Kitchen Backsplash

We finally got the backsplash up. So we took some "finished" photos, but like everything we seem to always find more we can do. We may decide to go a little brighter with the wall color...let us know what you think!

Finished Photos

Granite Countertops Installed

We removed the carpet in the living room yesterday, and put down some lovely OSB hardwood. Oh so urban chic! But seriously we are ready to lay foors!
In case you didn't know plaster dust is a renewable resource! This is a photo of our living room after removing and cleaning every item that was inside...down to tv cords and plant leaves. Our front yard was the cleaning area of choice, our neighbors love us :) This is before I was done putting it back together, but we actually have framed photos back up and a clean and tool free coffee table!! This is HUGE! Even the dog slept better last night.


New undermount sink! Single basin so that we can clean those large pots Joseph uses to brew beer. Wait until you see the sink faucet, it is beautiful!


Granite on the oven/breakfast bar. The granit has gold flecks, hard to see in this photo. What isnt hard to see? How awesome this is going to be when we are totally done!!


View of new countertops and our newly created "large" kitchen. The granite doubles as the window sill for the front window...which is coming soon.


Getting the sink ready with a router. This was included in the countertop install which we hired out, that felt great.



Before counters so you can see Joseph's handy work on the metal support for the granite under the breakfast bar.

Getting ready for Countertops

Another sunny weekend in Seattle and it was all about the kitchen again... We had to get ready for Chinese granite counter tops. But first I had to go to the Supercross at Quest field. I go every year and this year my buddy Andy had the hook up inside the Jones Soda Box. This is the view from it. I missed my other buddy Adam visiting from Idaho so we'll have to see him this summer.






Here's me screwing the 5/8 plywood to the cabinets. My dad and I only found "sanded" high quality plywood at the Depot. What a rip, it was $30 a sheet! The 1/2" normal plywood was $8!

To stregthen the half wall I added 6 studs and put them where the cabinets could be screwed into them and we added a 1/2" thick piece of plywood instead of drywall. This really stiffed things up. It will be covered by granite, cabs and the backsplash.

You can see the 20" angle brace in the photo, this time attached with 4 1/2 " lag screws into the floor. We then bolted the cab on the left to the floor and attached it to the wall. Much much stronger and i'm no longer worried that the wall will tip over with 140 lbs plus 2 people leaning on it. Could be a dangerous for that to land on our toes!


cabinet attached to floor


3/16" thick steel plaste screwed into the studs to support the granite without using corbels or angle brackets. To drill and countersink this it I went through all 3 of my drill batteries and had to switch to electric. This seems unbendable by my elbows, so I didn't bother putting plywood over it.



On Sunday we threw all the old cabinet pieces and other random junk and packaging onto the trailer and took it to the dump. I guessed it was 1200 lbs, Cheryl said 1000 lbs. It was 1160! But according to her Price as Right rules I lost. So much crap has come out of our kitchen it seems! This is the 3rd full dump run. Our total so far is 1140 + 830 + 1160 = 3130 lbs. Still got lots of carpet to throw out...

That puddle is from my neighbor washing his truck....

Cutting 240 volt wires is bad

Hi everyone, so just when I thought the kitchen was in the home stretch and the hard work was done.... I took a few steps in reverse. It's about the half wall which will be our breakfast bar and our opening to the living room. It still seems a little weak and it worries me that 140 lbs of steel and granite will be cantilevered off one side. Corbels won't help because the weight will take the wall down with the granite.

In the above picture you can see the left cabinet attached with a cover panel to cover a weird gap between it and the wall. Attaching the cabinet made it a lot sturdier but still not as sturdy as I like. So I added more support....






This bracket really stiffened up the wall on the backside and would be hidden by the oven. I had to cut into the wall to add a stud for it to attach to then I had to re mud the wall the pros did. I'm not a pro, but his wall shouldn't show.

Well after more thought and research I still thought this wasn't enough and I couldn't fit any more of these triangle braces where I needed them....




So I tore apart my perfectly drywalled half wall... And while I was cutting away carefully avoiding the wires I remembered putting in the wall. BOOOOOOOM!



The Sawzall sliced through my new 240 Volt oven wire, taking a huge chunk out of the blade and sending a pungent black cloud of burnt ozone into the room. Thank god I wasn't electrocuted and the sawzall still works. I guess I've become a little to comfortable using the sawzall and didn't take the proper precautions. Not remembering that loop I put in the wire. Luckily I think I will have enough slack left to cut off the damaged end of the most expensive wire I've put in so far.

But back to the half wall... The plan is to add studs, glue, a piece of plywood instead of drywall on the kitchen side, and most importantly steel attached to a floor joist. This means more of what I hate.... Under the house time! Stay tuned.

Lighting Plan

Here's my original lighting plan. I can't wait to put can lights in, it's going to be so much brighter and more usable! Originally I was going to do 6" recessed lights but with our low ceilings 4" would be more to scale. Also it's more of a modern look like we're going for. I had fun drawing the yellow halo's around the lights, not sure how usefully that is but it help me visually align the lights. They are a 5' diameter.

Plan is to do 4 Halogen lights over the counters and normal incandescent light bulbs for fillers and over the sink. The white Halogen light really brings out the color of the granite. All will be on a dimmer.

The 2 small halo's over the breakfast bar will be decorative pendant lights that hang from the ceiling.

Photos: Then to Cabinets - catch up

Here's a set of photos from after I tore down the plaster between the kitchen and living rooms until we had the drywall mudded and kitchen gutted. I still need to go way back and post more photos of the original kitchen for it to be clear what we did.


All cabinets are out and so is the window.




Drywall really changes the look of the room, all of a sudden lots of our light was blocked out that we used to get from the kitchen through the wall framing.


Last view of all our cabinets intact. We swapped the white 18" dishwasher for a stainless version for $0. Notice how low the upper cabinets come down. They are too close to the counter for my taste.




In the above pic you can see a black floor. This is the glue or tar that is covering the original oak hardwood in the kitchen. We had to scrape it down to make it as level as possible but the hardwood underneath was a goner. We wanted it to be the same level as the living room. 5 levels of flooring were taken off to get to this point in the kitchen.

- 1 Ikea laminate floor we put down -25mins to remove
- 1 peel and stick vinyl floor stuck to 1/2 mdf - 2 hours to remove with circular saw
- 3 linoleum floor below the others - 20ish man hours to remove with scraper and heat gun.

Also you can see the breakfast bar wall is frame in. This is where I can start to see the opening is smaller than I wanted. I needed all 64" for the bar though and the doorway is 1 1/2" wider than before so I can't complain too much.



Beam is up, probably over kill but it will bear the weight of the wall behind the fridge. Also with this 4x10 header our door way headers will be uniform through out house. Notice I used old jack and king stud at right of header. This I later changed. Also I wish I would have made the beam 1 foot longer. It was hard to visualize what teh doorway would look like at this stage.

Wall is mostly gone. This was a non-load bearing wall so no problem.

Here's the Cabinets half installed

Staging area to put together Ikea cabs! Thanks to both Cheryl and I's parents for helping out both days of putting them together. We're still not done... with a small kitchen too. I couldn't imagine doing a large kitchen.

dad hanging bar that uppers hang from


Volcom shirt that looks like overalls. It didn't help reading Ikea's hieroglyphs they call instructions. We moved the upper cab behind me up 2" the 2nd day. Glad we did so we would have 19" between the finished counter and the bottom of the upper cabs. Before we only had 15" and it was claustrophobic to work on the counter tops.



We used my dad's ultra handy auto-leveling laser to shoot a perfect line on two walls. This was awesome because after 69 years my house is not level. Measuring from the floor up or ceiling down would have be useless. Also the Ikea cabs have adjustable legs and they made our cabs lever in all ways! I'm not used to seeing the level right in the middle!


you can see that the window on the right is a foot shorter than it used to be. I've since decided to rip out the sill and make it counter height and only slightly smaller than it used to be.





Here is the original rough opening it's 4'x4'. It needs to come up about 7" to be counter height. I'm planning on extending the sill by bumping out the window 8-10". The counter top will flow into the window sill.


This is want I"m wanting. Notice the bump out for the window and the counter flowing into the window. I've already made the bump out from 2x10's.

We got cabinets!

We got Ikea cabinets and lots of them. They are a light Birch color in the Shaker door style and we love them! We did alot of research and got many bids for cabinets. But a Ikea 15% coupon sealed the deal and we used it to buy a great stove there too. Stay tuned for more.

Must say I'm not looking forward to putting them together!

Drywall finishing Today

Party in the attic! Come on up, bring your own sawz-all!
But seriously I'm getting way to used to being up there. I'm just cutting more of the paster ceiling away so I can put one big patch up instead of 5 little ones. Preparing for dry wall.


The drywallers came today! You can't see what all they did in the photo but they put 9 8 foot sticks of metal corner bead, paper covered on the walls and the beam. Added about 4 sheets of dry wall and 3 bags of 40 min hot mud to even things out in this old house. The ceiling will be skim coated along with some walls tomorrow. We are going for a smooth look and the old knock down texture is going to be hidden. I will borrow a texture gun later to spray on a orange peel.

Deflection

Here you can see whats left of the load bearing wall that is going to give us 2 more feet in our 8 foot wide kitchen. There is only 2 studs left supporting the ceiling joists above. I've sistered the 2x4 joists above and they are not ending on top of this wall but it does help decrease the span as 2x4s are too small to make this span unassisted. Our house was built in 1941 and is lightly built as far as I can tell.

I just bought a 10 foot 4x10 beam to put above the joists, allowing them to hang from this beam. It's sitting in our living room now waiting for 3 strong people to hoist it into the attic! It was sitting outside in the rain at the lumber yard so hopefully once it drys out it will be lighter.

After consulting with Cheryl's Dad, Jackie the plan is to jack up the wall slightly so it's not saging then attached the joists to the beam with "huricane ties".

11/22/08 - Some re-wiring

Last Saturday my dad offered to come down and help me move the knob and tube wiring out of the walls I want to remove. We spent all Saturday moving the old wires out of the wall between the kichen and living room. They ran to the 2 ceiling lights in the kitchen.


We ran romex to the lights and the circuit breaker and I moved the switch to a double gang box on the right side of the door opening. This took all day since there was TONS of blown in insulation to dig through in the attic to find the wires. Also Knob and tube uses twices as many wires as the new 3 strand romex, so figuring out the old wiring is time consuming.

Sunday: Dad offered to come down again and I was so greatful to make progress again on the kitchen. We ran a new 240v 40amp wire under the house then up through the half wall near the stairs for the range. This allowed me to cut off the old box poking up through the floor. At the same time we pulled a new wire for the hot water heater downstairs.



Now I need to connect the new wires to the water heater, cut the old wires in the wall I want to remove, and of course deal with the plumbing vent pipe in that wall.....

11/14/08 - Dump Run Needed

I now have 15 garbage bags and 3 garbage cans of plaster outside my house. It looks pretty bad. Luckily Marshall called and he and Jesse we're coming down to Seattle to do a SCUBA diving test of Alki Beach. It got canceled due to heavy rains causing sediment into Puget Sound and making it 2 feet of visibility.

They showed up early and helped me make a dump run... stoked. When they weighed us at the dump it was 1160 lbs of plaster/cement! Geeez. $75 remodel cost so far for dump run.

Kitchen Remodel - Demolition - 11/8/08

( Nov. 8th 2008) Started Demolition on 2 walls in our kitchen today. I didn't know what I would find in the walls but I knew our house would be better with 2 feet added to an 8 foot wide kitchen and a "breakfast bar" between the living room and the kitchen.

This is what I hope the finished kitchen will look like. Our oven will be in the same spot.


















I soon was hammering away and saw that the walls were over an inch thick.

A combination of cement backer board and plaster oh I can't forget the wood paneling. Oh knob and tube wiring everywhere oh joy!




Here is after I cleaned up for the day. The next day I decided I should take down the plaster of the wall you see on your right behind the wood paneling and map. That way the walls will be uniform new drywall wall when it's time to replace the wall board.