Another 12-hour day

So, here's my advice: don't give yourself 6 weeks to build a kitchen. Make it more. UNLESS you have the following things: a shop with tools (throughout the duration of the whole project), a helper (throughout the duration of the whole project), or a desire to hate life for 6 weeks (well maybe just the last 4).

I have approximately 65 hours left in Newfoundland, but I am still keeping my fingers crossed (aka working my ass off) that I will be able to see some semblance of a finished product before I leave. I also think Steph might appreciate it too.

The good news is that we are at this stage:

Not bad...still have upper trim, grouting, gables, baseboards, hardware.....etc. etc...oh and Electric Dave is coming in on Monday, so we will no longer need to look at those saggy lights in front of the window.

E-Dave also needs to install the hood-vent.

The old hispter coffee station is looking A LOT more yuppy. Steph finished all the tiling today. She was on call last night and is on call again tomorrow and she STILL managed to squeeze in a 12-hour day to work on the kitchen.

There are still a lot of filler strips to install. Also, the butcher block is upside for oiling, hence the imperfections.

This list is stressing me out...let me talk about what I don't have to do again.

Here's what we did today:

I laid out all of the doors to spray. Then the sprayer didn't work, so we painted the doors with a roller. I DO NOT recommend this. The finish is less that ideal and it takes FOREVER!

At the beginning...

Near the end.

Notice the change in temperature, light and general happiness.

Oh this was fun. We decided the butcher block needed sanding at 10pm and Steph is on call tomorrow, so it had to be done tonight because I need help moving it.

On to the final push!

Almost there!

Have you ever seen Steph look so excited?

This is right before she tiles behind the stove. Who wouldn't be excited?

Heavy concentration to nip those tiles.

Final product before grout! (And before the rest of the backsplash gets tiled)

Steph also finished all of the framing and strapping for the "addition". We'll drywall it as soon as Electric Dave installs the pot lights in the bulkhead.

In the meantime I sanded many many doors. Not much to show for it, but just wait for tomorrow for your mind to be blown. The doors are really the piece of resistance, as they say in French.

Here I am drilling the pockets for the Euro hinges with a drill...on the deck...using my feet as clamps. Very professional.

This took me approximately 30 minutes for 15 doors. With a drill press it would take me about 3 minutes AND my drill wouldn't be recovering in the ICU with a Forstner-induced coma. I'll try to go easy on her tomorrow, but she's pretty vital at this stage.

Hey, notice anything different in the picture below? Notice the not-hideous new fridge!?

Recall the old fridge:

What a piece of garbage! Steph doesn't understand why I hate it so much, but I really do. In fact, when it arrived a few weeks ago, I was really saddened by its short, boxy demeanour. To tell you the truth, I thought it would ruin the whole look of this kitchen. You can't tell in the picture, but it is also encased in what looks like a heavily textured skin rash. Superficiality aside, the freakin' fridge doesn't come with a freezer shelf! Look at the size of that freezer! Now picture opening it. Now picture all of the stuff in your freezer falling out onto the floor. Now imagine that some of the bags in your freezer aren't closed and that some of those bags contain blueberries. What a disaster. All to say, Steph leveraged the freezer shelf issue to get a new fridge, and I was very very thankful that the fridge didn't come with a freezer shelf.

Anyway...here is where we are at with the kitchen. Completion is imminent. (Except for Steph's "addition", we will not make any promises about that. And by "we", I mean "I").

I see an island!

Hurray! The footprint is complete. In case you are wondering, no the island is not finished. I am adding trim that will cover up the screws, but since I have limited tools, I am waiting to rent a compressor and nail gun for that at the same time that I do the crown moulding.

I have never built an island/peninsula, but I figured it must involve screwing some boards together and then screwing them to the floor. So that's what I did.

Here's the new shop where I painted the parts of the island that aren't receiving trim.

There's the back I built to support the dishwasher area, complete with electrical outlet (Electric Dave's recommendation, obviously).

Fixing the first gable.

The island with three gables. Square and level...enough. Notice how there are two strips of MDF on the back of the drawer unit. Those are spacers I pulled out of the garbage when I realized I cut all of the gable 3/4" too long. I had accounted for the drawer fronts twice. Anyway, easier solution than cutting the gables.

Here's what she looks like so far. That dishwasher is not installed yet, but it should be today.

Stay tuned for doors soon...in case you were worried.

R.I.P. Shop

Sadly, we had to move out of the shop for good yesterday. This was expected, but still disappointing. I don't have much left to do, but it's always easier to spread out in the shop. It's also easier to have all of your stuff in one place. Although, I have to say, nothing about this proces has been easy. We have been battling with deadlines the whole time. First the battle for space in the shop when Steph's friend returned to work on his own projects (fair enough - it's his shop after all!), then the countdown for time with the table saw followed immediately by the countdown for use of all remaining tools (since they were selling their house and moving across the country) and finally the loss of the shop altogether. The past few weeks have been chaotic to say the least.

I should have taken a picture of the shop. Skin and bones. So sad.

Now I feel like a real DIYer. Working out of the basement and renting tools. Let's hope for the best today!

Holy Kitchen Batman!

Finally. Progress. Actually, we have steadily been progressing the whole time, but now we have something to show for it. Yesterday was a big day. Cabinets went up. Floors went in. I think we pulled a 15-hour day.

First we put up cabinets.

Adios hipster coffee station.

Steph's trimming the dowels to fit the shelves.

Now that all of the shelves are up, almost all of the old pine is gone. Recall the sauna kitchen:

(I realize that I haven't posted many "before" shots of the kitchen. If you are dying to know what it looked like before, give me one week and I will have an extensive before-and-after montage dedicated to this)

I do appreciate natural wood, but Steph doesn't live in a shack on the side of a river. I think it's important to know when to paint wood. This is one of those cases.

So we painted the ceiling and all of the wainscotting white.

We also chose light flooring to keep the kitchen as bright as possible. The flooring is pretty amazing. You just click it in. It doesn't require any nails or glue. Easy! But being novice floor installers, it still took us about 6 hours.

Steph is a pro. She was the lead on this part of the project. I just cut the end pieces and ran around looking for a tape measure most of the time. That was especially funny since we had 2 tape measures on site, and they are extremely large, but not bright so hard to see (I prefer bright tape measures. My favourite small and bright tape measure was sadly packed away and shipped to Calgary last week, among other things that I needed...but these are setbacks that make the whole project more interesting...?).

Steph is amazingly brave and truly committed to the task. Here she is liberating an outlet from the floor...with metal cutters. Eek! Were we supposed to turn the breaker off? Just kidding.

We did run into a small issue concerning the levelness of the floor. Most of the subflooring was in really good shape, except for the part in the new "addition", which is a little uneven. For some reason I have refused to take ownership of that part of the kitchen (I think because it was an afterthought and I didn't want to overcommit - I'm not exactly giving myself ample time here). So I consistently refer to that part of the kitchen as "your project" to Steph. Anyway, before we started the floor, Steph was worried that it would be uneven. To tell you the truth, I didn't really care at that point (sorry Steph!) and figured throwing some 1/2" floor boards would be fine. Not so. 1/2" is a thin stock, and floors need to withstand a lot of weight (obviously).

So when we started to notice the moving floor boards, we decided to shim them. Here's a tip: shim as you go. Don't try to lift the whole floor up and shove newspaper and foam in as far as you can reach. It actually matters where the shims go and how thick they are. Needless to say, the floor started to get worse and we couldn't tell what was causing the main disturbance underneath. So Steph came up with a clever diagnostic strategy:

She took a picture with a flash. Foam was the culprit! How very medical of her. Don't doctors use cameras to see into tight human spaces? I don't know what they are called. I don't know anything about science.

In the end the floors turned out great. We had to remove a couple of rows, which really sucked at 11pm after working for 14 hours, but it was worth it.

Now on to the island!

Out of the Doldrums

Now you see it.

Now you don't!

Steph and I got inspired when the dumpster arrived. Then we had some beer and decided to play in the backyard.

Steph wanted to prune.



We also decided to paint.

Good paint can opener.

Good painter.

Btw, the butcher block is back in one piece.

Invisible Progress

So I have almost no pictures to post today because the progress is not easy to perceive right now. It's hard when that happens because you get people who stop over to check in (i.e. Electric Dave) and they are immediately surprised to see that nothing has changed. I feel like I have to convince them that this will in fact get done in two weeks. In turn, I feel like I am convincing myself. That is not a motivating feeling, and combined with exhaustion it can make for some long crying sessions (haha, just kidding). Yesterday was sort of a write-off. I did this:

By "this" I mean clamping two pieces of butcher block together. Let me make it clear that I did not build those blocks. We bought them, and they will be used for the top of the island/peninsula.

Then I tried this to smooth the seam:

But now the block looks like this:

Back in two pieces! In my extremely tired state, I decided it would be totally fine to laminate two pieces together even though they had bevelled edges. If you have ever laminated anything, you know that you can't make a good seam with bevelled edges. You MUST joint the edges first. I realized this basically as soon as I clamped it together, probably before actually. I just didn't care for some reason until it was too late. So I sawed them in half and today I will joint them properly.

Ok, here is something I built yesterday, but I was so tired I forgot one of the gables!

Kidding again. This is going to fit up against the chimney. Yes, the chimney. Luckily it doesn't have to fit around the chimney so we are smooth sailing.

Blog Post

Don't be fooled by the lack of blog posts. I have definitely not been taking time off. In fact, I am extremely burnt out. There is not much to report however. I'm just trying to get as much stuff done on the table saw as possible before it goes away forever tomorrow morning.

I've got piles of melamine for the upper cabs...

Piles of MDF for the cabinet doors...

And piles of garbage in the backyard...

We did get one cabinet up on Sunday night, and Steph also recruited a friend to help her frame the bulkhead for the "new addition".

 


Then we proceeded to have a Sunday night dance party in the kitchen. The thing about working and drinking is this: not only do you get almost nothing accomplished, but the things you do "accomplish" are done very poorly.

Take mudding drywall for example:

What the hell is going on there? It looks like I put the mud on with a chopstick.

That's all for now. Expect some serious progress in the new few days....?