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.

This was the kitchen?

Here's some pictures from today. A long long day of demo... Best part of today was a neighbor coming by to ask to use our dumpster. He wasn't quite sure what the room we demoed had been and asked nervously "this was the kitchen?".

Kitchen...

Today we started the demolition of the kitchen.

Since our dumpster delivery was delayed we also snuck out to take advantage of a sale on Samsung appliances (http://iframe.shoplocal.com/lowescaproducts/Default.aspx?action=detail&storeid=2598197&rapid=0&pagenumber=0&listingid=-2089054184&offerid=&ref=%2flowescaproducts%2fDefault.aspx%3faction%3dbrowsecategoryall%26storeid%3d2598197%26cattreeid%3d%26SortBy%3d3%26StartRow%3d193). We went to the new Lowes that opened up on Warden near a Future Shop and a Brick to do some wheeling and dealing. In the end we got the deal and the rest of our appliances from Future Shop. Their flexibility on pricing was pretty awesome, you just gotta haggle a bit ;o). Other places we've looked at for appliances included Brick Clearance Center and Sears Outlet in Scarborough. If you're ok with scratch and dent and want a really good deal those places are really worth a look.

Kitchen, your days are numbered...

Temporary kitchen is set up and the dumpster is booked. This last, very nasty room is going to be in pieces in a bin on our lawn very soon. :)

Here are some pics of the temporary kitchen:

And some pictures of the kitchen soon to be demoed. Don't let it's 1940's cuteness deceive you, it's pretty foul.

Green Machines

After getting a couple of quotes we replaced our old furnace and hot water tank. We got an incredible deal on this Goodman furnace:

We were originally going to compromise and get a cheaper 92% efficiency Trane furnace (with no DC motor so it would get the smallest rebate) but at the last second our installer got a sweet deal on the Goodman 95% efficiency with a DC 2 stage electric motor. This model qualifies for the maximum rebate available so in the end it will come out to being less than we had originally budgeted for the lower end Trane. This should help bring our gas bill down in December! One thing we didn't realize is that these high efficiency furnaces produce a good amount of condensation when they are running so it is recommended that a drain be located nearby. Since we intend to relocate the washer and dryer nearby, when we run the drain for that we will put in a floor drain for the furnace.

For our water heater we got this Rinnai tankless hot water heater:

It is great to have the massive hot water tank out of the basement; and now we will never run out of hot water again. I had to open it up and change one of the jumper settings to let us set it above 120 degrees fahrenheit but after I changed that it gets the water nice and hot. It delivers a more consistent temperature than our old hot water heater that would gradually get less hot as the shower went on.