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.

Bump out

Cab row and window sill

Ikea stove

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.