Kitchen - nearly done

Here we go ...

Before the floors were finished. The horizontal wood is not original. 

I LOVE this backsplash. It was a splurge from The Tile Shop at $20 per square foot. We wanted gray glass tiles. At the tile store, I learned that straight up gray glass is hard to make and hard to find. I didn't want the gray to have blue, brown, green, or any other tints of color in it. Just gray. We settled with this stainless steel, called Fortuna. 

Ugh. The passageway to the Disaster Room / future sun room. One day we'll deal with this, which will include re-routing the radiator pipes.

The sink is small but deep. I am overjoyed with the prospect of having a dishwasher. 

Challenge: keep kitties off the counter. Oh yeah, we got new kitties. Long story. Pictures to come.

Our messy house. We've been living upstairs during all of this and neglected to clean anything.

This is where the fridge will go. 

My attempt at taking a close up of the countertops. I am very happy with them.

Another attempt.

The arch: one of the few 1920s-style architectural details. Question: paint it light gray to match the rest of the walls or white so it stands out?

Here you can see the swirls in the counters. Torquay by  Cambria.

Freshly finished wood floors.

The floors are done as of today! They look so much nicer than the rest of our floors and are itching to get scratched up.

 Next up:

1. Paint
2. Hang pendants [those other ones were defective and didn't work. I was secretly happy to spend even more hours staring at the Internet's beautiful light offerings.]
3. Get rid of old appliances. Because there was a kitchen upstairs, we currently have three refrigerators,    two stoves, two microwaves, three sinks ... 
4. Get new stove and microwave. The old stove leaked gas and gave me carbon monoxide headaches.

I'm off to California for work for the next ten days, so I won't get to enjoy the new kitchen for awhile. Maybe R will finish all the painting by the time I get back.    

TTFN.

 
 

Kitchen - halfway done

Don't mind the dusty floors. They'll be dusty forever.

The ceiling fan has got to go.

All I have is a few blurry iPhone photos, but the knocked out wall makes the house look so much bigger. It's small and simple.

No new stove yet. We're blowing through cash like crazy right now.

Onto lighting.


A couple of Minx EP96003 pendants by ET2. They're not hooked up yet so I don't know what the light looks like. An Internet purchase, they're smaller than I had imagined but everything is small in the kitchen so I guess it's OK. I planned to put up three, but the kitchen guys just put in two pendant fixtures and I am not going to squabble.

It matches the marble-y-ness of the countertops.

Kitchen guys also put in under cabinet lights. They don't burn my eyeballs, so I'm happy with them.

Most of the beautiful Internet kitchens have recessed lighting, but that would require gutting the ceiling and doing fancy electrical work or something. Or maybe recessed lighting is really easy and no major holes are necessary and it's just that I don't know what I'm talking about. Either way, I got this overhead light from Design Public:

It fits three light bulbs.

White, white, white, everything white. I think the walls will be white, too. From the dining room all the back, which kind of sucks because we painted the dining room less than a year ago. It's OK, though, because the dining room walls are cracked anyway ...

A couple months ago, we finally got the sagging beam fixed. Hoisting up the house led to cracks in the plaster in each room.

Bathroom

Dining room (this wall's gone now!)

Bedroom

The only room we (OK, Rudi did most of the work; I helped by pointing out spots that didn't look sanded all the way) managed to patch so far is the living room. The work on this house will never cease.

It's Happening

The kitchen is happening.

This winter we hibernated. Watched some House of Cards, read some Game of Thrones, played some Settlers of Catan. Recall the kitchen in its original state here. A few more photos below.

This wall is now gone.

A sad little pantry and an alcove for the fridge. The alcove leads to the Disaster Room / future sun room.

The stove / plug in dishwasher that doesn't work combo. P.S. We're normally a little neater than this. 

Grease spot above stove that will not come out.

Here's the kitchen today.

Standing in the kitchen facing the front door.

The bottom half was the closet. The top half will be the kitchen floor. We'll stain it to match the rest of the wood. 

Former pantry. Future fridge area. '

R and I are not doing this work ourselves, thank gawd. It would surely drag out over two years and wind up being all sorts of awful. I hired a local guy to do the hard work: demo, plumbing, electrical, cabinet installation, etc. We shall see how it all turns out.

...

In preparation for the coming of the kitchen, I did some major online shopping. We don't have a car, and shopping online allows me to spend hours obsessing over things like xenon lighting and pull out faucets.

The cabinets will be simple, white, Shaker style.

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/159895/list/Readers--Choice--The-Top-Kitchens-of-2010

The countertops will be quartz. We ordered Torquay by Cambria.

This is Torquay. 

Yesterday I stared at thousands of faucets. At first R said he wanted a faucet that can be pulled out and moved around. I researched and researched. Then he changed his mind. If we can't test it, he reasoned, we shouldn't buy a pull out faucet. I asked, What if the pull out faucet has really good reviews? It has to have at least four and a half stars. And if it doesn't pull out, it has to swivel three hundred sixty degrees. And you have to be able to fill up the Brita container without putting the container in the sink. That means the clearance has to be at least nine inches. I don't really like the rounded ones. It should be kind of square, but not too square ...

After going on and on (and on) about the ideal faucet, R fell asleep. I was free to order, so I got this one:

A Kohler K-7507. It's gorgeous and it rotates all the way around.

Plenty more to come, but the sun has set and the room is dark. TTFN.

Pretty shit from the Internet: Kitchens

I love love love houzz. The only issue is that when I search for small kitchens, the kitchens are rarely small.

http://www.houzz.com/photos/kitchen  Isn't that light fixture amazing?

This one is actually on the small side. http://www.houzz.com/photos/kitchen/small-%2B-white-%2B-kitchen-

Liking the shelves in the bar area. And the subway tiles. We're definitely going to have a subway tile backsplash. http://www.houzz.com/photos/white-subway-tile/p/16

Small, too. Not as small as ours, though. Love the vintage stove and the hood cover.  http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/1646041/list/Kitchen-of-the-Week--Vintage-Elegance--Pocket-Size

http://never-without.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html

In my dreams.  http://sweethomestyle.tumblr.com/post/7619679050

In sum, everything needs to be white: appliances, cabinets, countertops ... Maybe a stainless steel sink. The original hardwood floors are covered by a layer of nasty yellow linoleum, so we'll probably wind up refinishing the floor in the same dark stain as the rest of the downstairs. Very exciting.

Budget? Twelve thousand. Hopefully less. We shall see.

Kitchen

Our kitchen is dingy and depressing. Sometimes I get thirsty but stay thirsty because I don't want to go in there. The goal is to make the kitchen nice enough to fill up a glass of water at night.

Isn't the fluorescent light horrible? There isn't a real light in the kitchen. The sink is kind of cute, but I think it must go.

There isn't really room for a fridge, so the it sits in a doorway that leads to the disaster room/the future sun room. The future fridge will be where the far left of this photo is. 

It was painted red at one point. Now it's a shiny, peeling yellow.

It does have an arch detail, partially shown here.

Right now the dining room leads to the kitchen. The plan is to knock out (most of) the wall and the closet in the dining room.

Then we can reroute plumbing and electricity as needed and put in a bar/counter space.

 Here is a tentative floor plan:

Everything needs to be petite to fit. The entire wall along the left side is window and radiator, so nothing can go there. The only way to squeeze in a dishwasher is to have the sink in the corner. It won't be a weird corner sink like the one on the floor plan, but it needs to be in the corner.

I'm hoping that a 24-inch wide fridge will work in the back corner. The floor plan shows an 18-inch pantry, which may or may not be possible. We'll see. The house came with a 24-inch wide fridge upstairs, so we can try it out in the new kitchen.

I am currently gathering estimates for shoring up the ceiling to take out the wall, possibly demolishing the wall (because I don't want to), and then installing a beam across the space. Right now I have one estimate for $950, which also includes moving electrical wires to another wall.

All very exciting. More to come.