Kitchen remodel progress was put on hold this week, everyone got quite sick. E got sick, L got sick, Mike got sick, the electrician got sick, and finally I got sick and wound up at the doctor. We all decided to pause on the work, rather than keep giving sickness to each other.
The end of last week showed great improvement. All the walls are up, the ceiling was patched, the cutout to the living was constructed, and by the time Friday rolled around everything had mud and tape.
Next order of business is to sand everything and replace sections of the subfloor damaged by water.
This is so exciting I have to post mid-afternoon. After two and a half years of living with a half demolished side wall, we now have a wall and ceiling.
Our contractor friend, Mike, started yesterday morning. The first order of business was to survey the state of affairs, and then start building out the little eat-in bar wall. When he took out the sheetrock, we discovered that the previous owners had chewed off the bottom two inches of the support beams, to make more headroom in the walkway between the kitchen and the family room. You can see it in the top right of this photo:
We are hoping to put a small countertop on the built out wall. Mike is going to put in a support post when the wall is built out, to prevent the beam from sagging any more than the 1/8″ it’s already begun to sag.
After spending the first day doing a lot of planning and deciding, he and E called it a day and I arrived home from work to face the evening’s task. Yes, we scraped the 1980s popcorn ceiling.
We had seen a lot of DIY jobs call for wetting the popcorn using everything from hot water to a 10:1 vinegar and water solution. None of this would work for us as the popcorn had been painted with enamel, effectively sealing it from any tampering. We decided to do it dry, and bought one of these:
Mike showed us how easily the popcorn came off with a putty knife, which gave us the idea to do a straight scrape and sand job. After scraping the bulk of the popcorn off, we went through with pole sanders and sanded down the remnants. The result was a ceiling that looked only slightly textured. We are very pleased, and the whole job including taping off the entryways with plastic sheeting took three hours.
Though we’ve been great sports about living in a state of remodel in our 1960s project ranch house, L is getting to an age where it’s become imperative that we live in a safe home. We decided to bring in a contractor to solve some of the problems outside our range of ability. Our friend’s father has been a general contractor for ages, and gave us a great and affordable quote.
The first and main project is to finish the kitchen, which I posted about here.
This first photo shows how we’ve lived for two years now, after gutting the cabinets on the first day we moved in, and discovering they were built straight into the beams of the attic (even before the sheetrock was put in). God knows how much money we’ve wasted on heating and cooling, with just plastic sheets covering the demo area. This was one of those situations where we vowed we would finish it immediately, and then got married and pregnant. Time has flown by.
More of the “before” photos:
The first task at hand was to get rid of the awful painted paneling, which used to have nasty teal scalloped fringe around the top.
The sheetrock is in decent shape, but on the left side, adhesive was used and came off tearing the sheetrock in squiggly lines. Depending on how much our contractor friend says it will cost for extra mud and tape, we are considering beadboard.
By the time midnight rolled around, we had ripped out the rest of the paneling, the upper cabinets, backsplash, and sheetrock and beams above the upper cabinets. The rest of the sheetrock was in surprisingly good condition, and already had mud and tape.
We set up our makeshift kitchen (sans sink and stove) in our front family room, using butcher’s racks, our discontinued IKEA Udden tables, and two older IKEA Varde butcher block freestanding kitchen counter units, positioned back to back.
Work starts this morning, we’re hoping for the best.
Our washing machine managed to rust out the bottom just as water started backing up into the garage even moreso than it has been. We scored a new Whirlpool washer and dryer from Craigslist for $300, and called the sewer/drainage guy recommended to us by our plumber.
He went on the side of the house and the roof, and snaked all our pipes with one of those 50-100 foot snakes with a camera on the end. The things that bubbled out of the water orifices of the house after he used the high pressure blaster were just filthy.
The conclusive findings pointed to a bad pipe job located right before the main drain stack. There is an indented section of pipe that has been collecting debris for ages, and has caused everything to drain slowly and back up over the course of the last few years. It apparently finally reached its pinnacle.
There is a ninety day warranty on the drain job, so it’s up to us to call our plumber and get that section of pipe fixed. We think our house used to be a rent house some years before we bought it, which would explain the kitchen grease poured down the kitchen sink, among other things.
