Week 6
Demo Home Stretch
And the wall came tumbling down...Finally. With the electrical abandoned in the wall we had the ok to take the last wall down. The room is now open and looks much bigger. Probably because the fridge is in the dining room and there is nothing left in the kitchen except a work light and trash cans.
Clean up has been easier from our newest family member, Stinger. The travel pocket size shop vac. 2.5 gallons is perfect for all of the remote rubble.
The new kitchen looking in from the dining room.
The future bar view....
The new kitchen looking out into the dining room.
Summary of Week 6- Memorial Day Weekend
4 -Trips to Home Improvement Warehouses
1- Interior Partition wall removed
9 -Maximum number of people in the house at once
1- 26th Birthday
1 -28th Anniversary
3 -New circuits added to the Electrical Panel
250' -of new electrical wire run in the kitchen
4 -Working lights in the new kitchen
7 -Consecutive meals cooked on the grill
4 - Appliances in the dining room
1- Surprise Sibling visit
90 - degrees Weekend high Temp
100 - Bottles of Reverse Osmosis Water drank
2- Cases of Beer
1- Bottle of Julia (Italian Grappa)
1- minor injury, Missy, 4th smashed left digit
1- annoyed cat
Week 5
Week 5 has come and gone and not a lot of physical progress has been made. We were busy meeting with outside consultants who just verified that we are nutso. Electrician Number 2 came out, we shall call him Ty Pennington, because that is what he looked like. He was very nice and told us that
3/4 of the kitchen electric is no problem. The problem is in the wall that we want to demo and the existing knob and tube circuits. So we parted ways and waited for a quote, of .....$1400.00 pending no major snaffu's. Well all know that is
not possible.
So trying to digest that, the next day came the window guy. Window guy was also very nice and the cats loved him and all of his
mini window samples. So again we go through the outline of projected scope and wait for the quote. Joe has the numbers but I am sure that it is still too much. So we will go with the good ole order from HD and install ourselves. Breaking it to the cats is going to be the hard part.
The plumbing is so close to being done I can almost feel the water under the new faucet. As we speak Joe is reassembling the upstairs bathroom from its plumbing update. Now the only thing left is the supply lines in the basement to the kitchen sink. This will be addressed this weekend because it is producing a pretty substantial leak into a bucket below. We were trying to hold onto the use of the kitchen sink as long as possible and those days are coming close to an end.
On a side plumbing project, the porno toilet is leaking too. Where from we have no idea, but the carpet in front is soaked. Contractor John is hooking us up with a replacement toilet, that is if they separate the tank from the bowl to get it into the Acura. There will be no plumbing untouched when this project is done. Joe's arm is healing slow but sure. The grimace on his face when band-aid removal meets arm hair is priceless. Tables are turned now, and he had so much fun poking my bruise.
This has nothing to do with the Kitchen remodel, but worth mentioning because it only happens to us. This past Friday, a few close pals were enjoying a few delicious Cinderellas at Brazenhead, well I was, the boys had Guinness. Along side us was a reunion of some sort, I may call them engineers, for Ohio Northern, and no it wasn't John, Joe Y. Or Cousino. But alas, another crazy very drunken fool, who John witnessed throwing up in the urinal and proclaiming the need to fart by his hair holding friend. This dude was so drunk he could hardly stand, it was only 9ish roughly in the pm. Of course, all we do is stare at dude, knocking his head into the wall and then onto the table and just loosing all sense of anything. Then the unexpected happened, he stood up in attempt to leave the bar and started to whiz his pants in the middle of the Brazenhead happy hour crowd. To our amazement the wet spot just grew and grew right before our eyes, and that was not just the tears of pure entertainment clouding our view. We still can't believe that we witness such a show in a high class establishment. Of course we will be back this Friday to finish celebrating May birthdays. Cheers to another unbelievable moment of not working on the kitchen.
Foreman Number 1, Dad Socie will be coming down this weekend to mentor the kitchen remodel, mainly the electrical. Food Mom Socie will be providing Meals on Wheels to all workers on the site. Come for learning, stay for beer and slave labor. This is an open invite to anyone who wants a front row seat and sneak peek to Week 6 Kitchen Remodel.
Week 4
The plaster has been removed from the mystery stack in the corner of the kitchen. Looks to be the exhaust stack to a wood burning stove, maybe. Some more restoration work needs to be done to make the stack presentable for the new kitchen.
Major Injury #2, by Joe on Saturday 05-13-06. Molten solder from working on the overhead plumbing lines dripped off and onto his arm, cinging arm hair and 3 layers of skin.
Current kitchen conditions.
Happy Birthday Shrimpy, Cocktail, Diesel!
Week 3
Weekend Three begins with drinking
5 pitchers of Margarita's the night before for celebration of Cinco de Mayo. Whoever planned that obviously didn't have to get up at dawn to attend the Ha
milton Parker Tile Blow out sale. Oh wait that was me.
The HP sale is very similar to the David's bridal dress sale also held once a year. This is where all the
crazies come out in search of a good bargin, in this case,
floor tile. We get to HP on schedule at
7:30 am and wait in a huge car line waiting for the madness to begin. There is nothing better than a hangover headache and crazy people all in one place, and a million forklifts for that matter. Finally, 8am comes and they funnel all the cars into the secret parking lot in back, very similar to Cedar Point stlye. People were running, yes running, to the tile bays to be the first to scour the loot.
Pallets after pallets of tile were lined up in the bays, with about 18"aisle ways for the crazies to navigate. Pure madness. Joe and I had a very tight gameplan and had 9 boxes of tile in 45min.
We picked out imported Italian ceramic tile 18"square, very Euro, for $15 bucks a box x 9 boxes =$145 with tax. Score. So we got beautiful tile for about $0.95 a sqaure foot. You can't beat that, you really can't.
Fair market value of the tile is no less than $5.50 a square foot. My bargin shopping was at its finest.
This is another
public announcement, and the Cousino's can back me up on this one. (We saw them there, but no time for small talk, we were on a mission and so were they.)
1.)
Do not bring babies, especially babies in strollers
2.)
Do not bring full size plan drawings to figure out the SF of tile you need.
3.) Crazy Architects will buy entire pallets full of tile at a drop of a hat.
4.)
Don't carry your own tile, it is far too heavy, use the runner boys
5.) Be there
early6.) Wear steel toed shoes, no open toes
Of course we will be back next year for the bathroom project.
The rest of the weekend was pretty productive, we even enlisted some help from Joe's parents. All of the plaster and lathe has been removed from the interior of the kitchen walls. All of the trim for all of the doors and windows also has been removed.
2 out of the
3 major appliances now live in the dining room.
On tap for this week will be getting an electrician to come out and get the knob and tube out of here.
No major injuries to report this week.
Week 2
Week 2 brings slow progress in the kitchen remodel world. More plumbing side tracks, mainly getting the shower fixtures replaced and working. So we have mainly focused on the shower shenanigans this weekend. Joe also worked on beefing up the structural members of the floor joists where there was apparent water damage before. Structural engineers is so overrated, all the calculators and math.
The Expanded shower plumbing project
Forman Cocktail endorses Craftsman tools.
