Kitchen Renovation, Part 4 (Under Our Feet)

Two days after our countertops went in, our floor was installed.

After seriously considering hardwood in the kitchen, to match the rest of the floors in the house, we ultimately opted for Marmoleum. Marmoleum is an all-natural linoleum, meaning it's a mixture of linseed oil, rosin, wood and cork pulp, and finely-ground limestone, all on a jute background. It lacks on the nasties found in regular linoleum products.

And also, it's very pleasant to walk on, being very soft and cushy.

The color we chose is "Natural Corn." It's basically yellow (very similar to the wall color) with orange, brown and white flecks/swirls.


Rolls of Marmoleum

Before looking at the final pictures, I have to tell you, I almost had to throw down with the flooring guy. A week earlier, his partner had dropped by to take a look at our floor and give us an estimate. After looking everything over, she gave us what we felt was a pretty reasonable price. But when the installer showed up, he started grouching at me about how the screws in the floor were all wrong, and he was going to have redo the subfloor in order to install the flooring, and how that was going to significantly increase the cost. So I immediately told him, um, NO, your partner has already looked at all of this, and okayed it, so I wasn't about to pay any more than what she quoted us. It went back and forth for a bit, until I finally just told him to stop working until this was sorted out. While I was trying to sort it out, he came back in and apologized, saying everything was fine -- he was just having a bad day because his wife kicked him out of the house that morning, and he overreacted to the way our subfloor was installed. He said it was an easier fix than he thought, and he could just do it for the original price.

Once everything was smoothed over, everything went just fine and the floor installer was a perfectly nice guy about everything else. And the floor ended up looking fantastic!


View from the dining room doorway.


View from the hallway doorway.


The little bit of flooring that goes under the refrigerator.

And the final touch: the metal strips that hide the seam between the Marmoleum and the wood flooring elsewhere in the house! We went with gold.

Kitchen Renovations, Part 3 (Rock!)

To recap the kitchen renovation thus far: we tore out the old cabinets, tore out the old floor, repaired a giant hole in the floor, installed a new subfloor, assembled and installed a ton of cabinet boxes, installed plywood on the tops of all the base cabinets, sanded the walls AND painted. Whew.

The night before our countertops were to be installed, we noticed one of the cabinets hadn't been properly screwed to the wall! Oh noes!

But never fear! Our trusty screw gun, and Evan, fixed it right up.



And the next day, when the countertop installer showed up, he noticed that the plywood along the longest wall of cabinets wasn't level -- the dishwasher panel wasn't square! He had a plan, which involved the following:



That piece of wood pushed the dishwasher panel back enough to make the countertop level, but it had to stay there until Evan could secure the panel in that same location (which later involved shims and glue, I believe).

But, all those problems solved, our countertops went in!

We picked out a 1" thick black granite called Shanxi Black. It's almost solid black, with little teeny goldish flecks in it. Finding this granite was a big deal; we went to every low-cost granite importer we could find, and looked at every type of black granite one could buy. We ended up picking Seattle Granite Countertops because we liked their cut the best -- a very classy bevel.


The first pieces of granite, and backsplash, go in.

And the whole process went incredibly quickly -- maybe 3 hours? And we had a countertop!


One side of the kitchen, with sink cut-out, finished.


The other side of the kitchen, finished.

We have a few things still to finish up re: the countertops. One, we have to paint the caulk to match the walls (right now, it's gray). And two, we have to use a plastic strip to cover up the edges of the plywood that can still be seen under the countertops.



It turned out really pretty -- white cabinets, black countertops, yellow walls. Now we just need some flooring...

Sea of Blue

My new favorite color combination is teal and dark brown, and ever since Evan vetoed an orange living room (what was he thinking??), I'd had this particular color combination in the back of my mind for our living room decor. So, after some convincing, Evan agreed to the following:

1) a very light teal ceiling (in a color called "Baby Bonnet")
2) a light teal on most of the walls ("Tahoe Blue"), and
3) a true and vibrant teal on certain accent walls ("Java Sea")

And after some grousing on Evan's part about blue being so depressing ("it rains a lot here"), and my response that he can go stand in the now yellow kitchen if he's feeling down, we got to work.

Painting the entirety of the hall, living room and dining room was a multi-day task -- we had to wait for each coat of paint to dry, not to mention, for each color to completely dry.

We started with the hall, which had gone from salmon to white, thanks to our primer.



At first, our ceiling and wall colors looked very similar, as the following picture may lead you to believe. But they ended up being noticeably different.



You can see the contrast better in the living room:



And many days later, finally, we got to the accent walls. We chose to paint the two small walls in the dining room the true teal, along with the wall perpendicular to the front door. It really pops, next to the two much lighter blues!


Almost done.


Evan the contortionist, painting the last little bit of the last wall. He had to squeeze behind the refrigerator to do so, since it was still in our living room, waiting for the kitchen renovations to get finished.


Accent walls in the dining room, drying.


Accent walls next to a "regular" wall.

You may notice a stripe at the tops of the walls -- this was intentional. Thanks to the wood paneling originally hanging on the long wall in the living room, we decided to put up crown moulding along the tops of the walls to make things easier on us. As a result, we didn't have to be super careful in a lot of the corners where two different blues met. We just left them mostly unpainted, figuring the crown moulding would make everything look pretty.


Shot of the dining room through the kitchen.


Evan, afterwards. I think he's frowning because he had to do so much painting by himself, since I couldn't balance on my sprained ankle for long enough to paint the larger living room walls.

And, in case you're keeping track... we're finished painting! Yaaaaaay!!!!

(Ok, so the furnace room isn't painted. But we're using it as storage for the time being, so it doesn't need to be painted yet, right?)

Kitchen Renovations, Part 2

The next step in our kitchen was to paint the walls - which needed to be done before the countertops and cabinet doors could be installed.

My original paint scheme, which I had thought up long before we bought the house, was to have a pale yellow dining room, with black and white furniture/pictures/accessories/etc. But since our current dining room shares a wall with our living room, we had to rethink the color scheme. We hadn't decided on kitchen colors yet, though, and said, "hey, yellow is great for a kitchen." And, a kitchen lends itself to the yellow/white/black color scheme quite well, as it turns out.

We picked out a light yellow called "Jonquil Yellow," in a semi-gloss (so that any spatters would be easy to clean).

After taping off and otherwise covering all the cabinet boxes, and after drinking the obligatory morning latte, we got to work.


Still-life, lattes and paint rollers.

My ankle was still out of sorts, so I was limited in what I could do. I did much of the cutting-in around the base cabinets, and painted the walls as high as I could. Evan painted everything on high, ceiling included.





Our kitchen shares doorjams with our dining room on one side, and our hallway on the other. We made the executive decision to paint them yellow, as you can see above.


Under the wall cabinets, with all the electrical boxes turned out. Post-second coat.

Being a small room, the kitchen took no time at all to paint. Here's the finished paint job a few days later, sans dropcloths.

Boo!

My favorite holiday is Halloween. It also happened to be our first major holiday in our new house. So, of course, we had to do something!

But first, a little background...

Two weekends before Halloween, I was being my clumsy self. I usually try to compensate for this by being very careful about where I step. But as it happened, I was following a conversation between Evan and our friend Steve, and didn't account for a random curb in my path. Over I went. Crack went my ankle. And, ooh boy, did it hurt!

So I'm laid up in bed in traction all day that Saturday, and hobbling around on crutches with an ice pack strapped to my ankle for days after that.

And our death-trap of a front walk suddenly looks a lot more death-trap-y.



Yes, you're seeing that right -- those are cinder blocks, laid unevenly, right on top of the dirt. Very dangerous.

Evan decides we need to get rid of all those cinder blocks and dig out our front walk, so that we can some day lay down new pavers and have a real front walk. He spends a whole day, and an few additional evenings, digging down 8 inches, pulling out giant rocks, sawing random tree roots, laying down a layer of gravel, and leveling the whole walk. All the extra dirt is piled along the perimeter of the new walkway.

So now we have mounds of dirt and multiple flat rectangular bricks. And Halloween is fast approaching.

What would you do??







Spooooooky.....

Kitchen Renovations, Part 1

Please note: our kitchen renovation took a fairly long time by our standards. We had quite a few obstacles along the way, including two trips to California and one severely sprained ankle. So, I will blog about each step separately, since there were serious time lapses between each stage.

As you may recall, upon moving in, this is what our kitchen looked like:



Outdated. Ugly. Green. Not to mention, containing a leaky water heater in the corner that had caused our subfloor and structural floor to rot through. You can also see, at left, the mysteriously-placed wall cabinets -- why no base cabinets along that wall? It's not like there was room to place a table there...

Opposite side of the kitchen. Check out the lovely, stick-on tile!



Due in large part to the giant hole in the kitchen floor, we decided a new kitchen was desperately needed, as soon as possible. So, as suggested by this post, we bought an entire kitchen from IKEA, the Swedish Wonderland.

The reason IKEA prices are so reasonable is because you get to assemble everything yourself. Thankfully, it's fairly straightforward, and once you do one, the others are a total breeze. I ended up doing most of the assembly myself, since Evan decided to take a work trip to Monterey. His dad nicely stopped by a few times after work to help. We ended up assembling 14 boxes altogether, including the giant pantry.


A stack of cabinet boxes, awaiting installation.


The corner wall cabinet, surrounding by other cabinet components awaiting assembly.

Our handyman, Todd, was a life saver. He not only fixed our giant hole, no problem, but he also laid down a brand new subfloor and installed new drywall throughout most of the kitchen. Then he started in on our cabinet boxes.


Check out the new subfloor! And the new drywall (the white patches)! And the first two cabinet boxes!


All the base cabinets are installed, and the wall cabinets are in progress.

After installing all the cabinets, both base and wall, Todd carefully measured, cut and nailed plywood to the tops of the base cabinets. The plywood will later be the base for our countertops (more on that later).



A little measuring, a little cutting, a little sanding, and a whole lot of lifting later... we finally have what looks like a modern kitchen!



...with only a little bit of detritus left outside.