A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

The final step of the kitchen renovation was installing the tile backsplash. This was a job that I was pretty sure I could tackle by myself. I did a lot of research on the subject and nothing really seemed beyond my capabilities. It would be the first home renovation (involving cutting things) I would take on completely by myself (note: Michelle helped with the grouting).

Michelle and I liked the look of travertine (a type of stone) the best after shopping around many different stores. Surprisingly enough the stuff we liked the most was from The Home Depot. The only problem was that there were stocking issues with the stone and it was not available through a special order. Annoyingly we had to check back at the store regularly to see if they had received any (or found some that they had lost). We ended up having to buy the 42 square feet we needed over two separate occasions as they received shipments. This put our plans of getting the tile installed right away a little out of whack.

We borrowed a wet saw from one of Michelle’s colleagues and I was underway. My plan was to get the tile on the wall over a Saturday and Sunday, and then grout one night during the week. I was calling this my best case scenario which I was sure was not going to hold.

As expected, my Saturday wasn’t as productive as I was hoping since Michelle’s dad and uncle stopped by to start work on putting in a cabinet outlet for the microwave. This chewed up a good chunk of my afternoon. Sunday however went quite well and I probably could have finished, but I thought it would be safer if I stopped. I was super tired and figured I would start making stupid mistakes….like cutting off my fingers.

The grouting didn’t go exactly as we were hoping. A day after applying the grout I noticed some problem areas that had cracks and small pinholes. I wasn’t sure what to do about these and started to get quite worried. After some reading and talking to some friends I just decided to repair the problem areas with the help of a grout saw and fresh grout. It appears to have worked.

After letting the grout cure for a few days I moved on to the final step of sealing the travertine and applying a silicone caulk around the backspash perimeter. Even though I finished this up late on a Thursday night I decided to clean the kitchen and put it back together. I was tired of it being out of commission for the last week and a half. Plus I wanted to wake up to something nice.

Here’s what I learned about installing the tile:

• Wet saws are extremely messy and spray water in your face.
• My knowledge of the Imperial System is terrible, making measuring my cuts go slowly.
• Cutting the stone around 7 electrical outlets/switches, 6 cabinet overhangs, and a window takes very precise measuring.
• Pre-mixed mastic adhesive should actually be sticky. The first stuff I bought was dried out, but I wasn’t quite sure since I had never seen the stuff before.
• Installing 40 square feet of backsplash is a lot, and is hard on your back.
• The mixing instructions on the grout package are not even close to correct.
• Using your fingers to smooth grout lines between travertine tears your skin apart.
• Packing grout between porous and ragged edges of the tiles is extremely difficult.
• Applying silicone caulk sucks.
• The feeling of accomplishment after the job is pretty cool.

You can see more shots of the tile install, and the “after” pictures on my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Backsplash Install Thumbnails
• Backsplash Install Slideshow
• The “After” Thumbnails
• The “After” Slideshow

Even though our cabinets had been installed our kitchen was still in an unusable state since we were now waiting on the countertops to be built and installed. Because the dimensions can change during the cabinet install, the counters cannot be built until a final measurement is made.

Pristine Countertops showed up a couple days after the cabinet install to take measurements. We were under the understanding that it would be a couple days for them to build and come to install the counters. Michelle decided to call J&H Builders to find out when the install would actually happen and it seemed that we couldn’t get a straight answer. After being redirected to Pristine, we were told it would be late the following week.

By the time we reached the middle of next week we still hadn’t heard from Pristine so Michelle decided to find out what was up. After getting bounced around a bit we were told that it likely wouldn’t be until the following week. Michelle found this unacceptable and convinced them to reconsider. They agreed to install Friday morning.

The guys showed up early Friday morning and had the counters installed within three hours. We were ecstatic to clean the kitchen and get everything moved out of the living room and back to where it belonged. We could now start putting the final touches on the kitchen.

My first task was to install the over the range microwave. I looked over a installation video on the Panasonic website on how to do this. It made it sound really complicated so I was a little worried as to my ability to do it. I decided to dive in anyway.

As it turned it was way easier than I was anticipating. We hadn’t installed an electrical outlet in the above cabinet yet so we were hoping to just be able to run the cord to an outlet just below. This plan didn’t pan out so we will have to install the outlet sooner rather than later. An extension cord will have to make do for the time being.

Michelle’s uncle Ray showed up at the tail end of the microwave install to see what would be required for the sink install. He put together a shopping list for me so I could make a trip to Home Depot before tackling the plumbing the following morning.

Ray arrived late Saturday morning and we immediately got to work. He mentioned earlier that he was having some painful back issues so he was going to have me do the work as he coached me. I wasn’t sure if he was serious about this, but as it turned out he was. He directed me through 9/10ths of the plumbing work and installation of the sink and faucet. I had no idea how any of this stuff worked prior to this, but with his instruction I now have a pretty solid foundation for future work in this down this path. As the old saying goes,

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

The work took a little longer than I was expecting, but that can likely be chalked up to me going slowly as I was taught Kitchen Plumbing 101. We managed to have a working faucet and sink by the end of the day with minimal glitches encountered along the way.  (Hey…that was like a poem).

The kitchen was pretty messy after the day’s work, and even though I was totally wiped I wanted to get everything cleaned up so we could have an actual working kitchen. Under all of the sawdust and ABS pipe shavings Michelle presents what was hiding.

Following admiring our new kitchen, the three weeks of renovations finally overcame me and I made my way to the nearest couch and collapsed. I could cherish the next few weeks of a normal household until we tackled the final step of tiling the backsplash, and fixing the completely out of place light fixture.

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

• Microwave Install Thumbnails on Flickr
• Microwave Install Slideshow on Flickr
• Plumbing Thumbnails on Flickr
• Plumbing Slideshow on Flickr
• Final Product Thumbnails on Flickr
• Final Product Install Slideshow on Flickr

After seeing our kitchen in a near finished state, Michelle and I decided that we would prefer to buy new appliances sooner, rather than later. We were planning on holding off buying a new refrigerator for at least a year, but once we saw how ours looked in the new kitchen, that plan went out the window. We had the fridge area built with a counter-depth fridge in mind, and we really didn’t like how far our current one stuck out past the counter. Plus we left an opening for a 36″ fridge, so our 28″ one looked a little ridiculous.

So the plan for the weekend quickly switched gears as we found ourselves running around to the many appliance stores in Saskatoon. The plan was to purchase a fridge, a dishwasher, and an over-the-range microwave. We left the stove upgrade until a future date since we want to make the switch to gas. This just didn’t seem like the time for that.

We focused our attention on the fridges, and narrowed our search down to three models. As it turned out, counter-depth fridges are a premium, and are few and far between. They are typically only made by some of the higher-end manufactures so that sucked. I still find it weird that they are more expensive than standard depth fridges even though their capacity is typically five cubic feet smaller.

I was kind of hung up on keeping the three appliances to be the same manufacturer. Michelle was not. We came down to two setups and got the salesman at Coast Wholesale Appliance to price out the two options. Our plan was to pick the cheaper of the two. As it turned out they worked out to be within $30 of each other. No help there.

We decided to leave and sleep on it. As we were leaving we remembered that Saskatoon Appliance had another location in the area so we decided to head over there. We had the saleslady their price out our two options just to see if there would be a difference. I kind of felt bad because the guy at Coast spent a lot of time with us. I figured if the quotes were only a little cheaper at Saskatoon Appliance we would still by from Coast.

Well as it turned out Saskatoon Appliance beat Coast by almost $1000 dollars on both setups. My loyalty to the Coast salesman faded pretty quickly and we ordered our appliances. We really liked a fridge from Fisher & Paykel. I also really liked one of their dishwashers. It is a two drawer system that lets you run two loads separately. Michelle wasn’t as impressed as me, but I managed to convince her. The company doesn’t make microwaves so we went with a Panasonic that seemed to match alright.

If you’re interested, you can read more about what we went with.

• Fisher & Paykel French Door Refrigerator
• Fisher & Paykel Double DishDrawer
• Panasonic Over the Range Microwave

Who would have thought that shopping for appliances could eat away an entire day. We spent nearly 10 hours flying from one end of the city to the other in search of the perfect fit for our kitchen. Now hopefully our new toys arrive soon so we can get our new kitchen completed. I’m also looking forward to the “new” beer fridge we get to put down in the basement.

There was no way I was tackling trying to install a kitchen. As comical an event it would have been, and as entertaining a blog post it would have produced, having all of the cabinets come crashing to the ground did not seem desirable. Luckily a friend of ours Wade (of J.J. and Wade fame), actually installs kitchens for a living. Hiring him seemed like a much better idea.

Wade and one of his guys showed up late Monday morning and got right to work. I filled them in on some pertinent information and then got the hell out of their way. I took off for the office and left the guys to do what they do. When I got back at around 5pm, I couldn’t believe how much they had actually accomplished. The majority of the cabinets were up and you could really start to see the kitchen taking form.

Once again I got out of their way and hung out in the home office. I peeked my head into the kitchen every once in a while between loud “construction type” sounds. The guys worked pretty late into the evening before calling it a night. Apparently everything went more-or-less smoothly throughout the day.

Since they traveled in from Regina, Wade and Tyler just stayed at our place. They were back up and working early Tuesday morning after Michelle and I left for work. When we returned at the end of the day they were just wrapping up the trim and some of the other more cosmetic stuff.

I got a kick out of some statistics they were keeping throughout the day. On the top of one of the lower cabinets they had written a tally of how many times two songs had played on one of Saskatoon’s terrible radio stations, Wired 96.3.

• Dead & Gone by T.I. - 9 times
• Low by Flow Rida featuring T-Pain - 9 times

Apparently the day didn’t go quite as “by-the-book” as the previous day as they had to make use of their ingenuity to get some stuff to work out. Everything looked pretty awesome to me so obviously they made some good decisions. They were hoping to wrap things up by around 4pm, but ended up working until after 9 before actually getting on the road back to Regina.

Michelle and I were super happy with how the kitchen looked so far. The only thing I was worried about from the design was how much floor space there was going to be with the cabinets around three walls. As it turned out I was worrying about nothing since it turned out great.

Now we just have to wait for the countertop to be installed. The guys showed up Wednesday to take measurements, but would likely not be able to install for at least a week. We were obviously hoping they would be done within a few days since not having a kitchen sink really sucks. Eating out is starting to get old.

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

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr

The weekend arrived and that marked the beginning of the actual work for the kitchen renovation. Michelle and I spent Friday night emptying the kitchen in preparation for the demo on Saturday. After a little deliberation we decided to dump everything into the living room We figured we could deal with losing that room for a few days. You can see the initial clutter of our kitchen below.

And after we moved everything out of there, it didn’t look too bad. Very deceiving.

The living room on the other hand was a complete disaster. I wasn’t too sure how I would be able to handle this for the next few days. However I was happy that everything was able to fit in the living room alone. I was really hoping to keep as many rooms as unaffected as possible.

Early Saturday morning the kitchen arrived. I was thinking we would be able to fit all of the boxes in the dining area, but when I saw the truck I knew that would be impossible. The only feasible place to store everything was the garage.  I was really hoping the installers wouldn’t mind hauling everything in as they needed it.

Michelle’s dad arrived not too much later and we started to rip the kitchen apart. I was rather pleased that everything came out without too much trouble. The lower cabinet turned out to be the only thing that wasn’t salvageable.

This was my first foray into demolishing a room in a house and it turned out to be not too bad. My only regret is that I didn’t get to use any dynamite, let alone a sledgehammer. Maybe next time.

With the kitchen being totally cleared out we were now able to start the electrical work. You can seem more pictures from the day on my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr

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