A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

The one thing Michelle and I really dislike about our house is the kitchen. It’s not ugly or anything, but it just lacks counter and cupboard space. We’re limited to about 4 square feet of counter space to work with, and our cupboards hold about half of our kitchen stuff. Shortly after moving into the house a little over a year ago we decided that our first big project would be to redothe kitchen.

We checked out a few places to do a custom design and we ended up going with J&H Builders. We met with one of their designers, told them what we wanted, and after a few drafts we were happy with what she had come up with. We put down our deposit and placed the order. We were told it would be about six weeks for everything to be built.

As it turned out everything was ready in about four weeks and we hadn’t started any of the prep such as doing electrical work, or purchasing the hardware such as sink, faucet, and pulls. Plus we hadn’t arranged a date with our installer. So we found ourselves scrambling.

First step was to add some electrical outlets on one side of the kitchen. Michelle’s dad came over last Sunday and we checked out what we were working with. Nothing to complicated here, but it would require me to drill some holes in the 2×8 beams in the basement ceiling to run the wire from the breaker box across the house and up to the kitchen. Michelle’s dad told me it would be messy and tiring. I believed the messy part, but I didn’t buy that it would be tiring.

For those of you who know me, I’ve never really been exposed to this type of work before so drilling 15 or so 1″ holes through these 2×8 beams was not on my resume. So only after I started drilling my first hole did I realize how much this was going to suck. Michelle’s dad was telling no lie when he said it was going to be tiring.  I figured it would be faster for me to construct a 5 megawatt laser than to continue drilling.At first I just thought my drill or bit sucked, but then I realized it was probably my technique. After fiddling with my stance, I managed to get fairly proficient at making holes. The real difficulty was how awkward it was in many areas to work around ducts, and all sorts of other crap.

About two hours later I finally managed to get the holes drilled and Michelle and I started the cleanup stage. It felt good to get phase one completed in our journey to a new kitchen. Next phase: wiring the outlets with Michelle’s dad. I’m not tackling this one by myself. I like our house when it’s not engulfed in flames.

You can check out more photos on my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr