The only three words that matter

spoken by the Guy as he sat in the renovated (except for the baseboards!)


and temporarily* redecorated den watching the Tour de France...

"you were right"

*once we were happy with the rug in its new position we took it up again. It will be another 4 weeks before we can put rugs on the newly sealed floor - this is why people buy pre-finished flooring!

Six years and counting

June 29 2009

The official date we bought The Cool House passed a little while ago but today marks the sixth moving-in anniversary. I can't believe that it's the second longest The Guy and I have lived anywhere together - and the most complete renovation we have undertaken. Most of the work, roof, windows, bathrooms, exterior maintenance, was completed 2004-2007 but the last six months have almost matched that in terms of the scope of the projects finished and money spent. Of course, it's almost time to redo some of the work we did when we first moved in, such as re-staining the siding and painting the exterior trim and the great room will need a refreshing coat of paint soon but for the moment let's not be daunted by the to-do list but rather celebrate what has been accomplished this past year:

January-June 2010
We finished the laundry - new floor, new cabinets, new countertops and a new paint color - Iced Cube Silver - on the smoothly sanded walls. From start to finish this took us four years but 90% was done in one month-long period in tandem with the Master Suite.
The domino effect of making our bedroom beautiful caused us me to take a long look at the guest bedroom - and it was found wanting. We made it more comfortable with new roman shades that enhance the geometric shapes of the windows.
The great room sectional got its pretty pillows and because the dining room was feeling left out I went ahead and ordered new drapes for it. We also decided the rug we'd originally chosen for Verity's room would be better suited to the dining room - if we removed the old stained carpet and laid hardwood floors - so that's what we did. What? Crazy? Well, we had already decided to put down hardwood in the kitchen so it seemed sensible to just go ahead and run it into the dining room, too. I know, that's not much justification for undertaking another project!


Which brings us to the major update, the renovation we'd been looking forward to since 2004, the ultimate undertaking: the Kitchen. It isn't completely finished yet, although the countertops will be installed in less than two weeks, but so far I love everything about it, including the new energy saving windows (a big bouquet to the new carpenter who spent two days on these fixing the previous guy's mistakes) and mud-room door.
And while we are in the kitchen, let's not forget the final touches we made to the powder room. It got its third makeover in as many years: new wallpaper - just two rolls (that's a double roll if you speak US design) - and a pint of black paint.

June-December 2009
Three outdoor projects were started... and finished:


the re-landscaped side yard


new fencing on the east and south sides


Belgian stone pavers laid in front of the garages


and one interior undertaking: the Great Room makeover including re-upholstering the twelve-piece sectional.


It's been a fun rwelve months but I'm impatient to get the last pieces in place and the furniture back in the first floor rooms so I can finally sit back and enjoy the house.

It's all over now sixties blue

In anticipation of the arrival of new shades for two bedrooms I stained and sealed the triangular window frame, touched up one bedroom wall and got two coats of Navajo white over the blue wall in the den. I really should have primed the latter first... I'll be painting a third - and hopefully final- coat tomorrow. And when I say final I mean final until we've chosen a paint colour we like for that room because enough with the Navajo White, it's been almost six years of blah and I need something that says I chose this not I was afraid of paint. Maybe something inspired by the sunset last week...

Peaceful

After all the drama around here recently I'm looking forward to a little peace and quiet. Just a little, mind you. I don't want to settle for a half-finished kitchen and I certainly don't want to be microwaving store-bought soup for the next few months while we wait for the countertops to arrive and den flooring.
But I am enjoying the thought that on Monday morning I won't have to get up early to be ready for the contractors or wonder what new problem will be discovered before lunch. On Friday, for example, I discovered 8 soft-close drawer glides and 6 door bumpers were missing. Did someone count order wrong or were they thrown away by mistake? I don't know but I have to fetch replacements. Then, after lunch, we discovered a hole in the framing of another window that had to be filled and painted before the end of the day. The guys wanted to get it done because we don't know how quickly the fabricator will be installing the counters and exactly when the new wood flooring will arrive. They won't come back until one or other happens so they wanted to make sure the external problems were taken care of and The Cool House was watertight.
It was a bittersweet moment when they packed up all their tools and trash, got into their trucks and headed out of the Village, There may be no noise and no fuss in my immediate future but the house is going to feel empty for a while.

Tracks of my tears...

This is the point we got to yesterday when the new team said "you're not going to want to watch this" and suggested I leave while they made the refrigerator fit into that gap


And this is what it looked like when I got back. Sub Zero in place, end cab cut down, two high cabs re-secured straight and true. Four hours to move one appliance 20'.


And this is why we finish a hardwood floor on site rather than installing prefinished flooring in the kitchen.
Double G&Ts and Advil all round!

Finding my happy place

When things get to much; when the last piece of the puzzle won't fit and you find out you have to demolish half the jigsaw - or your high cabinets - to make it fit; when your new carpenter says: you might want to leave for a while, it's good to have an escape, a hideaway on a desert isle to run to... or maybe just the nearest beach.

Tidying Up

A few items on the punch list were taken care of late yesterday:
The inferior hardwood flooring was hauled away
The mud room door was painted to match the Marvin medium bronze windows
The offensive thick trim around the kitchen slider was removed and replaced with square edge trim that matches the rest of the moldings in the house
The kitchen walls and ceiling were smoothed with spackle, mud, joint compound.
The template guy came, discussed the changes I want to make to the island, nixed all backsplashes, measured and templated and told me he'd see if his boss could actually do what I wanted.


Just because I am nuts the carpenter, flooring guy and I examined the old water damage to the triangular window in the bamboo room, decided the window could stay but the trim had to go. So that is being reframed and will be stained to match the other windows.
There will be uniformity in this uniquely modern house even if it costs me my sanity and my retirement fund!

I celebrated the end of the workday with 2 Advil and a very strong G&T

Getting a grip

on the kitchen renovation... and my sanity.


Yesterday was not a great day on the house renovation front. Not as bad as the previous week when the contractor ordered the wrong size window, tried to install it anyway and then phoned in drunk the next morning, nor the following two days when he was a no-show, and the subsequent hiring of a new contractor who basically re-did everything the first one had touched.


No, it really wasn't so bad: the hardwood for the den floor turned out to be not so much "select and better" as knotty and mismatched and had to be re-ordered; the window supplier didn't have Marvin aluminum for drip caps (because that's a siding/roofing thing); I discovered the deep shelf I wanted for the kitchen has been discontinued; I found out that the only way to make the kitchen window both watertight and aesthetically pleasing was to trim 2" of redwood siding along its length and we know how obsessed I am about the siding... Still, I avoided a repeat of last Monday evening's total meltdown, rolled with the punches and looked on the bright side:


A roll of flashing the right shade was procured for the drip cap and the window was framed out. It looks better than I could have dreamed - I just hope it's waterproof!


The new full-light fir door was installed in the mud room. There's so much light in there now I keep thinking I've left the door open.


The cabinets now have skinny Linea rail pulls from Atlas homewares. I can open and close the drawers now - and I've tried out every single one just to make sure they work.

Backsplash Options

I can't believe we are thinking about this already. Originally I wanted to panel this whole wall in the same walnut colored oak veneer as the cabinets but it made the room too dark - it seems there is such a thing as too much wood after all - so we started to look at tiles. From left to right:Venis Dados Crema, Firenze Antracita and Trento Moka porcelain wall tiles all via Porcelanosa. A close-up of my two favorites:


Trento Moka - I'd use the silver grout to lighten contrast with the browns.


Firenze Ambar It comes in Nacar, Oceano and Antracita - all glass-look and a couple marble-look options -Carrara Blanco and Negro Marquina. Click to see all at this gorgeous Romanian site.


Similar glass mosaic tile Erin Adams' Facet by Ann Sacks.
Do any scream "gotta have that" at you?

A very important question

Chaos! Piled-up pillows and books everywhere. The paintings are stacked in the bedrooms, cartons of books line the walls of my office and the pretty pillows that decorated the big blue sectional so beautifully for six weeks (or less) are now piled up on the sofa in the master bedroom. All the tables, chairs and sofas from the kitchen, dining room and den are crowded into the great room where they'll be covered in plastic sheeting until the new floors have been sanded and sealed. My biggest problem is: Where do we put the red wine and liquor now that I've removed the bar?

Template Ready

Meanwhile back in the kitchen, the double wall oven and island range hood are installed and working


the cabinets are in, the electrics have been upgraded and we are awaiting the template guy to come measure for the Caesarstone countertops. It looks almost like a working kitchen again.

And then I lost my mind...

Because re-doing the kitchen and mud-room wasn't stressful enough I decided to replace the 1970s dining room deep-pile, formerly cream, wool carpet with the same hardwood floor at the same time. And because I have pronounced masochistic tendencies I thought I should also replace the matching carpet in the den - in the interest of cohesiveness (and cleanliness), right? We discussed the issues with the raised platform and how to scribe in to the bar/media centre, worked on a direction to run the wood that wouldn't look odd and ordered two bullnoses for the dais and Pete the flooring guy ripped out the carpet.


And that's when the plan changed. He checked the moisture levels on the sub-floor (because he is a professional) where we'd had an issue when the old window had leaked and luckily there was no elevation. We were good to go for hardwood. Then for the fun of it he checked in random spots across the room... and found we were at least two points damper on the dais and a whopping four over the scary stain that kept reappearing over the years on the carpet. When we discover things like this, not-good things, we investigate. We hunted around the basement. Nothing, We checked the moisture levels on the joists underneath. Normal. We plugged in the fan and ran a dehumidifier for hours. No moisture but the levels were still as high.


So Pete decided to pull up a few pieces of plywood to see what was going on. And.... nothing. No leaks, no mold, no dead animals. Just the support beams for the platform and the sub-floor. And the moisture level on that sub-floor? Normal! We had no explanation except trapped air but we did have a huge exposed floor. And that was when I said "Now that we've opened it up when don't we just take the platform out... and the huge built-in, too".


And so we did.

On wheels

That whole match the cabinet to the picture idea was a real winner - twice over. We took advantage of the carpenter's absence to do a dry run of the cabinets under the window and decided to change the configuration slightly. Then we swapped the images on the window and voila - the carpenter, when he returns, will know exactly what goes where.
By moving one cabinet from the extreme left to the right side of the run we can place the dishwasher next to the sink rather than adjacent. The footprint remains the same but the countertop won't project into the room as far. This will open up in the kitchen even more, so much so that I'm thinking of ordering roller skates and waitress outfit to get around!

Pictures speak louder than...

The cabinet installation is motoring along with only one minor speed bump, a confusion over which box goes where. Yes, we do have a labelled plan and diagram but after a fifteen minute search for a missing part that wasn't missing just misplaced to a different part of the kitchen I reckoned things would go a lot faster if I printed images of the finished cabinets and sticky-taped them to the walls in the correct configuration. It worked. No more holding the plans upside down and squinting - just follow the pretty pictures...

Taped

The hardwood floor is down in the kitchen and I spent much of the weekend playing with the placement of the island. In order for it go back the direction it was before we would have had to move the extractor vent to the west by 6 " - and there is a joist in the way! We could "jump" the joist but there would be a lot of holes in the ceiling, possibly some exploratory cuts in the wall behind Verity's bed where the hvac system runs to the exterior blower and it all seemed a lot of work, plus there was the possibility of a reduction in venting power if we had to insert an elbow into the vent pipe. An easier option was to just pivot the island and run it north-south rather than east-west.



Once it was all taped out something magical happened to the feel of the kitchen, it just fit better in the room - opening it up and emphasizing its trapezoid shape. This room is the same size as the great room but it never felt as large, now the kitchen will be one large area rather than two divided and disjointed spaces. We'll also end up with fewer pinch points than before - by using the full width of the extractor fan cutout the island will be relocated 5" towards the eating area, giving me a 36" pass at the tightest place, everywhere else will have 40" minimum clear. A big selling point is that I'll be able to cook while looking out at the yard - taking in the scenery (and watching the wildlife) from my island in a sea of hardwood.

Kitchen Reno: Flooring Progress!

So far so wood...

Hot Lava

Once the fabulously decorated great room, it's now full of furniture from the kitchen and dining room - the perfect place to challenge the peeps to a game of Hot Lava!

Gone

The leaky sink and faucet, huge range hood, beat-up cabinets... all gone. But what about the elephant in the room, I hear you shout? Don't worry, we didn't discard the refrigerator just because it had tested our patience on several occasions. We simply moved* it to a temporary locale...

*four strong guys and a dolly

Renovation shocker

This can mean only one thing...


The kitchen renovation is actually going to start ahead of schedule.


Cupboards have been emptied, non-essentials packed into boxes to be stored in the basement


while stuff we will use on a daily basis is evenly distributed between the bar in the den and the laundry room


I knew all that extra space would come in handy


One other thing we've learnt... we probably keep too much coffee in the house!

Exhausted by Design

I'm ashamed to say I'd actually forgotten - it was a couple of years ago - blogging about this design duo who, unhampered by their family of six (now seven) young kids, manages to renovate dilapidated buildings and turn them into chic living spaces. I'm overawed by their limitless energy and ability to get things done without a) falling over a toddler or b) having a complete, rocking in the corner, hair-tearing nervous breakdown.


Add to the mix a new baby and a camera crew trailing around after them filming their reality show 9 By Design and lesser mortals (me) would be self-medicating by 10 am. The show on Bravo is my new guilty pleasure and I'll be watching tonight with a celebratory G&T. Why the celebration? After years months of planning the kitchen renovation is officially locked and loaded. Demolition begins middle May and I predict many, many relaxing cocktails over the next few months.