Kitchen Make Over!

 

Anyone who has visited us in the past few years will attest that something needed to be done. Yes, "we" (*1) replaced some cabinets and the sink but our walls and cabinets were getting heavily used and showing it. I have been threatening to repaint the kitchen for... oh, maybe a year or two now. And Bob has been complaining about the stupid drawer pulls for quite a while. (*2) 

Annoyingly, when you used said little round knobs, you couldn't help but wear the paint off underneath in a dirty circular pattern. Nothing cute about that!

                                      

So in what seemed a spontaneous mutual eruption of  "Hey! Let's paint the kitchen today!" was actually several years in the making. First, Bob drilled holes to fit the new handles. Simple, clean, modern-looking metal pulls that work easily (and will hopefully eliminate the weird wear pattern) that we had purchased a month or so ago for just such a day as this. Then we had to remove all the handles and Bob sanded down all the handle areas where something like three or four layers of paint had worn away. Then he washed the cabinets. I busied myself with cleaning the louvered door leading into the utility room. There was a prodigious amount of dust and aerial-borne dander adhered to each slat. Cleaning done, we moved onto painting.

Here are our new handles, patiently waiting being screwed back on, after the paint job is complete. I wish I had photographed the stupid, round knobs before Bob removed them! But there's always a scary place that you forgot about... how about the area above the refrigerator. Noooooooooooooooo!!!!

Yeech! Look at that grime! And the worst thing is I had to make Bob clean and paint that as even on the ladder, my arm wasn't long enough to get the back wall. Bob dropped something he was cleaning with down behind the refrigerator, but we won't mention that!

But look! All that hard work paid off as a day and a half later, we have clean, fresh, white cabinets with new modern-looking handles! That are easy to use! No more scraping the paint off every time you open a cupboard. Yay!

And even Robin the Good's food corner is nice and clean. This corner was particularly awful with baked-on dog slobber (sorry Robin!) and some odd semi-domesticated spiders and just plain old accumulated dirt. Now I have to make Robin a new place mat...

The window sill demanded special treatment in the form of some advanced spackling and sanding, which Bob heroically executed, and then he even took the Venetian blinds down and laundered them outside. Now they, too, look almost new. Well done!!

Hard to capture in these pictures but the kitchen is now a wonderful room that you want to spend time in. Or even eat in! I am glad we had visitors last night, and are expecting my family this weekend as someone has to witness the magnificence of our new kitchen! (*3)

(*1) "I" had nothing to do with the sink and cabinet replacement except clean up. Bob and our good friend Joe executed all the construction and installation. I'm giving credit where it's very much due!

(*2) Stupid drawer pulls in question were "cute" little white balls. They did look quirky but after 11 years of fingers slipping and trying to get a grip on them, they weren't so cute after all. 

(*3) But unfortunately, inevitably, all that new freshness only reflects how dirty the paint and walls are in all the other parts of the house...

Bob At It Again!

 

Alright, here's the requisite snow picture. The only nice thing I can say about that is how lovely and regal Robin the Good looks silhouetted against all that white nihilism.

I apologize for my blog-posting absence, but I've preoccupied with the abundance of snow (yes, officially the "s" word) that has appeared outside. I guess I could exclaim, "Finally!" as we've had a negligible amount to date, but I prefer to grumble, "Is it spring yet?!?" as everything is harder and wetter and colder to do when there's a foot plus of that stuff outside...

So while I've been complaining, my partner Bob has been busy improving our life indoors. Remember how he made this fabulous balustrade and railing? Well, he got to work making another section of our upstairs so much nicer.

 Behind the door of our office, there has been a "problem site", to put it politely. We have a sorta-closet alcove that previously harbored a slew of boxes with our accumulated tax stuff and other assorted paperwork. A partial improvement occurred a few years back when Bob installed a random set of cupboards in which to hide our financial records. I scored a low cabinet at work (remember when I "worked"? No, blissfully, I don't either!) and we had always meant to install it beneath the cupboards. 

I tried this one day like a year ago, and was chagrined to discover that because of a narrow strip of baseboard trim, the cabinet wouldn't fit. I mean, we're talking so close and yet so far... Said cabinet then resided in our office, stacked up and unusable until Bob came to the rescue and sawed away that bit of molding. Now the cabinet fits! And we places to actually file things...

Here it is open, with Robin the Good surveying our finances...

Truly, the most exciting outcome of this operation is that Bob and I then spent part of a day throwing out tons (and I mean tons) of outdated paperwork and tax returns from like twelve years ago and random bank statements from banks we haven't banked at in a decade. Liberating! Plus all that paper becomes perfect fire starting material for our wood stoves...

And here's yet another cabinet that Bob improved! Is there no end of his home-improvement wizardry?!?! In the kitchen, Bob had fashioned a narrow cabinet next to the stove, perfect for stowing cookie sheets and other flat stuff. Bob has complained that it was too dark so he took some noisy little tool that cuts into tight places and he created a window.

                                           

Hey Presto! Let there be light! (Yes, that's Bob waving from the inside of the cabinet. ) I fear Bob may be at an end of cabinet repairs; I wonder what he'll start on next?

Sink or Swim!

I thought I'd let you suffer through the stress and anxiety of wondering what happened to the sink project... Did the new sink leak? Did the gaskets burst, spewing water sky high? Did the worst things that could happen happen?!?!?
NO! It all went swimmingly and we've been enjoying our new cabinets and sink for almost a week now. I've just been remiss (and busy!!) and haven't gotten around to finishing this epic.
So to pick up where we left off, Joe and Bob installed the freshly painted cabinets- ones repurposed from a couple of friend's kitchen re-do.And as you can see, with the exception of a couple of places that needed repainting after the cabinets were fitted, it already looks cleaner and brighter.
This part of the process looks simple enough but my hats off to Bob and Joe for figuring out how to fit all the jigsaw puzzle like pieces back together and then still have to do the actual plumbing.

For a few days, we washed dishes in the downstairs bathroom sink. It was a tad inconvenient but thank goodness for that downstairs sink. It felt almost awkward to think of using the kitchen sink again. The dish drain board had to sit on the washing machine and necessitated many trips back and forth from the bathroom to the kitchen. I don't miss that procession!
But finally, the sink was dropped in and the side pieces were glued on and braced. That's what the random looking piece of wood is all about: causing pressure to hold the side panels in place until set. But look at that glowing red sink! Fabulous! Around the edge, you can see silicone caulking oozing out of the friction between the sink and the counter surface. Bob carefully sliced that away and then he was ready to hook up the pipes and connections underneath. That's the nerve wracking part, because if it isn't sealed correctly, we're back to Leak Ville!
But it worked and brilliantly when Bob turned on the water.

So the sink is now in use and every time I approach it to get a glass of water or place a dish in the sink to wash it, I admire the amazing red sink... with no leaks. The doors still remain to be reattached but we're waiting a couple of days until the underneath dries out completely. But it looks and works great and I don't cringe when ever I get a glass of water.

That Sink-ing Feeling

Get ready for some truly gross before pictures! I mean, our sink was BAD. Last year, pre-tornado, we were aware that the faucet on the kitchen sink leaked. Water was seeping out from under the (badly chipped!) metal housing and oozing down around the sink and between the wall and the countertop. I even (cringe) removed a few mushrooms that sprouted in that crevice between the wall and the faucet. Hey! They were small...

Here's the underneath- unpleasantly soggy and one of those places in your house you don't want to even think about, let alone dwell on. And this is the cleaned out picture! There were boxes of things like steel wool pads that had disintegrated so completely that when I reached in to remove them, they dissolved into a nasty smeary, rusty rotten pile of slime. It was awful cleaning everything out from under the sink.
And the sink itself! Holy cow! It was never a paragon of sink perfection but as it was made of plastic, it just became entirely stained and no amount of Bartender's Helper's Friend helped. Take a look:

Wow... even I'm impressed by how hideous that was!
So I was attempting to say that we meant to do the sink/ counter/cabinet replacement last year but never got to it as we had so much exterior clean up to do. But Bob and our intrepid friend Joe (thanks Joe!) set to work on Tuesday and tore all this nastiness out.

 Here's Joe's arm being featured alongside the old cabinet (and dishwasher) that are a-comin' out. Notice the lovely neon lime green wall detailing: I think the entire kitchen was once that refreshing color! (Yeeeesh!! My eyes!) Anyway, here's what it looked like after circuit breaker had been tripped, water had been shut off and cabinets had made their way to the backyard:

Bob and Joe cleaned that disaster up and I painted the interior white. (I also did my (small) part by painting all the doors, trim boards, floor boards and various other connection pieces white... the least I could do!) Enough eye sore! I'll post the happier photos of successful rebuilding the cabinet and installing the sink in a few days!

Deja Vu All Over Again

As Bob and I struggled to lift tons of kitchen cabinets off of our pickup truck and onto the frozen tundra that is our current New England state of affairs, it occurred to us that we had done this before. Like seven years ago when we moved in: history does repeat itself.*

This is how we came to this particular episode in our lives. We have been bemoaning the state of our kitchen, especially the sink area. The particle board around the sink is soaked and exploding, the plastic sink is stained and nasty beyond description. Here, you see for yourself.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHH! Awful! And that's after a good cleaning. (Those stains just don't come out anymore and the faucet is all chipped and it's beyond redeemable!) So when friends- who thankfully live close by (in another modern house)- offered their old(er) cabinets because they're in the midst of a kitchen re-do, we said "yes".

Let's just mention that poor Bob had to make three trips to pick up all those cabinets and it got colder and darker as we offloaded. Then we had to maneuver them all into the house. By default, they all wound up in the living room as it was the only available "free space". It's a good thing we celebrated Xmas last week!

These cabinets are in much better shape than ours but it will be a bit of a Chinese puzzle trying to fit them into our kitchen and its configuration. But hey! We're always up for a challenge.
In all honesty, if the only area we redo is the sink (and maybe replace some of our obnoxious cabinet doors which fold out in this wonky and deadly way), I'll be happy.

This area. That stupid dishwasher is going as we haven't even used it once and we just store dishes in it. And under that sink... I'm not even posting a picture of that! It's been leaking through the back of the sink for a while and there's some sort of leak from the pipes underneath. So tackling this area will solve several dilemmas.
Bob did take all the cabinets and counters and drawers, not only as a favor to the friends (thanks Joanne and Eric!) for thinking of us, but because he wasn't sure what part went with which piece.

These are the ones we're pretty sure we can't use: triangular corner cabinets and odd floating islands. But this is a small price to pay for things we were considering purchasing from Ikea or Home Depot. It may take a while, but I can't wait for our new kitchen! Oh, and warmer weather...

*No kidding! I just realized that January 3rd IS the anniversary of our closing! And it is going on our seventh year here; time does fly and history does repeat itself.