From Cabinets to Countertops!

We're entering the home stretch, and soon we'll be able to cook again!  Last week started with finishing all the trim details and hardware on the cabinets.  Then it was on to test-fitting the appliances to make sure they would integrate correctly.  In the last post there was a big plywood cutout of the planned shape of the granite top for the island.  The next step was to test-install the cooktop in order to get the placement down.  Here it is, with all its foam bumpers still attached.

I've grown fond of flat electric cooktops, and this is the first time we've had one that's not attached to an oven below.  The placement of the cooktop in the middle of the island was inspired by one of my favorite kitchens to cook in, at Beth's aunt Peg's house in Maine.  It's going to be great to be able to talk to people sitting at the island while I'm cooking, and not be antisocial, facing a wall in the corner.  Another upside of this design is that we can store most of our pots and pans in the cabinet right below the cooktop.

The challenge is venting the cooktop.  The silver strip behind it is a pop-up downdraft hood, which will take care of this problem.  This necessitates a bit of extra infrastructure on the back side of the island, as shown in the next picture.

This is the test-fit of the pop-up downdraft.  You can see a bit of cabinet modification was necessary.  The placement of the whole island all needed to work out perfectly for the vent pipe going down to fall exactly between two floor joists, so that the blower motor would mount correctly, tucked up into the basement ceiling.  From there, the vent pipe goes along the basement ceiling and out the side of the house.

Looking along the island in the other direction, you can see the glass cabinets mounted in the pass-through to the dining room.  I made a mistake in calculating the size of the opening for the pass-though, and nobody else caught it, so we made the opening too tall.  What happened is that I had been measuring down from the top of the cabinets in the original plans, and forgotten that when the tray ceiling was being framed in, we found an extra few inches of room from what was on the plans (due to all the false ceilings we found during the demolition phase).  At that point, we decided to go with cabinets that were 6 inches taller, and I totally spaced out on how that would affect the size of the pass-through.  The end result is that we had to add in a trim board along the top of the glass cabinets to fill in the gap, and it all looks good in the end.  Almost like we did it on purpose!

On the other side where it hasn't been covered up yet, you can see all the 2x4s we used to fill in the gap.  This side is going to look pretty raw until I get the hutch built (hopefully by the end of the summer!).  When it's done, there will be a wood counter reaching through the pass-through, and an arch under the glass cabinets.  My goal is that it will all look like a nice piece of built-in furniture from this side when it's done.

Tile was also installed this past week in the bathroom and back hall.  The back hall tile was covered up quickly to prevent damage, but the bathroom is almost done and even has plumbing again!

But the MOST exciting part is that the granite countertops just arrived.  Here's the same view toward the dining room shown above, this time with granite!

The granite is called Verdi Butterfly, it comes from eastern Brazil, and unlike many things sold as "granite" in the kitchen stores, it's almost a true granite (monzonite if you want to get technical).  It's got nice color variations without being too loud, and it looks dynamite next to our cherry-stained cabinets.  Being a geologist, I needed real stone in the kitchen.  Close up, it's mostly big yellow-green feldspar crystals, which can sometimes look dark green, but glint a golden color in bright light.  The closeup below shows lots of white quartz filling in the voids between the feldspars, and a bunch of deep wine-colored garnets.  The garnets are especially beautiful in the sunlight, which is something that attracted me to this stone in the first place.

I should be honest, the stone I was most attracted to was an amazing slab of graphic granite I saw at the Granite Exchange, but it was several times more expensive, and I would have had trouble getting out the door in the morning because I would be lost staring at it.  The stone we ended up with is a bit more sedate, and that's probably a good thing.

The back of the island is now sealed up with the ductwork inside, and brackets screwed into a couple of interior studs to support the big granite overhang on the back.

With the countertops on and the appliances in (though still wrapped in plastic), it's starting to look like a real kitchen again.  We just got water back today, and hopefully tomorrow we'll have electricity.  Then it's painting, floor finishing, and we'll be done!

Beginning of cabinet installation

Running behind on posting to this blog!  Here's the post I meant to put up last week...

First off, some more trim work has been going on, running the baseboards around the room, finishing door frames...  Here's a shot of the back stairs with their new treads, trim, and the hardwood strip around the edge.  The subfloor now has backing material for the tile that's going to be installed by the back door.

All those boxes in the previous post were full of cabinets!  Here's a shot of the cabinets being installed by the door to the dining room.  Our old side hutch is becoming a new side hutch and small utility closet, with a lot more pantry storage space.  The gap in the middle will have a small countertop for fruit bowls, music system, etc.

Rotating to the left, the other corner on this side of the kitchen is getting some standard cabinets.  I'm particularly un-fond of deep corner cabinets where you lose things forever.  So the upper corner cabinet is a clever design that the manufacturer calls "easy-reach" which has overlapping shelves coming from both directions in an L-shaped cabinet, with a folding L-shaped door.  The "dead space" in the bottom corner is where there's an opening through the dining room wall so that I can use that corner to store table leaves and a hanging tablecloth rack, accessed through a cabinet door in the dining room that will open into a TARDIS-like space.

Continuing to rotate around the room, this next corner is where the oven and fridge are going.  Getting this whole bank of cabinets to play nicely together was tricky, because we're trying to maximize our storage space and not have any useless, inaccessible dead space.  Tony spent the entire first day of cabinet installation with a tape measure and calculator, figuring and re-figuring how to do it, and where spacers needed to be added.  On the one hand, if there was too much space on the right side, the cabinets in the middle would overlap the side window frame, and the left-most cabinet drawers would bash into the frame of the back window.  On the other hand, if there was too much space on the left side, you wouldn't be able to open the drawers of the right-most cabinets without running into the drawer handles of the adjacent bank.  It all came down to the placement of a crucial 1/8" gap, which made it all work out perfectly in the end.  During this painstaking process, he found an "extra" 3 inches  next to the window which is allowing us to replace one of the too-narrow upper cabinet boxes with one that is a more comfortable size.  The other fun part was making all the tops of the cabinets line up -- while the new ceiling is level, the old subfloor is not.  Tony and Mike figured out the optimal set of shimming and shaving of toe-kicks to make everything turn out straight, level, and with enough room for our Scooba floor-mopping robot to get underneath the toe-kicks.

The island in the middle of the kitchen is turning out very nicely.  They cut out a plywood top as a temporary measure to make sure that all the dimensions worked out before the slab of granite gets cut.  It's a good thing, because as we tested it out, we found that we were going to need another 4 inches of granite hanging off the back in order to comfortably pull a stool up and sit at the back side of the island.

Since I like to do things in a non-standard fashion...  I ordered these double-sided cabinets with glass doors to put into the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room.  It's not how these cabinets were intended to be used by the manufacturer, so before we hang them up, we're attaching extra lumber to their tops to give them more stiffness, and gluing their sides firmly together to make a single, hanging cabinet bank.  Here's the boxes as they were clamped and waiting for all the glue to dry.  In the next post you'll see them take shape in their proper position!

When do we get to open the presents?

The beginning of last week started with a delivery truck dropping off all our new appliances.  It will be a while until they are installed, but the carpenters don't quite trust what the spec sheets say in terms of the exact dimensions needed, and they want to be able to see them in person.  So a whole bunch of boxes filled up one corner of the dining room.  At the end of last week, all the cabinetry was delivered from the cabinet factory, also in boxes.  It was like two whole rooms full of Christmas presents!  Here's the dining room:

And here's the kitchen:

The kitchen is partly covered in plastic because we realized that this was out last chance to roll on ceiling paint and wall primer without the complication of having to go around the cabinets.  So that's what I did all weekend...

A bunch of trim work got done last week in between the deliveries.  The banged-up basement stair tread from the last post was replaced with a new oak tread.  Notably, the crown moulding around the inside of the tray ceiling went up:

It may not look too exciting yet (as white on white) but suddenly the room has a more finished look.  (and suddenly got harder to paint)  That piece of crown is going to be hiding a rope light which will give us an indirect glow off the ceiling when the mood dictates.

The last of the old bathroom floor and the last of the back hall floor went away.  These were the hard-to-cut-out parts, like the part wedged under the back door threshold.  I had no idea how they were going to get that out because it's hard to wedge a circular saw in next to the sloping metal threshold.  The guys got out a thing I hadn't seen before called a Fein saw, and once I saw it in action I knew this was an amazing tool that I need in my arsenal someday.  It worked like a sawzall but it could dip straight into the floor in exactly the way that a sawzall can't.  Another hard-to-get piece of floor was the chunk under the bathroom radiator.  They solved it by just hanging the radiator in mid-air, half a centimeter above the old floor:

The last thing you want to do is mess with unhooking and reconnecting a radiator that's already working just fine.  It seems that everyone who knows how to do that correctly is well past retirement.  Several years ago we had to have a radiator repaired, and the furnace guys called in their "specialist," an ancient and distinguished old gentleman who came hobbling into the house very slowly, leaning heavily on his cane.  I don't know if he still even makes house calls, so this radiator will hang there like that until the tile goes in.

The radiator we really weren't going to mess with was the big kitchen radiator:

We just left the original floor under it and put the hardwood up against the old linoleum.  In a couple of weeks we're going to be building a custom radiator cover to go over this, so you will never see this piece of old floor (unless you're fixing the radiator for some reason).  I've got a pile of images of arts-and-crafts style radiator covers, and we're designing something that will look good here.  Eventually a countertop will go over this, and it will become the breakfast nook part of the kitchen.

This week we get to open the presents!

New floor!

Yesterday the last of the old linoleum floor was torn out of the kitchen.  (except for a small piece under the big steam radiator because we don't want to move the radiator, and it'll be covered up by the radiator box we're building)  Once the floor was gone, Mike (the lead carpenter) found that the subfloor boards in the original house (the board running vertical in the picture below) weren't quite at the same level as the very uneven subfloor boards in the addition (the boards running horizontal under the window).  This becomes an issue when deciding which way the boards are going to run in the new hardwood floor in the kitchen.

The problem with this is that the hardwood floor in the rest of the house runs perpendicular to the original subfloor, which is parallel to the addition subfloor, and parallel to the transition between the two subfloors.  If we ran the new hardwood in the kitchen parallel to the hardwood in the rest of the house, Mike said that the uneven subfloor in the addition would cause a "hump" in the floor that the new boards would separate along, and we'd have a gap open up in the floor over time right where the addition meets the original house.  This wasn't a problem on the old floor because there was about three layers of plywood spanning the gap, with the linoleum on top covering up all the sins.  If we run the new hardwood perpendicular to the rest of the hardwood in the house, it would span the gap, even out the hump, and have the additional bonus of spreading the weight of our new kitchen island more evenly across the joists in the basement ceiling.

So we have to make some kind of transition between the old and new hardwood floors, since they're running perpendicular to each other.  This was already an issue anyway because the kitchen hardwood is going to be all sealed up and glossy, so it will have a slightly different sheen than the adjacent old floor in the dining room.  The solution was to put in a wide transition strip in the kitchen / dining room doorway, with strips of mahogany, to visually break things up between the old and new floors.  In the image below you can see the transition strips installed, with a tiny glimpse of the old dining room floor peeking out from under its protective cover.  After the new floor is finished it should bring out more of the rich colors of the oak and mahogany.

The kitchen is starting to look fabulous with the new floor!

I missed talking to anyone on the job today when I got home from work, but my guess is that those two darker patches on the floor are where they spread some extra poly underneath where the dishwasher and refrigerator are going to go, before the cabinet boxes come in a week from now.

Another small conundrum came up when the linoleum was ripped out of the landing next to the back door.  The top tread of the basement stairs was under that linoleum, and it's this weird red-painted board.  I think it's made out of soft pine based on the grain showing through the paint and the character of the mashed-up front of the stair tread.

I really don't want to mess with the basement stairs which are currently covered in an old gray carpet, and I'd like to leave them that way, thank you.  I'm pretty sure that the carpet isn't attached to this tread, and this board is too mashed up to keep.  I think this weekend curiosity will get the better of me, and I'll get out the pry bar and take it off so that we can think fresh about the transition from the back door area (in the scope of the project) to the basement stairs (out of scope).

Weeks 4 and 5: The calm before the storm

The fourth week of the project was pretty quiet except for the first day.  A big crew of plasterers showed up and coated everything.  It was fun watching the lead guy walking on half-stilts while he was doing the ceiling.  Here's the scene from the dining room side after they were done:

... and the view from inside the kitchen:

It's starting to look like a real room again!   But then we had to leave it alone for a few days to let the plaster dry.  Not very exciting blog material.

This current week has started slow but is rapidly picking up speed.  There was a delay in the shipment of our cabinets (probably our fault due to a change in decision), so we're trying to check off a few things that can be done before the cabinet boxes show up.  The first thing is to trim the windows and doors and start work on the baseboards, and the final thing is to rip out the old floor.  They were keeping the old floor as long as possible to absorb all the abuse.  Plus, without it you can see down into the basement which is a bit freaky (and a bit sawdusty for the basement). 

 Here's the current state of the window trim and the old floor removal.  You can see where the old addition starts because the subfloor suddenly changes directions.

The back steps also got an upgrade today from the temporary treads to nice thick (5/4) oak treads.  The trim is mostly done around the steps, and the new hardwood floor is going to com up to meet this area.  We're also building in a shoe storage box through the wall to the right.  (not cut yet)

Also today a big pile of hardwood floor boards showed up.  The floor is scheduled to go in next Monday, and then half the appliances show up (the ones that need to get integrated into cabinets), and then the cabinet boxes hopefully will be in by the end of next week.  Fingers crossed!

Weeks 3 and 4: Infrastructure and Insulation

A long span between blog posts, as I traveled around to various meetings around the country ... But now back home to see the progress!

Week 3 was all about putting in the rough electrical wires and plumbing while the walls were still opened up and easily accessible.  We had to make some decisions about lightswitch placement, plugs, etc.  The canister lights went into the new ceiling:

And the new bathroom fan was installed:

Meanwhile, the old back steps were torn out and temporary treads were put in before they get replaced to match the new floor.

It was a little scary seeing straight down through the temporary steps into the basement the first time I encountered these!  It got really cold outside for several days right around this time (half a foot of snow in April!), and with the bare walls and wind whistling in the vented roof, the kitchen space almost got down to freezing.  (it's sealed off from the rest of the house right now)  I guess it's lucky there's no running water in there right now.

Then I was off to California for week 4, during which all the inspections for rough plumbing, framing, and rough electrical work took place.  Then it was time to insulate it and make it warm and cozy again!

Fiberglass wall insulation got rolled in between the studs.

Then a thick layer of closed cell foam insulation was sprayed onto the inside of the roof extension, permanently sealing off all the air leaks that we'd been having problems with.

Finally, the wallboard was hung, and it's about ready for plastering.  It almost looks like a kitchen again!  You can see the plumbing stub for the new sink coming out of the wall under where the new pass-through to the dining room is going, and you can see various wires sticking out for under counter lighting, the cove lighting in the tray ceiling, and the new switches and plugs.

Week 2: Lots of new lumber

I was gone to a meeting in Houston all week, and came back to find lots of new lumber added to my house!

They decided to completely take down the wall between the dining room and kitchen, because the old studs were in terrible shape from former jobs that had cut them off in random places, and the wall was going to need a lot of modifications anyway.  Easier to start fresh!  You can see a couple things taking shape in this wall: the doorway on the far left (in the same place where it was before), the big opening for the glass cabinets and the pass-through, and the funny little opening in the bottom right.  What is that for?  I hate deep corner cabinets because stuff always gets lost in the far back where you can't reach, and lazy susans in corners irritate me because something is always falling off the back and jamming it up.  So my plan is to have no corner cabinet in the kitchen, and instead the unassuming lower right cabinet door in the dining room hutch will have a TARDIS-like opening that goes back and back... allowing me to mount big sliding rails on which to put Grandpa Ed's old table-leaf storage box that we rescued from the Ames house.  Then when we need to extend the dining room table before lots of guests arrive, we'll just open up the cabinet, pull a handle, and boom -- all the table leaves conveniently stored in one out-of-the-way place.  That's the plan anyway, we're still a ways from execution!

The other big new feature is the framing for the new ceiling.

We can't raise the ceiling on the old kitchen extension because of the joists helping to hold up the roof, so instead we're taking advantage of all our newfound ceiling height in the form of a raised tray ceiling in the middle of the kitchen.  I must say that I was slightly dubious when Paul (our kitchen designer) showed us this idea on paper, but standing underneath it gives an enhanced feeling of spaciousness that I didn't expect.

A lot of the new lumber went in to solve structural issues that we found when the walls and ceiling came down.

For example, a bunch of the studs next to the side window didn't actually connect to the floor, and it appeared that a lot of the weight in this corner of the house was resting on the window frame.  So a lot of new framing has been put in to shore up that corner and distribute the weight around the window.

We had an engineer in last week, and we were not going to get away with the thin beam that had been holding the weight over the kitchen extension, so a new beam went in to take its place, and they doubled up new wood next to the substandard joists that connect to the roof extension.

Finally, a new post went in between the bathroom door and the door to the back stairs, in order to transfer the load of this end of the beam directly down to the foundation wall.  Everything looks much thicker and sturdier now!