28 August 2011

Kitchen Remodel: One Full Week



It has been a full week. Today is Sunday. Work began last Monday and continued through this afternoon.

Here's the colorful corner where the oven used to be, and will be again some day:


I love this photo compositionally. It shows where the stove hood will vent through the roof:


At this stage the small deck off the kitchen, soon to be enclosed, was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Good thing we hadn't planned a cocktail party for that evening:


Instead, Jer and I entertained ourselves by peeling paint, like sunburn:


One of our minor irritants over the years has been how easily the kitchen walls bruised. Obviously they weren't properly prepped before that bright yellow paint went on. We'll do it right this time.

Despite the amount of stuff the Rebuilding Center is taking off our hands, the dumpster was already full after a couple of days of work. I didn't see it go out, but I'll bet this tile, wherever it came from, must have added a special zing to the kitchen predating ours -- or maybe the one before that:


By Wednesday afternoon, when I last blogged, demo was complete and framing had begun. The impacted areas were almost down to studs, boards and subfloor. Speaking of which, late in the day, we -- by which I mean Steve and Les, the framer -- discovered another artifact of the earlier remodel, in which the kitchen was bumped out over a portion of the deck to create a dining nook: The old decking was still there. This caused some consternation, until we (same "we" as above) discovered that the underlying joists did, in fact, meet code. Whew; major win. The redwood stain is very similar to what Jerry and I chose for the backyard deck we put in.


Deck (left); former deck, a.k.a. dining nook subfloor (right):


Dining nook flooring, seen from below. It was disconcerting to stand in the yard and look up into the kitchen:


Thursday morning, I decided to git outta Dodge. Actually, this was a long-planned three-day excursion to Tacoma with my fiber arts pals. Our plan was to take in the APWQ show, as well as a couple of galleries and museums. We had a great time; I'm sure Gerrie and/or Terry will blog about it soon, if they haven't already.

The highlight of the trip, for me, was the Museum of Glass, especially the hot shop, where visitors can watch molten glass turned into vessels and other objects. I could have spent hours there. As it was, Jerry called in mid-performance; there was another design issue to resolve, this time involving the steps from the kitchen to the garage. I won't bore you with the details; not now, anyway. We worked it out.


By the time I got home last evening, the treacherous rail-less deck was gone. The space is now the southwest corner of our enlarged kitchen. If you look closely at the following pic, you can make out, just to the right of the big square window, the framing for the door that will lead to the new deck and the two corner windows above where the sink will go. All those dangly bits represent plumbing and electrical wiring, most of which will have to be relocated:


Here's what it looks like from the outside:


The other major change in my absence was that the pantry had been framed out to support the extended kitchen floor, eliminating the annoying step down to that area. Note the entombment of the old linoleum, which had lined the bottom of the pantry as well; we've left something for future remodelers to discover. To the left (below) is the base of the old pantry. To the right, the new framing. Beyond that, a sheer drop to the garage floor:


Going from living room to basement kitchen and back, last night and this morning, with occasional forays into the garage: not fun. But the inconvenience was short-lived. By this afternoon (yes, Sunday), the floor was level out through the pantry area:


And we had stairs again, of sorts:


The entire staircase to the basement will have to be rebuilt, and that's going to be a mess, since it'll impinge on our temporary setup downstairs. But that's a few days off. For now, it's navigable, though that first step is a doozy:



4 comments:

Diane (& Dave too!) said...

Hang in there; it'll all come together eventually.

Anonymous said...

Wow, quite a project. it''ll be worth it. hope Sophie doesn't fall down the new stairs...cats are too intelligent for such missteps!

June said...

Great that the code issue wasn't one. And good for you for missing some of the hassle while enjoying the spectacle. What excitement!

Anonymous said...

What? No pictures of animals in the midst of inapprorpriate exploration? It is coming along quite swiftly and looks huge from here, by comparison to what you had before. :-)