Awaiting the cabinets

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I'm taking care of the rest.

If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about more demolition and some of the progress with the walls going back up and plumbing/electrical. Now for some final sketches Greentea created for me and some decisions I've made.

I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my cabinets - and today is the big day! This is about 2 weeks later than initially scheduled, but when you they are coming from the other side of the world, you need to factor in the possibility of issues arising on their way over. The delay in my cabinets was due to the Olympics, as they were held up at a port due to extra security. Totally understandable. Then Greentea contacted me to let me know that my cabinets were arriving a bit earlier than anticipated and if they could be delivered on the 6th of this month. I panicked initially. I knew the construction in my kitchen would not be completed by the 6th and because my house is so small, I would have nowhere to store the cabinets in the meantime. I asked them if it were possible for them to be delivered on the 14th instead, which would give my contractor and myself enough time to complete the space enough to be able to put the cabinets in place. (Turns out I am barely able to make this happen). The guys at Greentea were more than happy to hang on to the cabinets until I was ready to receive them. Unexpected things can happen but they are able to work with their customers to solve issues like the timing of shipments and such. I am so grateful they were accomodating because my house would be in complete chaos otherwise. This has been such an awesome experience dealing with Greentea and I've got to give them props for this. They couldn't be nicer and I'm going to be very proud to have what I know will be a stunning kitchen.

Ok, enough of the warm and fuzzies. Mike, who's a whiz at sketching up kitchens, sent me some final sketches of my kitchen and I was SO excited to see what the finished product will look like. It's one thing to have an idea in your head but to see it with all the finishing touches is amazing. I love technology! Greentea's ability to do sketches is a fabulous feature that is incredibly helpful for their clients, especially those who are new to renovations and designing a kitchen (like me). So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to what will be my new kitchen!

To see more, click HERE.

Update on kitchen progress

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I'm taking care of the rest.

If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about more demolition and work begun by my contractor. Now for a bit more demolition (seems to never end) and some of the progress with the walls going back up and plumbing/electrical.

Work continues to progress in my kitchen. I am SO looking forward to finally having a kitchen again and being able to cook. I have never eaten so much pizza in my life and as much as I love pizza, I am tiring of it fast. But things are moving along, and as you would expect in a house of this age, unexpected work kept popping up (along with things I realized at the last minute needed to be fixed - and luckily my contractor is a patient guy). It seems the ceiling needed to be removed to allow the electrician to wire it for my potlights and pendants. The problem was it wasn't just drywall that needed to come down but more wood panelling, which is why it had to come down - he couldn't install the potlights in the panelling. And there was 100 years worth of dust and cobwebs that came down with it. It was TERRIBLE - such a huge mess, and the guys were covered in it when they were done. There was black dust all over the house. (In the left side of the photo below you can see alot of cobwebs - I think I took this after some vacumming of the beams was done).

The contractor discovered what we're thinking is horse hair in the ceiling (just a few chunks), which maybe 100 years ago was used for insulation??

And as a result of taking down the ceiling, the pile of garbage on my driveway grew to new heights.

To see more of the progress, click HERE.

More demolition and preparation for cabinets

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I'm taking care of the rest.

If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about the removal of the old kitchen, and now for more demolition and work begun by my contractor.

Once my boyfriend and I removed the old cabinets and tile floor, the contractor started his work. And of course as it always goes with an old house, there was more work than originally anticipated. And it probably didn't help that I added a little project (ummm, not that little) onto the ever growing list of things that needed to be completed before the cabinets arrive.

I've got to start by talking about the amazing discoveries on the walls behind the drywall and wood panelling. I have never seen so many layers of wallpaper and newspaper in one space. We all got a really good laugh out of that. My boyfriend counted 15 different wallpapers on one chunk he removed.

When we discovered newspaper on the walls behind the wallpaper, I was excited to see how old it was and if there were any dates visible. When I bought this house the age was not disclosed and all I got was the inspector's guess that it was about 90 years old. I did find one date, and although the builders may have used old newspapers they had stashed away, it is amazing to think that this house was built so long ago.

So once the kitchen was stripped bare of all the drywall and the plywood removed from the floor, the contractor got to work on levelling the floor. This was a crucial step as the cabinets would have been on a really obvious slant. The contractor nailed down new thinner plywood over the floorboards (the floorboards were in too much of a rough shape to have skipped this layer), then added strips of wood which he used to level another thin layer of plywood. This will mean that the kitchen floor will be higher than the living room floor but there's nothing I can do about it, and with the floors painted the same colour throughout it won't be that noticeable that there is a little step up into the kitchen.

During the process of removing all the drywall, conversations were had about the wall covering the staircase. I was concerned that it would be a tight fit having a table down the center of the space and trying to get around it with people seated there. Before the demo I took my desk out of my office (which would be a similar width) and we tried it in the kitchen. In the photo below you can see a bit of the wall in question on the left side. On the right there is a little brown rug that shows the depth of the cabinets.

If you'd like to see what I decided to do with the wall (a HUGE success) and more of the construction in preparation for the cabinets, click HERE.

Emptying out the old kitchen

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I'm taking care of the rest.

If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about the beginnings of the demolition phase and my flooring dilemma, and now for lots more demolition.

There's been alot of work going on at my house, and this being my first renovation, I am realizing how tough it is to have your home in complete reno chaos. This is one of the first times I've ever wished I had fewer cats. But I'm coping and praying things will be done in a timely fashion. I've got all fingers and toes crossed on that one.

A couple weeks ago my boyfriend and I started taking down all the old cabinets in the kitchen. As sad as I was to see the pink go, it felt REALLY good to have at them with a crowbar. I thought I'd show you a sequence of photos of the work we did in preparation for my contractor's arrival. One weekend we started by removing the island (that housed the dishwasher), the wall cabinet above it, and the built-in china cabinet.

Here is the island with the dishwasher removed.

I am totally dumbfounded by the poor craftsmanship of so many things around my house - this island being one of them. This is what the interior of it looked like (with the door removed). And I will spare you the horror of what we found underneath the island once it was taken apart.

This photo is the island and the cabinet above it removed. It was a very revealing process as the island was built recently by a former owner and the cabinet on the wall above it was there probably since the house was built. The island came apart with 2 whacks of a crowbar. The cabinet above took about 20 minutes.

To see more of the demolition, click HERE.

The power of a crowbar, and a dilemma

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I'm taking care of the rest.

If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about the major purchases I've made for the kitchen, and now it's time for the fun stuff - DEMOLITION. I also have a flooring dilemma to figure out.

Demolition began recently in my kitchen, and it was a BLAST. I have no fear of tools (especially power tools), and love to get my hands dirty. I didn't do it all myself mind you, my boyfriend was as eager as I was to help with this demolition. We started with the wall between the living room and the kitchen. That had to go because the cabinets are ending about a foot into the living room and frankly, regardless of how the kitchen ended up being designed, I wanted that wall gone to open up the main floor. Here are a couple before photos to show you the wall (which I had an architect friend come by to check out and ensure it was not load bearing).

And here are a couple "during" photos. (During the demo of this wall we discovered mouse poop in the cupboard above the closet. Seems mice chewed/clawed a hole through the wall to get into the closet at a bag I had stashed in there of makings for granola. I have a couple pics in my kitchen remodel set on Flickr of this little surprise if you care to see the HORROR).

To see the space sans wall, and to see what my flooring dilemma is, click HERE.