Chad Chandler

Last week was very busy for us. As you know, the cabinet people came on Tuesday. We worked like crazy on Wednesday to finish the ceiling and the baseboards, but we didn’t manage to get enough paint on the wood on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday morning, the new refrigerator and range hood were delivered:

It fits pretty well into the custom cabinet space. The delivery guys had to take the doors off the fridge to get it into the house, and the right door sags a little since they reinstalled it. I’ll raise it up when I have some spare time.

Later on Thursday afternoon, the cabinet people came and installed the counter tops. According to my wife, they were amazed that we got the ceiling fan moved and patched in just a couple of days. You can’t even find the old hole:

My wife got the touch-up painting done on Friday morning, so the room is starting to look finished. The counter tops look great with the cabinets and floors.

I think we’re going to install our knife magnet on the wall above the stove. I’ll sand the wood and stain it the same color as the cabinets. Then the magnet and the knives will be cherry, black and stainless. It will look great with our range and hood:

We re-installed the old, brushed copper knobs and pulls. They’re pretty cheap, but they match with everything else in the room:

The electrician came on Friday and finished the wiring. He mislabeled the wires for the garbage disposal and the dishwasher, so I installed each one, then took them out and switched the wires, and finally re-installed them both again. It was a major waste of time. I installed the sink fixtures on Friday morning, but I couldn’t get one of the hose connections to stop dripping. My sister came up to visit that afternoon, and we promised that we’d walk away from our work all weekend. So I turned the water off in the kitchen and she got to experience what it’s like to have to use the bathroom sink or the garden hose for everything. I‘ll take a another crack at it this week. It looks good with our new granite, though:

The dishwasher is the only appliance that’s not stainless-looking. We can’t justify buying a new one until this one starts to break down, and we couldn’t order a stainless front panel for this model, so I bought some faux-stainless laminate (on the counter). It self-adhesive and it really looks like steel paneling. We’ll apply it to the black metal on the dishwasher tonight. I’ll take some pictures of the process and blog the results:

To recap, we’ve finally crossed the last tasks off the list:

1. Disassemble the dining room table and take it to the garage
2. Move all the appliances into the dining room
3. Relocate the hot water heater to the crawl space
4. Demo the existing cabinets and the rear closet walls
5. Remove the tile floor
6. Resurface the ceiling
7. Lay a new subfloor
8. Center the oven plug and add new outlets
9. Re-frame the rear wall
10. Move the dryer vent
11. Sheetrock/mud the rear wall
12. Repair and paint the walls
13. Tile the floors
14. Install cabinets and counter tops
15. Move all the appliances back into the kitchen

The demolition dumpster arrived on Friday, May 15th and the appliances were re-installed on Friday, June 12th. That’s not too bad for a couple of DIYers doing this in their spare time. If we have to hire a plumber to get the water running in the kitchen again, then that’ll put us a little behind schedule and over budget. But that’s nothing like the horror stories you often hear about remodels gone wild.

Our goal is to get the plumbing, the baseboards/molding and the washer/dryer cabinet door finished this week. With some luck, I’ll start building the pot rack this weekend. We’ll make it first, and then buy or build a matching island to replace the old microwave stand. Then the only thing left to do will be to build the sliding pantry, which was always going to be something we design on the fly.

It was nice to take a break from working on the kitchen this weekend. I don’t think we realized how tired we were until we slowed down and took it all in. I rewarded myself yesterday with mounds of Chinese food and an 8-hour Lonesome Dove marathon. It was just what the doctor ordered.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 8: Dishwasher

Tags: Cabinets, Counters, Electrical, Granite, Painting, Plumbing, Wiring

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Remodeling. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.