We had two months between when we took possession of the house on Beaumaris Drive and when we lost possession of the condo we'd been living in. As such, it seemed like a perfect time to renovate the kitchen. Okay, perhaps not perfect... It's always a good idea to live in a place for a while before changing it. That way you have a better idea of what does and does not work. Also, being new at this renovating thing, the kitchen is not the best first project. However, weighed against the mess and loss of use we would encounter doing it at a later time while already living there, it seemed the best choice.
Planning the layout was the first part. We talked with several kitchen design stores and got several design suggestions. Most of the layout was my own design done with some measurements, a pencil, and graph paper. The designer then helped with refinements to make it practical. We wanted as much useable space as possible but also wanted an eating area so we wouldn't have to use the dining room for things breakfast and other casual meals. If we reserved a separate eating area, though, it would drasticly reduce the amount of space for the main part of the kitchen. In the end, we decided to make the eating area part of the main island which would not reduce primary counter space and would also be useable as a second-height preparation area while cooking.
The job took 3.5 months to get to the point where the kitchen was again fully functional. There were still things to do come that point (floor, backsplash, door, etc.) but that was the point where it became a useful room in the house. I've tried to take pictures from the same four angles (i.e. the four corners) as work progressed. Whenever you see four pictures together, that's what it is. The picture above is what the kitchen looked like in it's original "pristine" <cough> state.
Several friends helped out at different points for which I extremely thankful and in their debt -- a debt I'm sure I'll be called to pay back at some point. Andrew helped me rip out the old kitchen. France also took a turn at smashing the existing tile backsplash. We left the sink cabinet standing as long as possible because we figured it would be convienent to have a place to wash, though it never got used for that. Instead, it was just a place to set tools.
They really don't make things the way they used to. The cabinets we took down had not one piece of plywood, chipboard, or particle board anywhere. Even the bulkhead above the cabinets was solid lumber -- a 12' length of cedar to be exact. Good luck finding wood like that today. I've saved the cabinets for use in some future project.
All of the drywall, walls and ceiling, was removed. Keeping the existing ceiling was not really practical since some walls were moving and new electrical was being run. Besides, the ceiling was spackled and France wanted it flat. Andrew helped with this job, too, and what a messy job it was. One side of my garage was filled with pieces of drywall and there was dust everywhere.
We also discovered that there had been water leaking in to the wall beside the garage near the window. This was not good. Some of the timbers were nearly completely rotted away. Not only did those 2x4's need to be replaced, but we needed to be sure that the leak was not still going on. The next rainstorm gave us our answer: It was still leaking. We had to get a roofer in to rip up the shingles where the the garage meets the house and found that whomever had last re-roofed the house had not done a good job. The step-flashing was not installed properly and they had run the shingle under a part of the siding so water would seep in to there, pool up, and leak in to the wall. <sigh> After replacing the flashing, installing a new row of shingles, and adding some sheet-metal at the bottom where the roof meets the siding, the problem was fixed. Before and after pictures of the water entry point are below. This ended up adding two extra weeks to the entire project timeline.
All in all, if there had to be a leak, it couldn't have happened in a better place. The original house plans called for a window there between the counter top and the cabinets. The original owners had decided not to have it installed so even though it was framed for a window, it had simply been filled and bricked over. The upside of all this is that the rotted wood was all cosmetic; they were not part of the load-bearing members of the wall. The massive header above the window distributes the load to the unaffected wood on each side. Thus, I could easily pull out and replace what was there with no concern except how the drywall would mount to it.
Another problem, although this one was known in advance, was that the wall at the top of the stairs was a mechanical wall with a heating duct and water pipes going to the upstairs main bathroom. Since we needed to move that wall back in order to fit the new kitchen, everything had to be squeezed in to a little column of space next to what would remain of the stair landing. We had a professional plumber move the drain pipe, but France and I moved the heating duct ourselves. I added a central vaccuum pipe at the same time (a very tight fit).
The house and all of its rooms are a good size, but not so big as there is any space to waste. We didn't really want a table in the middle of the kitchen because there wasn't quite enough room (and we didn't like the look of it). Without it, though, there was too much open space. An island would be great, but could only be 1' wide and still give the requirements for pathways to either side. It would have looked like an ironing board in the middle of the kitchen. Time to move some walls.
The original house plans had allowed for the washer/dryer to be installed in the kitchen. The owners hadn't done that but had instead used the space as a pantry. By removing that, the adjoining broom closet, and the wall at the top of the stairs, we gained another 2' of width. Opening the wall to the family room (which was only a 1/2 height wall in the original plans) allowed us another 2' of length. Final size: 12' x 14'
We wanted to widen the hallway to the dining room another sixteen inches, too, but that turned out not to be practical because the column at one end is a significant supporting beam and moving it would have been both difficult and expensive.
Also done at this stage was the electrical, including the initial rough-in inspection by the proper authorities. This consists of kitchen lights (4 pot lights, sink and cooktop task lights, cabinet light valance, and the hallway to the dining room), counter top (4 outlets, 3 circuts, 70 amps total -- hey, it's "code"), fridge, microwave, oven, dishwasher, disposal, smoke & gas detectors, and garage (because it had previously been on the same circuit has the kitchen lights). All in all, there is some 240 amps (at 120 volts) of capacity coming to the new kitchen which is somewhat interesting considering that there is only 200 amp service (at 120 volts -- actually 100 amps at 240 volts) to the house. Again, it's "code". The eleven ethernet cables, however, were my own choice. Only five of them go to the kitchen, though. :-)
Drywall is both wonderful and terrible. It's wonderful because it is much, much easier than lathe & plaster but it's still a terrible amount of work! I was originally planning about 1 week to do it all. I'd get some friends to help put it up and maybe do the first coat of mud, and then I'd sand and do the remaining two coats during the week. You can stop laughing now. Four weeks it took me! The first day with friends got only insulation, vapor barrier, and ceiling sheets up. Of course, at this point the roof still hadn't been fixed and so I couldn't insulate or drywall the one wall.
The odd-looking lift you see in the pictures is a drywall lifter rented from Home Depot. You just lay the sheet on the "shelf", tilt it flat and lift it up to the ceiling where you start screwing it in to the joists (or strapping in my case). The two guys helping me are Andrew and Richard. The ceiling is done with four 12' sheets of drywall and it took the three of us an average of one hour each. Sheesh! Doing it again, we could probably do the whole ceiling in well under 2 hours, but we had a lot to learn and an occasional mistake to fix.
It then took me another three weeks, including a couple days of help from Irv to put up some drywall and do a final sanding coat on the ceiling, to finish all of the taping, mudding, and sanding. A full 80kg of drywall mud went on the various joints and some 20+ kg was removed (mostly from the ceiling) with the aid of a drywall sander rented from Home Depot. You might say I was a little over-generous with the amount of mud I applied.
All things considered, it's a good job. There are a few places where I should have had an additional sanding done on them and a spot or two that could have been feathered-out farther. If I were doing it all again, I'd have contracted out the taping/mudding/sanding: The job would have been just as good, perhaps better, and there were other things I could have done with my time. Of course, whatever the next job is will probably be smaller and less significant, so I won't have any real reason but to again do it myself.
One of the big changes in the kitchen is how it joins to the family room which was previously just a standard 30" door from one to the other. By not having wall or counter there, there is more length to work with. Here are some pictures of the new entrance.
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Within a few days of all the painting being finished, the new appliances arrived and they came to install the kitchen. That took two days. It took me three months by this point to get everything ready and then it took one guy two days to install all the cabinets. When he left, there were a few dings in our freshly painted ceiling and a scratch on one cabinet door.
A few notes about the appliances...
The cabinet doors are maple with a red birch stain; very nice. The body of the cabinets, of course, are particle board. It would be nice to have them made with solid lumber like the original cabinets were, but the cost of that would have been obscene.
I wanted a fixture on the ceiling to match the area used on the floor by the island. This would also contain the "task light" for the area. I took the idea from the family room of the house in which I grew up in Elkford, BC. The wood grain (pine) and the stain (cherry) were choosen to match the cabinet doors as closely as possible. Unfortunately, the "knotty" element of the pine somewhat detracts from that effect.
About a week later, they came to install the granite and then we could finish the plumbing and appliances. The kitchen was now completely functional, if still a bit rough around the edges. Whew! See my evaluation of Hawthorne Kitchens here. The beautiful woman in the picture below is my wife who, though we didn't know it at the time the picture was taken, was pregnant with our son, Christophe.
Gone for Christmas. It was actually a couple months before I got back to doing any serious work on the kitchen. There were only a half-dozen or so things to do and the only signficant one was the floor. After a long, drawn-out, and somewhat painful process, we finally settled on glue-down cork flooring. This choice was pushed because our cabinets were already in and doing ceramic tile would have meant adding quarter-round everwhere, including the exposed part of the island. The cork is easy to cut and somewhat flexible so pressed against the cabinets tightly enough that it looks at first glance to go right under. In addition, the cork is softer on the feet and warmer to the touch. No regrets there.
Preparation took a few weeks since the existing vinyl floor had to be stripped. That was pure manual labor: slice the thing to ribbons with a knife and then scrape it up with a trowel. Of course, much of the paper backing stayed glued to the plywood so a solvent ("Foam-Off") was used to loosen it and then it too could be scraped off the same way. The whole house smelled of lemon for weeks. Then came the screws. It's not ceramic tile, but we didn't want any squeaks developing, so I put down screws every 8" (3" ones in to the joists below and 1.5" ones in between) and every 4" where it was previously squeaking. After that, the wood pieces filling places where walls had been were sanded down with a belt-sander to be level with the rest of the floor and the cracks filled with a type of self-levelling cement (and then sanded down again).
With all that done and some help from my sister-in-law's boyfriend, we did all the final finishes to the plywood and layed the cork over a weekend. About 1/2 the time went in to installing the little red inlaid squares (14 of them); 1/3 of the time went to cutting the cork around corners; the remaining 1/6 went to actually placing the cork and pressing it in to place. Then there was four coats of polyurethane and replacing the table leg.
Moving right along... The number of things to do is diminishing rapidly. We chose a tumbled porcelain 4" tile for the backsplash with a "light bone" grout, but then had to wait because we also decided to replace the kitchen window. We might as well get the window replaced first or there is risk of cracked tile. For practice, though, I did the area under the far cupboards.
Here you can also see the "Nero Impala" granite that makes up the counter-top above the cabinets and the island. We elected to use just arborite for the eating area since it would have been another $2,000 or so to finish it in granite. Actually, France and I agree that it looks better this way; more granite would have been "too much".
Another relatively small task was the new door for the basement stairs. We wanted it to somewhat match the cabinets in the kitchen so we picked a pine door with frosted glass and stained it the same way as the task light over the island. For whatever reason, the door wood took the stain more than the other and so is a bit darker that planned. Still looks good, though, and then I was able to put up all the baseboard and door casing.
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Now comes the reason why the kitchen took longer than a full year to be fully completed. Chantecler took 7 (yes, seven) months to deliver the window (the two doors also ordered took even longer). The backsplash sat as the only unfinished piece for all that time. You can read the full, painful story here.
Once that ordeal was finally over, I was able to finish the backsplash. As it turned out, doing a practice run of tile on the small back wall was a mistake. The tile under the window needed to be centered around the window and where they meet in the corner is off by 1/2 a tile. It not really noticable, especially with a toaster oven tucked back there, but the prefectionist in me groans every time I notice it.
Now the kitchen is now completely Done (with a capital "D")! Here is the final result:
