Jul
13
Progress
Submitted by jessica on July 13, 2008 - 7:49pm
One month ago it seemed like a burden to do our dishes in the bathtub and cook our meals on our ancient grill and hotplate. But it was all in the name of Updating Our Kitchen, which we've been preparing to do ever since we bought our new dishwasher (which still hasn't been installed) three years ago.
Then we figured out what that smell was coming from underneath the house - it turned out to be our sewer line, leaking into the crawl space! Lucky Joe; he got to shovel six wheelbarrows of poo from underneath the house. We couldn't use any of our sinks or drains while we waited for the plumber to replace our cast iron sewer pipe with a new plastic one, so we stayed at Le Chateau du In-Laws at night and used the toilet at M-Space if we were home during the day.
After four days or so, it was fixed, and now it seemed luxurious to do our dishes in the bathtub. I felt I would never again watch the water swirl down the drain and take for granted that it wasn't collecting in a stagnant pool beneath the house.
Now there's been sufficient progress that I feel compelled to include some before-and-during pictures here.
The kitchen before we started the remodel. Notice the hilarious drywall box above the fridge, and the meandering of the drywall beyond the box:
Here's Matt U. in the box, just for fun. He and Joe completed the demolition in one day:
And here's the same view yesterday.
The box has become a delicate slope to accommodate the staircase, and the meandering has been replaced with a smooth wall. There is a new, lower, half-wall off to the right, where our sink will be instead of our stove. Various newly installed pipes and outlets eagerly await the fridge (with ice-maker!), dishwasher, and sink. The four types of linoleum have been removed and the floor stripped down to its historic 1900 fir, which has again been covered up with plywood.
Today while I did statistics homework, Joe taped and mudded all the seams in the drywall. More updates to follow, I am sure.
Jul
28
Kitchen Update
Submitted by jessica on July 28, 2008 - 6:58pm
More progress this weekend, due to Joe and his parents' hard work.
First, there was painting to be done. We used low-VOC paint due to my delicate condition, and there were only a few color choices, so my vision of a mustard-colored kitchen morphed into an orange one.
Here's Joe scraping the last remnants of carpet - carpet! - off the old fir/plywood floor in preparation to sand down the hump on that side of the room.
And then the cabinets went in! And the microwave/hood!
There were only a few small glitchettes. The little wall we built was both not tall enough and not long enough. By about 1". So Joe had to move all his pretty outlets up higher. And we'll have to do something about the dishwasher sticking out a little bit past the wall.
