Step 1: Take down kitchen cabinet doors. Step 2: Sand, prime, and paint cabinet bases. Step 3: Do other things for like, two weeks to allow your sanding muscles to successfully weaken. Hide cabinet doors in a corner of a very crowded garage, to aid in forgetting about them. Step 4: Plan New Year's Eve Party. Extend invitations. Step 5: One week before the party, remember/stop procrastinating the cabinet doors. Step 6: Take a gatorade break. Proper hydration is important. Step 7: Set out all doors on the back step and kneel above them. Step 8: Lean onto sander, make small circles and apply pressure. Step 9: Repeat to fade.
Almost done. Dave is coming by this afternoon to finish up the grout. HOT DAMN WE ALMOST HAVE A KITCHEN.
I'm currently trying to secure the bin pulls to the drawers. The previous handles had large screws that went from the inside out into the housing of the handle. These pulls have screw heads on the outside, with the dainty little screws ideally resting snuggly in the wood of the drawer. However, they just spin in circles in the vast existing holes, and then the drawer pull comes off when pulled. Instead of you know, pulling the drawer. I got some fat screws, which are also ridiculously long, and sharp at the ends. They still spin inside the hole a little, so I'm going to have to find some nuts or caps and (gasp!) use them on some wood screws. Just don't tell any of my coworkers. And then, when the nuts secure the screws in place, I'll hack off the ends of the screws with a mini hack saw or this little toy my dad has that spins tiny discs around. We used it to make some total hack job shelves one year in college, shaving off screw ends rather than spending another five minutes in the hardware store finding the right screws. But in this case, it's really hard to come across black or antique rubbed-bronze looking machine screws.
Without further ado: before:
currently (well, taken first thing sunday morning. after a day's worth of work on sunday, it still seems to look very much the same. sad times):
I'm also going to purchase some hose to connect the stove to the gas valve thing in the wall tomorrow. The local utility will be out on Thursday to inspect the safety of the connection etc. This doesn't change the fact that I have no freaking clue how to turn on the stove. Whatever. KITCHEN! TOMORROW! (Except for, of course, the cabinet doors, which are approximately 5% complete. Pesky details. Cabinet doors are so bourgeois anyway).
Today, I put the latch on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. This is big news, because now the medicine cabinet actually stays shut. Of course, this is the lazy way of getting it to stay shut. I suppose one day I'll don the whole respirator thing and sand it down so the door actually fits easily in the hole. Whatever. Until then, this will more than suffice. It's so pretty!
And while I'm typing, Dave is cutting tiles and laying them in our kitchen. We also painted the cabinets (not the doors, yet, because it was too overwhelming and I just wanted to put them away in the garage and deal with them later) and put the drawer pulls on, only to realize that the provided Restoration Hardware screws were too puny for the existing holes. I'm going to try some fat #8 drywall screws, which only seem to come in gigantic lengths. Either we will always scratch our knuckles when reaching for spoons, or I'll just hack off the ends. But you're going to have to wait for pictures of that, because Dave will make relentless fun of us (notably: me) if I go in there with a camera and say I'm documenting it for the internet. He thinks all we talk about on the internet are our rashes and Survivor.
So as soon as he leaves, I'll take some pictures and post them for you. It's so awesome, even filthy and incomplete and ungrouted. The black and white checkers are choice.
I'm still waiting for something to go wrong with the tiles, because so far this has been the only thing that has worked out for us from the get-go. I'll believe it when I see it. Alright, enough previews. Hold please.
I can't ever say the word "progress" without proclaiming it, and following it with similar proclamations of technology! and science! or sometimes scientific!advancements!. But today we're proclaiming kitchens, specifically concrete backer board. We have officially shifted from that uncomfortable phase at the start of any project where it feels, looks, smells, etc like you're doing more harm than good. Like in college, whenever someone would come over to my room and gasp at the mess, I'd (lie and) say that I had recently begun a major reorg. But with the un-fond farewell of the vinyl sheet floor and the installation of the concrete backer board, it's actually starting to look like we're making something. The smells, however, are still fairly ridiculous. We replaced the ghastly and ecologically evil smell of PVC with the really bizarre smell of Hardibacker. It's somewhere between dirty fridge, rotten fruit, and soil.
We did have a wee snafu, for which we give our relentless gratitude to Dave, our friend who is helping us out - slash- doing all of the hard work and math with the floor in exchange for legal tender. Dave noticed that a tiny section of the floor would sag when stepped on, between the new(er) heating vent and the wall. Fear swept across me as I braced myself for the possible diagnoses, but it turns out he could fix it. Super Dave!
Also, Super Joel! At the time, we were concurrently trying to clean out our condo in order to pass off the keys to the new lucky owner. Erik was up there, with his car and mine (long story), so I was stranded at the house with Dave. This was fine, because I was eating up everything Dave taught me about flooring and tools, and was happily put to work whenever possible, screwing in 800,000,000 screws on the concrete. Or something close to that. But when it came time to repair the subfloor with some 2x4 pieces, we looked at each other and said, okay, Julia go and get some 2x4s. Without a car. After considering walking to the hardware store (a mile), I called Joel who was over in no time with his beautiful and glowing wife and a not as glowing but certainly beautiful to us 2x4. Joel told me today that they somehow ripped that 2x4 out of their old kitchen, which was built in the late 20s. Now it's right at home again. Swoon!
Speaking of math, screwing down the backer board is strangely satisfying to my inner perfectionist and geek. I found myself, in between unsightly contortions trying to get the best angle for the cordless drill and my aching knees, calculating optimal distances between screws in order to get perfectly even intervals. I couldn't get it right, which makes me anxious to get back in there and finish up the rest of the floor. For the love of god, I am looking forward to driving hundreds of screws into smelly concrete. Help me.
In other kitchen news, I've finally finished sanding the cabinet bases. The doors are still in the garage, looking shiny. I've also vacuumed everything with my dad's shop vac. The hose on that thing is obnoxious and really hard to control. I feel like I'm wrestling a giant amazon freakishly large hose beast. Erik keeps insisting that we buy our own (vacuum, not amazon hose beast), but I am faking resistance because I know that my parents bought Erik a shiny new shop vac for Christmas. The man loves to vacuum.
Up next? Priming. We are prime for priming. We'll shoot to get that done Wednesday evening, because that's pretty much our only free time before the tiles go in this weekend.
In he meantime, I present to you a brief look at our smelly new concrete:
carnage from afar:
hot:
But more importantly, I hung stuff from the picture rail this weekend, too. Good news about picture rails: you don't have to vacuum beneath where you attach the picture to the wall. Bad news: your fingertips are already raw from sanding/weeding/scraping up floor glue, and the fine gauge wire you're using to hang will hurt.
Toss in a crazy experiment with sufocating grass and the two puny charlie brown strings of lights hung outside, and you have our weekend in a nutshell. Ah, nesting.
Our yard is pitiful. And completely neglected. This started when the previous owners began the neglect when we went into escrow. Any pictures of the exterior were taken about a week into this escrow-neglect. Envision everything being about two shades less green. We water the grass everyonce in a while, but only begrudgingly so, because we know that most of it will be replaced with a more drought-resistant ground cover. But until then, what? Just let the grass crisp up to a lovely golden brown? Dead is the new black. But still - our most immediate neighbors either work from home or have one partner retired and therefore spend all day long working on their perfectly immaculate showcase gardens. Not that I'm competitive or anything. Also, the neighbor across the side street is a freaking master gardener with a membership card and discounts and what have you. No pressure.
Other than replacing some of the grass, the two other immediate needs in the garden are plants to go around the perimeter of the building to frame the foundation a little more, and something done with those bubbly trees. And painting the house something a little less cold and gray, but that's in the long-term plan.
I promise, we do have a darling Craftsman porch hiding behind those tree bubbles. The opinionated neighbors suggested grooming them down to their 50s/60s glory of two to three mini manicured blobs per tree. Surely you can envision this from my highly technical description. Think: Edward Scissorhands. I might try to go at the branches with a chainsaw and make some mini-bubbles (NOTE: find someone with a chainsaw to borrow that's not my dad, John, or Joel and already loaning us tools). Or I might just go at the trunks with the chainsaw. This pains me. Even ugly trees deserve to live. I'm very much open to opinions here.
In terms of planting around the foundation, we currently have some excellent daisy-looking plants on the side of the house. They are in full bloom right now and just look completely cheery. The front of the house? Absolutely nothing. Other than the giant bubble trees, that is. And very-close-to-death grass. I'm telling you, our neighbors are probably wishing they had renters living here again, because at least the landlord forked it over for a gardener.
And all of this, the bubble-tree fix and the planting and the grass-near-death-equilibrium stuff? It all has to be done in between refacing the kitchen and trying to find time to get in the freaking Christmas spirit with exterior lights and a pretty tree in the front window. But first we need to get an outlet installed outside and figure out a way to completely close off the floor heating vent in front of the aforementioned front window lest the tree dry up and die. Matching the grass. But I'll be damned if we don't have a tree and exterior lights for our first Christmas in the house. This is kind of like when parents force the kids to have fun on a road trip or a family meal or something. "WE WILL HAVE A GOOD TIME AS A FAMILY OR ELSE."
This weekend we began work on the kitchen bandaid restoration. We'll be leaving some work to the professionals, including a new tile floor and any plumbing, if we ever get around to installing our Coveted Ikea Farmhouse Sink. It may actually be shattered in pieces in the box, because there's no way in hell we deserve this sink. No, we haven't opened the box yet. Don't ask why, but it probably falls into the same category of reasons as me never watching our wedding video. Not even once. It's fear.
Back to my point. I pulled down all the cabinet doors and removed all of the hideous knobs and pulls. One of the knobs would not budge. I solicited Erik, thinking maybe I was just a pansy. After we had completely stripped the screw head, I put some calls out to my subject matter experts - my dad (didn't answer) and my friend John (also didn't answer). Maybe they are learning early never to answer calls from me on Saturdays. Finally, we got a few calls back, and I was on my way to buy a mini hack saw from Hillcrest Hardware (Saturday morning trip #2). I've never sawed through metal before. It was awesome and strangely satisfying. I'm trying to come up with other excuses to use it. Does anyone have any metal they need sawed?
As of this weekend, all of the mid-door mounted knob holes are filled with wood-filler (that smells vaguely like that new plastic toy smell of my youth), and all but four of the cabinet bases are sanded, using a combination of Joel's 1/4 sheet sander (his description: "it looks like a large vibrator, but DO NOT USE IT THAT WAY") and some steel wool that is now in a million pieces and will probably show up in every single corner of the house for decades to come.
But most importantly, we bought ridiculously overpriced hardware! (Thank god for Restoration Hardware friends and family discounts.)
We got the 1.25" circle knobs pictured below:
And the large bin pulls here (chosen entirely because the 4" size means not having to fill the old drawer pull holes):
We're not going to replace the hinges. They're sort of antique brass-y. I wish they were a little more antiquey, so I'm open to suggestions for speeding up, well, time.
I'll post pictures later in the week of further progress, but right now it just looks dusty. You can use your imagination.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
