Kitchen? Oh Yeah, The Kitchen...

You may be wondering how the kitchen project is coming. I haven't written anything about it for a while, mostly because the people I see on a day to day basis are so goddamned sick of hearing about it that I can't get a word out.

Basically, the thing's done. I'm just waiting on countertops, and then some final plumbing hookups. The guy from Lowe's ("I'm hear to make a template, but I think instead I'll just stare at the tattoo on your chest.") was here yesterday, measuring and checking the cabinets to ensure that we're ready for the eleventy-billion pound load of LG HiMacs counter material. The installers will be back on the 20th to slap it all together, and then famous Dave, our plumber, comes the next day to hook up my sink, disposal, and -- can I get a HALLELUJAH?! -- DISHWASHER!

It's hard to describe what it's been like to live without a working kitchen for a month. I can't complain too much, thanks to my uber-patient hubby and my vast collection of random kitchen appliances (that electric griddle I gave Charlie so much shit about? LIFE. SAVER.). But damn, kids...doing dishes in the bathtub? There are no words for that suckage, let me tell you. My mom can tell you, though; her kitchen remodel took six months. SIX. Let that soak in. SIX MONTHS WITH NO MOTHER EFFING KITCHEN. And she didn't even KILL anybody!

Anyway, I'm not posting any pictures 'til everything's done, so you can get the full, dramatic "before and after" effect. Nine days to go!

Quick Update

Just a quick kitchen/life-in-general update on a busy Sunday:

1. The electrical work is all done. I have lights, with switches in spots that actually make sense. Like, the switch for my back porch light is now by the door that leads to the back porch, instead of, you know, OVER MY WASHING MACHINE IN THE NEXT ROOM.

2. The plumbing is all done. No more house o' horrors plumbing, and a minor bathroom plumbing leak we discovered has been fixed (thanks, David and Orefice Plumbing!).

3. El Heep is fixed! No more god-awful squeal from the dying alternator.

4. We're scheduling the wall guy to come this week, which means floors can go in next weekend as planned. It also means that once the walls are up, I have to paint the whole kitchen by Friday. Anybody want to come help? Anyone? Anyone...?

5. My garden is putting out about two pints of cherry tomatoes a day. HOLY COW, that's a lotta tomatas.

6. If I eat any more take-out, I may die of MSG poisoning.

And now it's time to fly...have to go check out my MIL's house (her painters are done), meet Liz at Xways for coffee and free art (wooooo!), and then head to Shannon's for her going away party. Whew. Oh yeah, and we're picking up paint on the way home. Double whew!

The State of Things

Seems like not too long ago that I had a (semi) functional kitchen. And then we decided to start tearing it up. It began with two cabinet doors:

The Beginning of the End

Shortly after the above picture was taken, we pulled out the upper cabinets:

Ahhh, That's Better!

Remember that deeee-lish wallpaper I was talking about in my last kitchen post? Well, there was a whole bunch of it hiding behind one of the uppers. It just screams ELEGANT, doesn't it?

The Height of Kitchen Fashion - circa 1962 (or so)

After that, we moved on to the counter tops and base cabinets. I pulled off all the laminate that had been used in the "refacing" job done about twenty-plus years ago. You can't tell in this picture, but the rails for the drawers on the right were held up with DUCT TAPE.

Why did I leave my rug there?

Pulling out the base cabinets revealed more of the house o' horrors plumbing we've encountered in other rooms. I think the guy who did the original work in this house was either a) completely incompetent, b) using large quantities of crystal meth, or c) both.

Mold, corroded pipe, and hey look! A can of window cleaner!

After the initial shock wore off, Charlie and I dug in and started the serious demolition. We ripped out all the old drywall and plaster, pulled about a billion nails and screws, and scraped five, count 'em, FIVE layers of flooring off the concrete. Where does that leave us? Right about here:

Gutted

That big white rectangle you see behind the studs of the far wall is actually the rear of the huge metal medicine cabinet in our downstairs bathroom. We pulled one out of the upstairs bathroom, and it weighs about nine billion pounds. It also features its own huge and totally unflattering fluorescent light fixture. But hey, that's another post.

My stove is in my dining room, where we've set up an interim kitchen. It's a decent setup, but I don't think I could deal with it for more than a month or so. (I'm thinking of my mom's kitchen remodel, which took about six months.)

Charlie's moved the door to the utility room; well, he's framed it, anyway. And the electricians (great guys, 'tho one of them looks about 12 and bears a striking resemblance to Jesse Pinkman from "Breaking Bad") are here today finishing up all the rewiring and installation of new outlets and recessed lights. I can't believe I'll have more than one outlet to use! And that I won't have to fumble around in the dark to find the switch for my one overhead light! Squeeeeeeee!

We're making serious progress, is what I'm saying. It's a little unnerving - I keep waiting for something to go really, really wrong. Like, you know, the guys go to run wire and find something disgusting and Edgar Allen Poe-ish plastered into the ceiling.

Minor Crises, Averted

We're about a week into the kitchen remodel, and we've had two minor SNAFUs thus far. I'm hoping we run into a third minor snag, and then finish without any further problems. No, seriously. Stop laughing. DON'T KILL MY HOPE.

SNAFU Numbah One: THE FLOOR

We had leftover Armstrong laminate flooring, and decided to use it in the kitchen instead of spending tons on tile. We needed another six boxes to finish the job. Charlie, who is the King of Research and Price Comparisons, called a bunch of local flooring places (and the big box stores) to see who had the best deal. A few days later, our order was in and Charlie picked it up on his lunch hour. 

The trouble started when he got the flooring home. We pulled it out of the box to make sure the pattern and color matched (it did), only to discover that Armstrong apparently changed their clicky-locky-floating-floor-hook-together mechanism, so the new floorboards wouldn't connect with the old. This, my friends, was eff-bomb worthy. The flooring place was closed, so Charlie put it on his list for Monday.

Monday morning rolled around, and Charlie decided to skip Mr. Local and go straight to Armstrong. He called them up, explained the situation, and they told him to go ahead and buy six more boxes of the new style floor. Before he could say "Uhh...WTF?!" the Armstrong guy explained that if we'll fax in our invoice, they'll send us a check for the purchase price of the six new boxes. AND we can keep the old stuff. Proof yet again that LIFE IS EASIER WHEN YOU HAVE A PENIS. Because you know, if I had called, they'd have told me to take a flying leap.

SNAFU Numbah Two: MOVING THE DOOR

Part of our remodeling plan includes moving the door that leads to our utility room/pantry/laundry room. At present, it's squished into a corner. It's not in a load-bearing wall, so Charlie had planned to do this part of the job himself. It involves some demo, some basic framing, and then hanging a piece or two of plasterboard. No bigs, right?

Well, sure, except that there are ELEVENTY BILLION ELECTRICAL WIRES running through this particular wall. They spread out from the electrical panel like kudzu vines, and I have no idea where most of them go. Neither does Charlie. This means that we can't move the door until the electrical work for the whole kitchen is done, because we don't want to pay the guy for multiple trips (one to wire the kitchen, one to clean up the crazy kudzu nightmare). Annnnnnd, you guessed it, the electrician can't do his stuff until the whole kitchen's gutted. Blah!

So now we're working on gutting the kitchen. The upper cabinets are down, the stove is sitting in the dining room (classy!), and the lower cabinets may be gone tonight. 

Wish me luck, kids.

Is it wrong to be excited about a trash can? I mean, like REALLY excited?

Yesterday, I spent a good chunk of time browsing teh Intarwebs for kitchen-organizing accessories. Anybody who knows me will tell you that I love to be super organized, and that my P-Touch label maker is truly my best friend. (I didn't used to be this way - my OCD was a hindrance and then I turned it into a coping mechanism, but that's a whole 'nother story.) One of the reasons I'm so happy about getting a new kitchen is that I'll be able to take my time putting things in order, and really get it organized the way I want. It's hard to explain, but when you're trying to organize a space that you didn't plan or design yourself, it's a huge pain in the tuchus (at least in MY tuchus) to cram all your stuff in there just the way you like it.

Anyway, I ended up on the SimpleHuman website, staring at sleek, overpriced soap dispensers and such. And then I found this:

What's that, you say? Looks like just an ordinary pull-out trash can? No no, friend...this one's different. This one costs sixty bucks.

One of my biggest complaints about my kitchen (and many previous kitchens) is that there's never really a good spot for the trash can. I'm too germ-phobic to put it near any food prep areas, which means it's usually shoved in a corner too far away to be useful. Plus, our current can is so big that by the time the bag's full, it REEKS (and no, I will not buy overpriced odor-eliminating trash bags), or it's way too heavy to lift out.

So, the idea of having a petite trash can tucked away under a counter is very exciting to me. It'll go under the sink, which is usually wasted space anyway. This particular one has an 8-gallon capacity. That doesn't sound like a lot, but we recycle and compost, so not much ends up in the actual "trash."

To you, it's just a pull-out trash can. To me, it's a squee-inducing joy bin. Now you know my shame.

Histoire de la Maison

It occurred to me that I've been Tweeting about my kitchen remodel, and some of you don't know anything about my house. Since we're about to tear into the old cucina, I'll start there.

Our house was built in the early '50s, when apparently all one needed in a kitchen was a giant stove and about six inches of counter space. Delicious avocado-green lino tiles were the flooring choice of the day. Oh, and the cabinets? They've got fixed shelves that prevent me from storing anything taller than a salt shaker.

When we first moved in, the far wall was half windows, the floor was half carpet and half linoleum, and the walls were covered in hideous, nicotine-coated paper. Two tiny overhead fixtures and one ghetto-tastic under-cabinet fluorescent strip were the only sources of illumination. Your basic nightmare:

Wall color: NICOTINE

That thing lurking next to the microwave cart? Yeah, that's a boiler.

Fake fruit, a birdhouse, and a china cabinet made entirely of particle board.

We couldn't afford to gut and redo the kitchen at the time, so we settled for some minor changes. We closed in the huge, nonsensical doorway to the dining room, added a sliding glass door to replace the bank of single-pane aluminum-frame windows, and swapped out the appliances. The hideous wallpaper got covered with plain white paint, and I scrubbed the tar and nicotine stains off of every surface I could. A vinyl remnant went down where the carpet used to be. 

It was a big improvement; we were making the best of what we had. And it really didn't bother me to be without broad expanses of counter space, a dishwasher, or functional cabinets. That is, until I had to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Dinner for six, cooked in the tiniest, most poorly laid-out kitchen I've ever worked in. And that year (2007), the far wall still had exposed studs and insulation hanging out over the stove. Everyone likes a little fiberglass in their stuffing, right?

Anyway, we've made do for as long as possible. But now, it's got to be done. I'm home to cook dinner five nights a week, and I can't work in this old, stinky, Formica-coated U anymore. I thought we'd be stuck for another couple of years because of financial constraints, but lo and behold! My fantastic mom and mom-in-law have offered up the funds needed.

We're going to use Ikea cabinets, mostly because they're inexpensive (everything we need for under $2000) but also because they're nice looking and well-made. The countertops will be LG HiMacs solid surface, and the same flooring we used in the rest of the house (Armstrong laminate in "Tiger Maple") will continue into the kitchen. Here's the plan:

An Ikea Dream, in greyscale

I can't put into words how grateful I am for my two moms and their generosity. And how lucky am I to have a hubs who's going to tackle 90% of this work on his own, while working full time AND finishing up his MBA? Yep, pretty darn lucky.