Day 5 and some more history

Today the electrician came to change some of our switches and outlets and add new ones. The job is not done, and not all that exciting.

I mentioned that our new cabinets were delivered yesterday. It's hard to believe that this pile of boxes in our garage will become our future kitchen!


One thing I know is that we will have plenty of Faktum to go around:

Our flooring is also boxed up in our garage. We had heard a lot of great reviews about cork in kitchens (it is resistant to mold and mildew, durable and environmentally friendly), so after some debate, we decided to narrow our search to cork and would up with this choice (APC Cork, "Apollo Brown").



In my search for an old kitchen photo from when we first moved into our home in 2006, I found something even better...a video. Obviously, we have made a lot of changes since then. But this will give you an idea of what we started with, as well as the full layout of the kitchen.



I guess we have come a long way already, but there is still a long way to go!

Day 4

Not much of an update today. The plumber was here to pull out the old sink pipes and install new ones. Somehow all of the piping down to our utility sink was replaced along with it (I guess they don't want to join old pipe to new pipe). They tore out some of the gross drywall around the old pipes. It looks like this now.


Our new cabinets were also delivered by Ikea today. Everything is flat packed like a good Ikea product should be. It was delivered on a large skid, and then everything was moved separately into our garage, where it will wait until it all gets assembled.

Fridge

We bought a new refrigerator before starting the kitchen construction. We are going with Bosh appliances throughout the kitchen but found this Fisher & Paykel fridge at a scratch and dent store in near perfect condition. I thought I would hate having the freezer on the bottom but it's really nice and seems roomier even though it is counter depth.

Day 3

Today the contractor removed the temporary wall that was holding up our kitchen ceiling and installed this large beam.

I have been very impressed with how clean our contractor is! Check out this plastic wall surrounding the construction:

On the right side of the plastic is our dining room. Which now looks like this:


Today we also ordered our new cabinets from Ikea. The Ikea purchase was pretty unceremonious. We printed out a list of what we needed and walked to a register to buy and schedule delivery. The new cabinets are stocked at the store and will arrive tomorrow.

Day 1 and 2

Our contractor and two of his crew members arrived early for the first day of work just as we were heading to the airport for a wedding. We were told that when we returned on Sunday the walls surrounding the kitchen between our living and dining room would be gone, as well as everything in the kitchen.

I should start with some "before" pictures. Eventually I will dig up some true "before" pictures with details on the ivy stenciling and peel and stick tile that were part of the kitchen when we purchased our 1950s split entry. We couldn't live with that kitchen for long and made some minor inexpensive improvements to make it livable for four years. This was the state of the kitchen when we left our house for the airport:

This picture really makes the kitchen look decent. I should explain that we have white cabinets with newer modern looking handles, and a newer faucet. Nothing fancy, but simple measures we took to make our kitchen livable when we first moved in. The peel and stick tiles that were cracking and breaking were replaced about a year ago with inexpensive vinyl "wood like" planks. The dishwasher has been barely usable as seals have broken leaving us with a mold problem inside of it. The cabinets were probably one day beautiful since they are solid wood, but although cabinet materials have gone downhill over time, the construction and use of space within a cabinet has greatly improved making these older cabinets a bit of a bummer. The configuration of the kitchen was the largest problem. It's not a small kitchen but all of the counter space and cabinets are shown in this picture because kitchens of the 50s were designed to have an open area for a large kitchen table. Unfortunately pantries, an area for trash and recyling as well as countertop space didn't seem to be a priority back then.

At the end of day 1, our contractor sent us this picture:

On day 1 and 2 all of the cabinets and appliances were removed along with the soffit and the two walls. Fortunately when we returned to our kitchen on Sunday night, it looked like this:

The walls to the right of the kitchen and at the forefront of this photo were entirely removed, and a temporary wall was created to keep the ceiling from falling in on us (who knew it just took a few strong sticks).

Oddly enough, we thought the space would feel larger but somehow without anything there to remind us of the scale of a kitchen, it felt smaller. I'm sure this will just be temporary perception!

Our old cabinets and our appliances are now stacked up in our dining room.

Background

Hi. I wanted to keep a journal of the progress of our kitchen construction. Sadly, I should have started this 9 months ago when we first started to plan the kitchen we hoped we could someday have. That 9 month process was much more difficult than I expected. I knew there were a lot of options to consider when it came to flooring, countertops, colors, etc., but what I didn't realize is that it would take a long time to actually get started. Considering our remodel would include the removal of walls as well as some unusual design requests, we wanted to work with an architect or a kitchen designer that would understand us. We also wanted to stay within our budget. Mixing these two things proved to be impossible in the end, so once we found a contractor, we wound up being the kitchen designers. We started at Ikea since we had experience with a small Ikea kitchen in our last house. We liked their cabinets but couldn't help but wonder what we would get if we went to semi-custom cabinets. After several meetings with a kithen designer (more of a cabinet sales person), we realized that the price of semi-custom cabinets were easily 5x the Ikea cabinets we already knew and liked. We liked the semi-custom aspect but realized that modifying the stock sizes or options led to a very large increase in the price. During this time we also investigated countertop materials, flooring and other elements that would go into our kitchen, and we also found our contractor. So the following posts to this blog will be a day by day (as often as possible) record of what is happening with our kitchen. The blog is called Three Mile Island Kitchen in honor of the disaster site (much like what we expect our kitchen to look like for the next month) as well as for the 9 foot (not quite three miles) island that we will be adding to the kitchen. I'm hilarious.