Tarkblog

As part of my ongoing process of doing home renovations solely to be able to post pictures and blog blogs, I present our kitchen remodel.

First, we should be a bit historic and show you the kitchen as it was when we moved in.

Now, this kitchen was certainly satisfactory, but it suffered from a few flaws:

*) It was really small
*) The cabinets were old and not very good
*) The floor was dirty ugly linoleum
*) There wasn’t really a place to eat

When we moved in, we had grand ideas of cutting down walls and opening this kitchen up to the adjacent dining room. However, as you might remember from an earlier blog, we changed the dining room into our office. That plan wasn’t going to work.

However, next to the kitchen was the “red family room”. Here are the pics of it, before we moved in:

After we moved in, this red room became nothing more than a storage area for us. We didn’t use it much, as there wasn’t any overhead lighting. We didn’t need a 2nd living room. So, it was just an extra area for us. And, we surmised, it would potentially make an excellent kitchen.

Flash forward to earlier this year.

We had begun our bathroom remodel process, and as part of that we had to cut into the wall of the red room to run the plumbing (timeline, March 8th):

We knew we had plans to turn this into a kitchen, but we wanted to wait until the bathroom project was done first. For one, both were expensive. And for two, it’s nice to only have one huge mess in your house at a time.

As the bathroom project was wrapping up, we decided to start working on this red room and see what we could to do make it into a new kitchen.

First up, get rid of the old nasty berber carpet (timeline, April 6th):

Next (April 12th), I removed all of the builtin cabinetry in this room (it was, again, old, and not the best quality)

What amazed me most of that is that by the time I tore all of the cabinetry down, I had filled the entire back of a standard pickup truck. I drove the whole thing to the dump, where I was charged a whopping $5.25 to dispose of all of it. I never knew it was so cheap to throw stuff away.

Continuing on…

We got a bit busy the rest of April, so we didn’t do much more work in there until the beginning of May. We had just finished painting our new bathroom, and had all of the primer and stuff ready, so we decided to just go ahead and throw some primer on these red walls while we were at it:

Yes, I know we didn’t hit everything. We didn’t have enough primer to do so, but we wanted to use up what we already had opened, hence the funky looking painting.

At this point, we we still had wall work to do, we had our trusty electrician Ron come over to add outlets and overhead lighting before we got much further.

We spent the next few days finishing up with a good coating of primer. We also had a professional come over and put down the vinyl tile floor (Metroflor, which is a very nice high quality flooring). And our carpenter who was working in our bathroom helped us by drywalling all of the holes that Ron had to cut to run wiring into the ceiling.

We got the room painted, and just about that time (May 15th), our cabinets arrived.

A few weeks later (around May 28th), the installation process began:

That is the new refrigerator we bought. The one we had was a relic from AEI, and they wanted it back, so we ended up getting a new one.

After the bar base got built, we had to paint it:

Our cabinet guy also was able to install the new microwave we bought, and Ron helped us move the outlet from the old stove to this new location (this is the same stove we had before, we just moved it):

The plumber was able to then come and rough everything in in preparation for our dishwasher and sink addition.

A few weeks later (June 21st), the granite countertops we picked out showed up and were magically installed.

And over the past few weeks, we’ve moved everything in and have settled now on finally having a nice kitchen to work and eat out of.

All that’s left is to buy a small table for the south wall area, and to put in some kind of transition/threshold between this kitchen and the old one.

Next up: remodeling the old kitchen into a utility room.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.