As I said, from this point on, we finished the rest of the kitchen in less than 48 hours. I was able to fit the door casings, do the rest of the cabinets and countertops, wire the range vent hood, and lay the thresholds at the edge of the door frames.
There are a few things left to do, like replace the ugly teal ceiling fan, original to the house. IKEA was also out of stock on the large doors needed for the stove side cabinet, so we’re going without for a few weeks. On the big bare wall above the sink, we will most likely do some open shelving.
We simply snapped some iPhone photos and uploaded them to Flickr, mainly because we are burnt out. We rushed and rushed to get this whole thing done by the time L’s birthday party rolled around. Now, I don’t want to turn another screw, take another photo, wire another fixture, or even look at the resultant mess of tools and scrap wood in the garage for at least a few weeks. The ceiling fan will get to have its last hurrah.
Overall, we’re quite thrilled so far.
It’s hard to believe that at this time last year we were in the throes of doctor trips and hospital preparations. It was all very nerve-wracking, mostly for me. E seemed to have a calm about her that I envied. I don’t think I calmed down and was able to sleep without worrying, until L was a few months old. After E’s labor, I had a huge new respect for women who give birth.
We had a small party for L on Sunday, some friends and relatives came, most with their children. The party was a resounding success, and what really struck both of us was what a great home we have now that most of the construction is finished.
L didn’t like the cupcakes at all, most likely because they were a lot more sweet than the bananas and sweet potatoes he’s used to.
It’s been a whirlwind weekend, with my mother visiting for L’s first birthday party, and finishing the entirety of the kitchen in roughly two days. I haven’t been this tired or poorly rested since L was two months old.
I had put together enough of the cabinets that I got my time down to ten minutes per cabinet. Despite that, it took me three hours to do the uppers, mainly due to a shitty studfinder that turned the whole stud finding process into a comedy of errors. It began with knocking on the wall to listen for solid areas, and ended with four unneeded drill holes through studless drywall. I finally got pissed off enough that I went to Home Depot and dropped $30 on a studfinder that actually worked. After working on cars, houses, electronics, and everything in between, I’ve found that 80% of fixing anything is having the right tool.
The uppers mount to a rail that’s drilled into the studs. The mounts are standard IKEA keyhole l-brackets.
One of our problems was the placement of the electrical lines for the vent hood. I was able to cut out two small holes in the drywall, feed the lines back through the stud, and down the wall far enough to perfectly line up with the input hole in the hood. We then patched the wall and repainted that section.
Here are the upper cabinets and vent hood, midway through mounting the countertop on the wall of lower cabinets.
Tuesday evening we pulled an almost-all-nighter to install the sink side cabinets. We booked an appointment with the plumber for Wednesday morning to hook up the sink, disposal, dishwasher, and ice maker, so we needed to have everything ready.
First we cleared everything out and started mounting cabinets. The AKURUM cabinets use an l-bracket in the top corner on each side, with a keyhole mount in the center of the bracket. The odds that the keyhole will actually line up with a wall stud are astronomical, so I used heavy duty toggle bolts mounted in the drywall. Each cabinet also came with two sets of screws that could be used to screw each cabinet to the one next to it, which I took advantage of.
Next we cut the countertop. We chose the IKEA NUMERÄR double sided counter, and used the white side up. It’s a standard eight foot span of laminate, so to fit on either side of the sink we had to make two cuts. We used a regular circular saw with a fine toothed saw blade good for cutting laminate and melamine without chewing the edges. We wrapped the cut area in painters tape beforehand and cut the counter bottom-side-up as extra precautions.
My cuts were pretty good, but not perfect. Thank God the sink sides rest on top of the counter pieces, to hide the imperfections.
The finished product, sans doors:
My overall impression of IKEA’s cabinets is not too bad. Though it’s nice that the material is 3/4″ thick, I’m still not a fan of pressed particle-board, I’d rather they at least be made of MDF. Though we picked up everything at the store (as opposed to delivery), we still had two boxes with bonked corners, that we had to return and exchange. The DOMSJÖ sink is porcelain, and as a result has a hairline imperfection or two, which I am undoubtedly going to obsess over.
Though my anxiety has been high during installation as everything seemed fragile, I have to admit that everything is rock solid when mounted. I would feel comfortable standing on the countertop with no problem, and with reviews online saying how well they stand up over the long haul, it looks like it was the right decision. I will say that the flipside of saving a lot of money is that installation is very labor intensive, and not for the faint of heart or the non-handy.
E and I put L to bed and spent Saturday night carrying out Operation Bunny Gray. We let it dry and saw that it was still way too dark for a kitchen that will have black cabinets. We went back to the drawing board (and Lowe’s) and picked up two gallons of Iced Cube Silver.
After picking up the aforementioned row of lower cabinets for far less money than I envisioned, it occurred to me that doing the whole kitchen was slightly in reach. We talked it over and planned everything out, and walked out of IKEA Sunday afternoon with a full set of counters, upper and lower cabinets. Our sister and brother-in-law were our angels from above, trekking up with us in their F150 to haul the bulk of it back to the house.
We solved the counter dilemma by opting for the more expensive DOMSJÖ double bowl apron sink. This severs the counter sections completely into smaller sections without the need for a seam, and allowed us to pick up countertops at IKEA while we were there.
The only place we ran into trouble when designing the kitchen was that we originally placed the dishwasher immediately to the left of the apron sink cabinet. I wondered, since the sink is flush with the cabinet, if there would be anything for the end seam of the counter to rest on. There wasn’t. We inserted a twelve inch wide cabinet between the sink and the dishwasher.
Enough about the planning stages. As I say to E all the time, “Less talking, more working.”
Between work, life, kiddo, and Bella, progress on the kitchen has been a bit slower than we’d hoped. We had some last bits of mudding to do after Mike left, and over the last day or so E went through on the midnight shift and sanded everything down.
We do have a coherent plan as to how this needs to come together. First, we bought nine feet of IKEA Akurum cabinets with Applad black doors. We’ve started assembling those and should be done this evening.
We’re going to paint the walls Benjamin Moore Bunny Gray. It was a toss up between that and Iced Cube Silver, but Bunny Gray has the word bunny in it, so that’s a bit of a given. We should be able to paint when the plaster dries and we sand one last time.
Our only dilemma has to do with the countertop. Our budget is maxing out, so something like stainless steel will have to wait. L is having his first birthday soon, so the two week waiting period to have even a basic laminate countertop fabricated is backing us into a bit of a corner. We might settle on using some of the 8.5 foot spans of extra red countertop we have stashed in the garage, just for the time being.
Either way, it’s going to be a long weekend.
We decided to take L to Lowe’s to look at countertops for the kitchen cabinets. He had different ideas about what he’d like to look at, and ran around the aisles a bit.
On our way in was the line of appliance floor models they were selling. At the end of the first row was a gorgeous black Bosch dishwasher on sale for 50% off. E ran through a string of floor monkeys trying to get them talked down even further, getting denied each time until she finally talked to the manager. He agreed to take another 10% off, for a total of 60% off the retail price. We tossed it in the back of the shaggin’ wagon, and went home.
Behold, in all its glory:
Our old dishwasher was a hopeless piece of trash that’s already been serviced twice through American Home Shield and has to have its knob wiggled to get it to even start a cleaning cycle. One of the tabs on top that screw the dishwasher to the underside of the cabinet broke off, and the kickplate has long since disappeared.
Despite not being in our original budget, the Bosch is truly gorgeous and in hindsight, much needed.
I had another few posts queued up to write, but this popped up out of nowhere. We woke up this morning and our Rottweiler, Bella, was drooling and had a horribly distended stomach. She would not get up off the bed. Two hours later, she was put to sleep at the vet’s office.
She had what’s called “bloat”, or GDV (Gastric Dilation). According to this link, the condition can become fatal within six to twelve hours. She lasted longer, but was in pain. She was put down immediately after an x-ray confirmed the diagnosis. Surgery is available for roughly $2,000, but the risk of recurrence after surgery is so high that it wasn’t feasible.
I got the phone call and got to the vet office to pick up E and L, and she was already put down. L isn’t old enough to understand, so he alternated between being tired and whiny to dancing happily around the floor while we looked on at Bella’s body.
I’m always amazed at how, when something bad happens to a dog (or even a human), the other dogs instinctively know. The pups were visibly sad and whimpering when we came home without Bella, and the dog room looks profoundly empty without our 90 pound Rottie lazing around the beds.
Everything happened so quickly, I don’t think the full extent of the situation has hit me. It’s hard to believe she’s really gone.
I started the flooring installation on Sunday afternoon, and after doing the living room we barely had enough to complete the kitchen installation. Some of the pieces were defective, but I pieced together a Frankenstein floor with no flaws. If we could do it over again, we would have bought the best laminate we could afford, instead of settling for some of the cheaper grade.
When all was said and done, I was able to fit everything together in a way that we literally were down to two and a half pieces left over.
We did, however, learn from the living room experience, and bought a much better grade underlayment. It made a big difference in the classic laminate tapping sound, and I believe will be better in the long run.
My only real complaint is that I should have bought kneepads. It may be just that I’m not eighteen anymore, but by the time evening rolled around and I was finishing up, my knees were bright red and bruised from moving around the floor in that position for seven hours.
Last Wednesday was Mike the contractor’s last day for the week, everything was all set to begin our DIY portion of the remodel. E put a coat of Kilz primer on the walls and ceiling. We opted for the latex primer instead of oil based due to the fumes and our eleven month old, and it turned out to be a bit thinner product than we had hoped.
We then spent the first part of the weekend putting up a few base coats of flat white. It began to look like a real room.
Our next step was to level the floor to prepare for the laminate installation. There were sections where the subfloor was replaced, and other sections where the cabinets had been built into the floor. All were missing the linoleum that was under the old laminate. Since the difference in height was so striking, we opted to rip some strips of luan paneling and adhere it to the subfloor with some Liquid Nails.
