheduled to be installed until the first week of July, we were told we could move the date up if we’re ready sooner. That date was always a conservative estimate. Our ideal plan is to have the bulk of the demolition work done by the end of Memorial Day weekend. This thing arrived on Friday to get the ball rolling.

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14
May 09

The Perils of DIY

I went off on a tangent about the perils of DIY in my original kitchen remodel post, but I thought it deserved its own permalink:

One problem with the growing DIY movement is that people with little talent and/or experience are making major changes to their houses after ten minutes of incomplete instruction from a television show. I’m all about experimenting and expressing oneself, but people should start small and work their way up to more complex projects. Good examples of overconfident DIY are the counters and floor in our kitchen. There has to be at least a half inch of caulk in a gap between the backsplash and the wall and the floor tiles are a case study in lazy corner cutting (pun intended).

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7
May 09

Kitchen Remodel 1: The Plan

Well, we just put down half of the money for our new cabinets and counter tops, so the kitchen remodel has become a reality. They’re scheduled to install them in the first week of July, so that gives us a month and a half to get the room ready. It seems like every previous owner has tried to jazz up the space with new paint, knobs or fixtures, but no one put any serious time or money into modernizing the room. Here’s how it looks:

chandler-kitchen-1

As usual, everything looks decent in the picture, but a closer inspection reveals antiquated cabinets and shoddy craftsmanship.

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30
Mar 09

Dining Room Built-ins

When I bought my house, it had these built-in cabinets in the dining room area. They look good from far away, but a closer inspection revealed how warped and worn they were:

empty-house-g

They must have been thirty years old, and it looked like every owner of the house since then made some kind of change to them. My wife and I decided to demo them, but we realized too late that the hardwood floors had lightened considerably since the original built-ins were put in. Since the floor we exposed was darker than the rest of the house, and since there was no way we were going to refinish the floors after moving in, we reluctantly decided to build new ones.

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