All Wrapped up

So, we got a quote for siding. It wasn't outrageous but it didn't seem like they would do the job to the level we wanted it done. Their proposed solution around the window was J-mold and with no mention of building wrap.

When we installed the kitchen window, we caulked around it but it was basically sitting there with caulk around it and a piece of plywood below it. Given that water can pass onto the underside of the siding we wanted to ensure that the edge around the window was really weather tight. By this point we realized that if we wanted this job done how we wanted it it was probably just easier to do it ourselves. So this weekend we prepped the kitchen for siding, we flashed around the window (using a home made bending solution):

Filled in the gaps around the door and added brick mold

and of course wrapped everything in building wrap. Hopefully we will get to side it this week/weekend and then we can move on to the deck!

In other news we used the money we saved on hiring out siding to hire our contractor neighbor to arrange and install a custom size door from the Habitat for Humanity Re-store in the basement walkup. Things are moving along again!

Dishwasher update

For those who haven't been following, the beginning of the dishwasher saga can be found here.

The technician just left. I didn't get a picture before he did the repair, but the basic idea was to replace the whole inside door panel. It now has some extra holes on the inside to help the steam to vent out the bottom as opposed to out the side of the door. This issue seems to be common when our Frigidaire dishwasher is installed at the end of a run.

(the rectangle made of holes is new)

We will monitor it when we do dishes next and update this post with the results.

*Update* we've run the dishwasher through a couple of times and it appears to have worked. We checked along side the dishwasher while it was running and the side of the cupboard was dry. The new fix vents more air downwards, so it might not work for people with wooden floors, but steam on our tile is preferable to steam on the Ikea cupboards.

Dishwasher saga begins...

After discovering steam leaking from our dishwasher damaging our cabinets (thanks to another local blog!) we quickly got on the phone with Fridgidaire and got in contact with our local repair company (for some on-warranty repair). From other sources online we were concerned that this issue is a fundamental flaw with the dishwasher and only bandaid solutions would be offered. But given that we don't have the time to seriously research another dishwasher or the desire to spend yet more money on the house we figured it would be worth taking advantage of the warranty to hopefully buy us some time.

After the repair person attempted for quite a while to determine the cause of the steam leak he got on the phone with another repair person and progress seemed to be made. Apparently this steam problem with our dishwasher is especially an issue when this dishwasher is installed at the end of a run of cabinets (e.g., against a wall or trim piece). Normally if it sits mid-run (both sides blocked) the steam is pushed out the bottom of the unit by the fan successfully but if one side is not blocked the steam is not forced out the bottom with enough force and it just sits there accumulating.

It seems since this issue has surfaced Frigidaire has worked to solve it. The repair person has ordered a new door panel to be installed that is designed to get the steam to vent out the bottom of the door more effectively (something about where the fan is placed etc.)

I'm glad to report we now have some hope that we may be able to keep this dishwasher and not have our cabinets reduced to paper mache. We'll update again once the new door is in and let you all know if the fix is successful.

Stairway progress

This weekend was spent on ladders drywalling the area around the stairs.
While we were hanging drywall in the stairway and upstairs hall we figured we would take this opportunity to laminate some drywall over the grossness that was our linen closet.
We also finally finished demo of the main stair railing. As a cruel joke on us the newel post encased in the veneer at the base of the stairs is totally different from the one at the top. Not a huge surprise given the pile of crap the rest of this house has been. We officially do not feel bad not saving much of the original trim work etc. :oP

In unrelated news, we're cheap bastards. We bought our dishwasher because it was the least expensive all stainless on the outside dishwasher. It has a spotty history, but from what we read online before buying it. We figured it would die in 1 spectacular event (e.g., electrical short, big water leak etc.). What we didn't realize is that this dishwasher's flaw is more subtle. We actually found this out from Jen and Dave's Reno, another local blog. The dishwasher leaks steam out the side of the door which is pretty destructive.. especially for our Ikea cupboards (luckily the damage so far seems minimal). We've got an appliance repair company coming to do some fixing on Wednesday. Hopefully they can put a good enough fix in that we do not have to take more drastic measures like buying a new dishwasher...

Putting the kitchen to good use

Ginger man/lady. Note the lady gets the sawzall while the man has to use the hand saw.. hehehe

Here's the recipes we used:
Gingerbread
Icing

Kitchen Is Done!

Yes, the kitchen reno is done. We've spent the weekend moving back into the kitchen and unpacking quite a bit of kitchen stuff that has been sitting in our basement for the past year.

Here are some before/after pictures of it. Overall we're really happy with how it came out. We found a lot of good inspiration online that made putting the whole thing together a lot easier. In particular we found the kitchen at Rambling Renovators to be a good resource. We also spent a good amount of time watching Sarah's House 2 on HGTV by Sarah Richardson.

This is a collage we made when submitting our kitchen to CityTV's 48 hour renovation contest. It does a pretty good job of capturing the hideous "old lady peach" that the room used to be.




... and here is the kitchen now:


The fridge is a 33" counter depth by Samsung that we got a great deal on.


Given the lack of counter space we have we decided to dedicate a drawer to being a spice rack. We cook alot and digging through 24 jars to find cumin gets old fast. This drawer is right next to the stove, super convenient.



We went with a Fridgidaire dishwasher because it was the cheapest dishwasher that was all stainless (on the outside anyways...).


Here is the tiny eating nook we made where I am typing this right now :o).




This is our coffee station, super close to the eating nook. We pretty much optimized this side of our kitchen for getting breakfast/coffee in a hurry.


We started demolishing our kitchen on Sept. 19 and are now working in a finished kitchen on Nov. 8. Note that we are the exception and not the rule, but we think it's important to mention that, yes, if you have the skill/motivation a 100% DIY kitchen renovation can be had in a timely manner. One advantage of DIY is that you can work as fast or as slow as you want on your kitchen. In our case, we worked quite hard on the kitchen (this means getting up early even on weekends and pulling a solid 10+ hr day to make up for the fact that you are not a contractor that can do 8 hr days each week day). I'll admit it wasn't always easy or fun, but doing it ourselves also meant that the work was up to our standard. We (ok one of us in particular) is quite anal. Doing it ourselves mean knowing that the drains/wiring were all up to code. Also on the aesthetic side we got to include little details such as putting returns on the end of runs of baseboard. We also were able to give our Ikea kitchen a more custom look using backfeeds and hardwired undercabinet lighting. We also had the advantage of not having to wait on other people's schedules to get the work done.

Design/cost wise, we followed some advice we saw HGTV from Sarah Richardson. Her advice is to save on the cupboards and floors and then splash out on counter/backsplash/appliances. We went with this approach and especially as a result of the Ikea cupboards we ended up with a much nicer kitchen than if we had gone with similarly priced home depot cupboards.

Finishing up...

... is as always dragging on. The little bits that finish a room always seem to take so long relative to the major stuff. Hanging drywall, plastering, flooring, all take about the same time as the finishing but seem to give so much more pay off in terms of "progress" it seems.

Here's what we've been up to this week in pictures. We've been busy with trim, backsplash and enjoying our new toy (a dishwasher!).

Still a lot of caulking, under cabinet valence, painting trim, and much needed handles (!) to go..

Granite is installed!

City Home Granite Depot came to install our granite today (above is a picture of it when the sealer was still wet, it's quite a bit lighter now). We were very impressed with the service we got from City Home, within 4 days of visiting them they came and measured our kitchen, and in 9 days from our first visit we got our counters. The people there were also really nice. The lady that did the measuring was a bit concerned about our unsquare walls and offered some good tips on things they could do with the granite to camouflage some imperfections. The installers also took a lot of time to make things perfect. At one point my better half said a piece looked ok, but the guy still spent more time moving it around to get it "just so". His partner let us know that this installer was apparently a bit of a perfectionist.

We had also noted some dark spots on the first slab they showed us when we were in the store (we were looking for a very light/smooth look), so they had gone and picked us a lighter more consistent piece for the install (they also have a policy of informing you if your granite will be significantly different than the sample piece).

Overall we were very pleased with the service at City Home Granite Depot. It really felt like they were trying to make us happy rather than just take our money and install some granite. If you're looking for cheap pre-fab granite in Toronto we would definitely recommend them.

Disclaimer: No, we did not get any kick-back from the nice folks at City Home Granite Depot. We paid full price :oP and they really are this good!

Still chuggin along

Yet another week has elapsed in our kitchen reno. Most of the cupboard doors are now installed except for the one we're waiting on and the ones that go under the sink.

We also got appliances yesterday. They were a bit more work than anticipated. Our fridge came with an ice maker that we didn't know about so we got to run a waterline into the unfinished basement. This will be a nice feature in the summer when we're making jugs of margaritas in our Vitamix.

Today the better part of our day was spent installing the over-range microwave. Nothing about the install was too hard, but there was definitely a lot to do. We got to cut a hole to the outside and install the vent. We also had to move the electrical wire we had run for the microwave because we had hoped it would be able to plug in behind itself but the microwave required a plug in the cupboard above it instead.

Overall we're pretty happy with the appliances so far. They were a really good bargain and they look really nice. We'll see how performance is, but we've read good things about Samsung so far.



This week we knocked another item off our to-do list. We groom our dog Trinity ourselves, usually in the kitchen. Since the kitchen is now a bit more usable she got a much needed hair cut :D

Ikea Kitchen: Installing your kitchen

Installing Ikea cabinets is probably a bit easier then buying them :oP. They even come with a handy DVD showing a family with a small child, baby and dog assembling/installing them together as some sort of strange rainy day activity.

Assembling the boxes is significantly easier than assembling regular Ikea furniture. We got 4 boxes assembled at a leisurely pace in about 1.5 hours. The next day we took about 2 hours to hang these four and the one last upper on the wall. We waited to assemble the last cupboard because were weren't sure if it would be 12 or 15 inches. Ikea cabinets come with a rail mounting
scheme for the upper cabinets. This makes mounting the cabinets very easy (you just have to be very careful in leveling the rod and then from there it's a pretty simple task).

Base cupboards took a little longer to build because they had drawer hardware (which is much easier to install while assembling the cabinet). The base cabinets get mounted with a ledger board along the wall.

The doors all went on pretty easily too. The blum hinges just snap together and with some slight adjustments you have nice level working doors. Given that one of us is a very big perfectionist we were a bit worried that installing the cabinets would make us a little crazy, but really it went as smooth as it could (minus some unsquare walls etc). After about 2 days worth of labour this is where we're at with the kitchen. We still have to rip some filler pieces and put them in, but it's really starting to come together.

Ikea Kitchen: Buying your kitchen

Our kitchen is chugging along. There is so much to blog about regarding the Ikea kitchen install process (which luckily is not nearly as bad as people would have you believe) so we're breaking it down into general topics.

Today's topic is "buying your cabinets" or "when not to listen to the Ikea staff".

When we went in to buy our cabinets we had measured our room at 137.5". As a verifying step the sales person totaled our cabinet lengths to verify that they would fit. This calculation went as follows:
24 (DW) + 30 (sink) + 36 + 30 (stove) + 15 = 135 (2 inches spare).

However, the sales person said that we would need to put cover panels on either side of the sink and stove cupboards (because the cupboards change in height there) pictured below. These filler pieces would have totaled 2 inches (4, 1/2" filler pieces). Leaving us with 0 inches to spare.

So we get our cupboards. We notice that she only ordered these cover panels for the top (so our bottom cabinets would have been off by an inch starting at the sink wtf...). We were also a bit skeptical of inserting cover panels in the middle of the run for aesthetic reasons. Upon assembling the cupboards and checking it out our suspicions were confirmed, the sales person had no fricken clue what she was doing. Yes, the sides of the cupboards is ugly, but anyone with a table saw can do this without needing to insert whole cover panels. For the sink we are ripping cover panels down to go along the sides and top of the area under the cupboards. This wasn't possible for the stove cabinets because the cover pieces would have interfered with the over-range microwave. We could have just put the cover panels on the sides under the microwave but that seemed kind of odd too. Luckily we made the following discover:

Tile backsplash fills most of the gap between the side of the cupboards and the wall (caused by the mounting rail hardware). So over the stove we will put the backsplash and then caulk the little bit of gap that is left.

All of this means that we really don't need those filler pieces after all! But, based on the fact that we would have 0 inches clearance we had gone ahead and ordered a 12 inch cupboard. Leaving us with....
Yes, readers you are reading that right... 17 inches of extra space. Meaning the 12 inch cupboard would have left us with 5 inches of filler along the one side. Luckily we anticipated this and had gone and picked up a 15 inch cabinet frame as back up but we'll still have to wait 1-2 weeks for the door/drawer for it to come from Montreal.

Long story short, if you're planning an Ikea kitchen do the check of adding up the cupboard lengths ahead of time. Also, trust your gut when it comes to filler pieces/cover panels. The staff mean well but if something seems wrong it probably is. :oP

Stairs...

... because climbing in and out of the back of your house gets old fast.




This picture makes me think it's time we ordered another dumpster :\. We got 1 for the main demo but weren't sure how long the bulk of the reno would take so we were waiting til we got close to being done to order another. Now this just looks sad... :P

We also snuck out and ordered our granite today. We had our hearts set on torontogranite.com but the shipment of Kashmir white they had just gotten in was very grey and kind of dark. So we drove to City Home Granite Depot and they ended up having Kashmir white with more warmer tones in it. They showed us the piece we would get installed and we booked measurement/install with them. Torontogranite.com did have some more in stock than when we first went though. They had a white, a creme and a chocolate brown marble in stock that were pretty beautiful, if we weren't so set on the white granite they would have been tempting.

All that and a bag of grout

Cabinets arrive today. *woo*!

Long weekend

We had a long weekend of sanding, priming, painting and tiling. Here are some pics.

We got plastered this weekend

Not nearly as fun as the horrible pun would have you believe ;o)

Cabinets *check*

So we headed to Ikea today to order our cabinets. It was not a great experience. First we found out that our design fit *too* good (ie. we had 0 inches to spare which meant we risked it not fitting while installing). So we had to shave 3 inches off of our design. To do this we switched out the 15 inch cabinet next to the stove for a 12 inch one with a pull out that will hold baking sheets etc. We then got to wait around for them to enter in our order. Although the planner claims to give you a whole shopping list they will calculate what you need based on your cabinets and add all the filler pieces etc. So in the end we were given a crazy incomprehensible list of bits and pieces for the kitchen. This all would have been tolerable except that we found out that the home planner you use at home apparently gives a really crappy estimate on price. Even between the plan the Ikea staff member made and the final order there was about a $300 difference. If it wasn't still half the price of Home Depot I'd be more mad. As it is I'm just pretty annoyed.

Here is the design we ended up with.

Just add drywall

It's been a long hard crazy week. We both now have colds and somehow we managed to hang all the drywall. We're kind of amazed how fast this has all come along. I guess there is something about not having a kitchen that makes it all seem more urgent :oP . A long weekend of plastering ahead...

Another E-bay deal

Our faucet arrived in the mail today. It's the Kohler Forte faucet pictured above (but in chrome). We managed to save quite a bit by getting it on E-bay but it was still a bit more than I would have liked.. All the cheaper faucets we looked at just didn't look right to us though.

If you're looking for faucets e-bay is a great place to look. We've actually had pretty good luck buying various home items on e-bay. So far we've used e-bay for our shower halo, house numbers, vanity faucets, kitchen sink and now kitchen faucet.

Yay!

Just in time for us to buy our cabinets!

Kitchen, the rebuilding begins

It's been a long and very busy week between work and school and one of us getting a bit of a cold. But we did manage to get some work done on the kitchen. The new electrical and drains are in....


The pass through is framed and the new door and window are in (we switched where the original door was to be a window and turned the original window into a door that will let in a lot of light.)


Today we started on insulation and subfloor but neither is really done yet. It's really amazing how many skills we've had to use on this job. It really makes you realize why so many kitchen renovations drag on and on, it's a real coordination of different trades and skills.