After last weekend, we needed to take a couple of days off. We didn’t do much to the kitchen after work, but the electrician completed most of the wiring. He’ll finish up this week. I did manage to get a little mud work done on the ceiling and we were able to further repair the walls (and the new damage done by the electrician) before the weekend. Most importantly, we got the ceiling painted on Friday night:
We sanded prior to painting, hence the dust.
With regards to budget and chronology, everything has gone according to plan so far. As a healthy cynic, I’ve been waiting for the moment when we’re told we need to re-wire the whole house or risk burning to death, or when we stumble across a heaping pile of cancer-causing asbestos. Fortunately, nothing like that has happened. Yet.
We did, however, manage to lock ourselves out of the house on Tuesday night and have to break back in through the bathroom window (with wine glasses in tow). I honed my skills of inebriated acrobatics during my formative years, so the damage to the window and my body was minimal.
It seemed like our lucky streak would end when our tile dealer forgot all about us and our order, and later called to say he suddenly remembered and it would all arrive before the weekend despite the short lead time. We were sure the tile would come in late or be the wrong color. Amazingly, he got everything right and was even kind enough to refer us to another company that would tint the grout to match the tile color.
This is the tile we chose:
It’s 16″ x 16″ mock-travertine. It looks just like the real stuff, complete with those unique perforations that travertine is best known for, but it’s porcelain.
We figured it would be easier to paint without having to worry about getting droplets on the new tile floor, so we tackled that first thing on Saturday. We bought paint that has primer mixed in, so we’ll only have to put a few coats on the walls. Here’s what the room looked like after the first coat on Saturday morning:
I figured there was no sense in wasting paint where the cabinets will go.
We’ve been staring at a collage of peach, green and white for weeks, and the ugly mixture made it feel like we hadn’t done that much to the room. Having a single, unifying color on the walls seemed to magically transform the kitchen from old to new. We still have a little patching left to do around the new outlets and in various spots around the room, but we felt energized just to see it all starting to come together.
I told my wife that it would probably take us about four hours to lay all the full pieces of tile. The goal was to get most of the work done on Saturday morning and lay the cut-pieces on Sunday morning. With some luck, we thought we’d be able to grout the floors on Sunday night.
I miscalculated the work time a tiny bit. Instead of four hours, it took us two days. I’m sure she’ll remind me about that small discrepancy forever.
We decided to lay the tile on the diagonal since that pattern would look more elegant and mask any poor spacing. I knew it would be more difficult, but I didn’t think it would be that much more difficult. The tile cutter we bought for the job was a piece of junk that shattered two of our tiles before being retired. The wet saw we borrowed from a friend had a broken water pump, so my wife had to “mist” the spinning blade with the garden hose every time I went to cut a tile. To make matters worse, bisecting 16″ tile on the diagonal made the tile too wide to pass through the saw. The saw’s guard was useless since I had to hold every piece at an angle, eyeball the line, and try not to cut my fingers off when I force-fed the tiles through the blade. Robert Frost’s “Out, Out“ came to mind on several occasions.
This was how the room looked on Saturday night:
On Sunday morning, we had to tackle the floor in the rear of the room where the new closets are. Every tile had to be cut to fit. Every. Single. One. The whole process was an exercise in creative geometry and anger management. I said over and over again to my wife, “there’s no way normal people have to go through this,” but the results turned out great nonetheless. This was how the room looked on Sunday night:
Those odd-shaped pieces in the corners will all be hidden by the new cabinets. We just put them down to give the cabinet installers a level working surface.
I don’t think I’ll tile a room this big again. A coworker of mine said he uses a guy who will lay a new floor for $5 a square foot, and that includes the cost of the tile. That’s definitely the way to go. He probably could have done it in a third of the time, and with better results.
To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:
Disassemble the dining room table and take it to the garageMove all the appliances into the dining roomRelocate the hot water heater to the crawl spaceDemo the existing cabinets and the rear closet wallsRemove the tile floorResurface the ceilingLay a new subfloorCenter the oven plug and add new outletsRe-frame the rear wallMove the dryer ventSheetrock/mud the rear wallRepair and paint the wallsTile the floors- Install cabinets and counter tops
- Move all the appliances back into the kitchen
After work this week, we’ll grout the tile and finish patching the walls.
UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 5: Almost Finished
Tags: Cabinets, Grout, Painting, Sheetrock, Thinset, Tiling, Wiring
