Day 34 and the gang’s all here. Well, Eric is back from a trip to Arizona where he’ll be moving when this project is over (we’ll mis you, Eric!), and Team Tile and Team Cabinet Hanging were at it in full effect.
I have some unfortunate updates regarding the cabinets. Our cabinet dealer, Artistic Interiors, specifically the owner Jorge Ribeiro, was less than willing to do anything for us regarding the design confusion and the quality of the cabinetry. I would NEVER do business with them again, and would advise anyone out there who is looking for cabinets to look elsewhere. I don’t want to use this platform as a chance to smear businesses – we are very proud and happy with every single other person who’s come into our home – but I felt the need to warn against this businessman, and his inability to put our happiness ahead of his wallet. In the end, his offer of $100 worth of product to alleviate our issues (the actual cost for new materials would have been $230) was reneged, and the time he offered to do touch-ups himself was also withdrawn. I should add that the original total cabinet cost was twelve-thousand times that much, and that such a paltry gesture was insulting (that’s 0.83% for all you math nerds).
And we don’t care about their own faults, talkin’ ’bout our own style…
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Week 7, Day 31, and we’re in for a quiet start to the week. With a solo Dave working on punchlist-type details in preparation for a more active end to the week, we were able to NOT set the alarm for the first weekday in, well, 6 weeks. I slept until just after 8, and it was splendid. Dave picked up trim, painted, joint-compounded (spots here and there dinged by construction life), and just generally tidied the spaces. Fussed, I think the word was?
Upon closer examination of the cabinets, we noticed some issues with the paint finish – due in part to the fact that not all of the protective shipping pieces stayed on as they should have, so some of the cabinet doors were a tad bit dented, cracked or scratched at the corners – so we had a meeting with the cabinet people. A few door fronts are being re-ordered, and we’ll try to touch up some of the other spots where the finish looks like it’s been rubbed off (or chipped off) already and some bits of raw wood are exposed (not what we expected for brand new cabinets). Some of these issues are apparently common (but not foretold to us) to white painted cabinets; others are special, just for us! Hooray! (Voice thick with sarcasm, here.)
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning…
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Day 30 and Phase 3: Finish has officially begun. Cabinets are on the wall! What a transformation! Seriously, it makes such a difference to have furniture (so to speak) in the room. We went from concept to reality in about two hours. It was wild. While I ran some errands in the morning, Dave and Eric conquered the range-top side of the kitchen (the east wall, left side). When I got back, we had a kitchen! Well, sort of. But compared to how I left it! Wow! Of course they didn’t do the whole room in two hours, that was just how long I was out. The installation will take a few more days to be complete, but they made good headway, especially considering that they started on the least plumb/level spot in the room. Nice work, dudes, as ever.
Inch by inch, row by row…
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Day 29 and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. Sunny, breezy, warm, but not too hot – spectacular. And it came just in time. The dreary weather had taken its toll on the Team, leaving them listless, tired, and just plain exhausted. Yet they persevered, rallied, and managed to turn out a day full of detail work, full of intricate measurements, and full of hauling themselves up and down ladders in search of a finished exterior. Success! Despite the stain (which we will apply), they finished the exterior! Brad finished his exterior electrical (save for the last doorbell – hey, a potential movie title!), and Dave and Eric finished shingling around the windows (including moving some fragile, antique shingles from one part of the house to another for continuity’s sake), and painting the trim on the new windows. What a relief to have one part of the job wrapped up! I know they needed the sense of finish more than we did (we’re no where near normal inside, so we didn’t so much mind the exterior as it was), and the knowledge that they got it done was not unappreciated. Good work, dudes!
Things that make you go “hmmm”…
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Week 6 (!), day 26, and the weather matched my energy level. Gray, heavy, damp, cool. I would probably rather have been making soup, baking bread and watching sappy movies all day. Instead, there were three teams working – with three separate music choices – in three separate areas of the house. In the attic, we had Brad and his helper, Ian, completing the smoke detectors, and replacing all the floor boards; in the master bathroom, we had Caleb preparing the shower floor, and setting the in-floor (radiant) heating pad; and, on the first floor, we had Dave and Eric brushing the first coat of poly onto the stained kitchen floors. Busy, busy, busy.
If a problem comes along, you must whip it…
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Day 25 (Friday) was long. For everyone. The sanding continued on the densest floor known to man until after lunchtime, taking longer than had been hoped for (so it seemed). No matter, though, as the Team managed to get a coat of stain on the floor! Likely the only coat of color, the process will continue with at least 3 coats of polyurethane to seal and protect the floors. The process seemed the most physically taxing on the guys – so much crouching, bending, squatting, being on their knees on hard surfaces, reaching, scrubbing, you name it – but it also seemed to elicit a different kind of excitement. An excitement at seeing the early stages of a finished room? Perhaps. Excitement at conquering the antique floors? Possibly. Let’s just say, the enthusiasm poured into their work, and the floors came out beautifully (from what I can see from the doorways and the outside porch – we can’t walk on them yet).
I’d do it all again…
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Day 24. Day twenty-four. For some reason it seems like a long, long time ago that we started. We are almost at the end of five weeks of actual, constant work, and six weeks with no kitchen. Here, at the (almost) midway point in the renovation, I can start to feel the shift toward finishing. We’re sampling floor stain colors, talking about logistics — where to move our furniture, when to move our furniture, making space in the garage for a workshop — the final flooring phase of the project, discussing plans for a maybe-sometime-next-week cabinet delivery (!), and hoping to get to bathroom tiling started early next week. Things are starting to feel final, pieces of the puzzle are slotting into place, and the house is starting to feel like it will be finished.
Can I have it like that? You got it like that…
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Day 23. And. We. Have. Floors! The guys did a tremendous job, working at a steady pace all day long, blending the new floors with the old, and making the space feel truly whole for the first time ever. It’s amazing. The only hitch we had was when Ke$ha came on the radio, and I had to insist that they use the iPod Touch we have set up for them (we use it to play Pandora internet radio for them, even though Dave and Eric resist at every turn). Our musical tastes don’t always match, but I draw the line at teen pop when floor nailers and saws are running. I think, in the end, they were happy to have the music changed (David Bowie station today), though I don’t even think they noticed the horrid “songs” that were playing for part of the day. Shudder.
Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking…
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Day 22 and paint is happening! Ok, so it’s merely priming and first coat kind of stuff, but there is color on the walls, and I can begin to imagine the kitchen as my kitchen, our home, instead of simply a project to be completed. Unfortunately, this also reminds me of just how much I miss having a kitchen, cooking, creating and participating in (culinarily speaking) our most bountiful time of year: summer. I miss cooking. I miss it every time I have a mediocre meal or sandwich (like last night and today) from a take-out place, and I miss it when I put on my summer clothes that just aren’t fitting me quite as well as they did last year (or even earlier this year). I know “this too shall pass” and that it’s all for a good cause, that the reward will be worth the suffering (really, more like inconvenience), but it’s still hard. Sigh.
Double your pleasure, double the fun…
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Day 19 (Thursday) was a run-around day. Day 20 was a watch-joint-compound-dry day. On Thursday we went to Ashfield to check out stone for our counters, got some paint samples and swatches, Brad finished up some projects in the attic, Dave delivered our quarter-sawn fir flooring to get it acclimated to our space, and Brian from Bird Drywall put on the second coat of joint compound. I’m told that the second coat is the most crucial, as it is often the thickest, and takes the longest to dry. So, while we had lovely almost autumnal weather outside (albeit mildly humid), we had to close up the house and turn on the air conditioning to cut any dampness out of the air. We also turned on our dehumidifier (after I mentioned that we had one, and Brian’s eyes bulged out of his head, in a good way) and a few fans to get the drier air circulating. It must have worked because when Brian got here today, the seams were dry (except for in the bathroom where the mold resistant paper on the sheetrock slows the drying process). Phew. He was glad, and so were we. We’re getting a 4-point treatment (essentially four coats) on our seams which means that Brian will be working here this weekend. We’re on target for beginning to prime next week, and in order to make that happen, he’s got to make up for some of the time lost to waiting for the inspector.