I retired last October and did the heart attack in July. I don't know if that influenced my decision to update our kitchen now, but we've been talking about it for quite a while, and now it seemed like putting it off longer was not a good idea.
This is pretty much what our kitchen has looked like since it was all new 30 years ago. This was a big improvement from the original kitchen, but although I like the maple cabinets, the finish was getting worn and dated.
And our formica countertop was worn out.
I started in August by stripping the finish off the cabinets. I removed all the doors, stripped them on the patio, and refinished them in the garage.
I stripped and refinished the cabinets in place.
I also took a break a couple weeks after the heart attack to do a bike ride to see if I still had it in me. Ice cream and a lot of other stuff are no longer in my regular diet, but I thought I deserved this after finishing 50 miles.
I also took a break to ride my mountain bike near Moab.
Sorry for the gross-out, but I'm on a blood thinner for a year, and if I'm not bleeding I'm not mountain biking. The pedals have these savage cleats on both sides. They're good for keeping your foot on the pedal, but not so great when it slips off.
Just a reminder.
Okay, I know the morbidity is getting out of hand, but Chieko and I decided now would be a good time to prepay our funeral. We bought our burial plots last year, and taking care of the whole thing seemed like a good thing a couple months ago, so our kids don't have to worry about this when the time comes. I do hope we're looking far into the future. After all, it only makes sense to prepay now if the prices have gone up significantly when the time actually comes.
Oh, I also took a break to ride 66 miles on Route 66 while I'm 66 years old. I had to squeeze this in before my birthday in November.
We had fun picking out granite for our countertop at the Daltile warehouse. This place is amazing. They have tons (literally) of granite slabs inside a giant warehouse. This is the place to peruse granite and quartz.
There was nothing wrong with our refrigerator, but we decided that while we were getting updated cabinets and a new counter, we should get a stainless steel fridge. We picked out the LG in the middle of these three. The price at RC Willey was already good compared to other stores and what I found online, but Mick, the salesman, told me the price was going down an additional $300 the next day for pre-Black Friday. I think we got a great deal. I even hooked up the ice maker and water dispenser, something I'd never done with our old fridge. This was also something that was harder than it should have been--it's just a matter of running a hose from the sink plumbing to the fridge, right? Wrong. I had to snake the hose around our lazy susan cabinet, which doesn't extend to the walls, so I ended up twisting baling wire into a bent fishing pole of sorts and blindly snagging the hose around the corner.
Here are the finished cabinets. Well, except the one over the fridge only looks finished. Because the new fridge is taller than the old one, I had to remove this cabinet and cut it down. I also cut these doors down (this picture is with the old fridge and taken before I cut the cabinet and doors), but they're just temporary until I can get two new doors built by Rudd's Custom Doors in Murray, which takes five weeks.
I also tore out the old kitchen window sills (two windows) and drywall framing and put in wood trim with wood casing. We also got new wooden blinds.
We had to get a new faucet and stainless steel sink with the granite countertop. This is the faucet we picked.
Remodeling can get a little tense.
While we were waiting for the granite countertop to show up--it took a couple weeks to schedule--I got antsy and decided to redo the cubby-hole space in the exercise room. The space behind the bicycles used to be a serving area when this was a family room, before we moved here. We've used the space for storage, but it's really a messy nuisance. A disaster, really.
Back in the kitchen, the Saturday before the granite installers were scheduled to come, I removed the old countertop. In the process, I dropped the cast iron sink into the cabinet. It landed on the hot water pipe and snapped it off, which created an instant geyser of steaming hot water. Not too serious, really. Not too much water ended up in the basement while I ran to the utility room and shut off the water main. But I had to rebuild the copper pipe, starting in the basement and connecting to the hot water faucet and dishwasher. It turns out the old pipe had been seeping through a joint, so breaking it while everything was apart anyway was really fortunate.
Here's the kitchen ready for the granite guys. This stage would have been a more convenient time to run the refrigerator hose from the sink, but that's already done.
And here's me starting on the cubby-hole storage area in the exercise room. Notice that the ceiling over this area is lower than the rest of the ceiling, because some water pipes have been run below the joists. This space also a big sewer clean-out pipe coming up from the floor and a heat duct coming out of the ceiling and into the bathroom upstairs that I'll have to build around.
The granite installation was really interesting to watch. Here the guys are cutting a hole for the cooking range. The counter came in three pieces, which had fitted joints, and the guys glued them and filled the joints with resin. They also installed the sink. I will install the faucet and tile the backsplash. The lead installer was from Serbia, and the helper was from Argentina.
The faucet and backsplash are in. I also installed this exhaust hood. I think this crazy thing was built for houses with 12-foot ceilings. I had to build this table to hold it up while I installed it (this solution will also come in handy later in the basement remodel), and I modified the design of the hood assembly significantly to fit our kitchen. I first installed 2x4 bracing in the attic and then mounted the hood base to the bracing. I threw away one set of mounting legs, and cut several inches off the lower set. But that put the mounting bolts behind the stainless steel cover, so I drilled holes in each corner of the cover near the ceiling. I then installed crown molding over holes.
This is the almost-finished kitchen. The 1/2" trim molding around all the cabinets is still pending, as are the two doors over the fridge. I've stripped and stained the molding, but it needs to be varnished with the two doors (the doors in this picture are the temporary ones I cut down). I replaced a fluorescent light fixture with two recessed lights (which haven't been pushed into their housings in this picture), and I moved a light that had been over the stove to be over the walkway. I still plan to install another recessed light on the wall/cabinet side of the range hood. This will require more crawling around in an attic stuffed with insulation, which isn't my favorite thing, but winter is much better than summer for that stuff.
Back in the basement. Here is the cubby-hole space almost stripped out, and a large piece of wall is gone.
Here's what the exercise room looks like with everything moved to the non-cubby-hole area. That rack on the left used be in the cubby hole. It had all my bike stuff as well as velcro straps to hold my road bike, which is leaning against the treadmill here.
Then I got a little crazy and took a concrete chisel to the ceramic tile on the stairs. I never liked the way I had installed the tile, and in fact, I had never grouted it, because I planned to tear it out and start over.
I guess I got more than a little crazy. This project was supposed to be building a cabinet in the cubby hole. But it's turned into a whole-room makeover. Here, everything but the treadmill has been moved out, and I've stripped most of the old asphalt tile and removed the closet that used to be against the far wall. The treadmill would also be gone, but it's too heavy to pull up the stairs. I have no idea how I got it down here.
Well, now I've stripped the entire floor and the paneling, window trim, door trim, closet, and electrical fixtures from the whole room.
Just a reminder that if I'm not bleeding, I'm not working. That's just the way it is.
I discovered that I can cut sheetrock without making a cloud of dust by holding the ShopVac hose just behind the RotoZip saw blade. I learned this from the guys who installed our granite countertop. I had to get an extended ShopVac hose. I also use this setup to connect directly to my orbital sander for finishing drywall joints without covering the entire house in dust.
I'm finding all kinds of weird wiring in this 58-year-old house. I'm not surprised that I completely fried a breaker when I wired three new recessed lights in this room. I am surprised that Home Depot had replacement breakers for our breaker panel, which was built by Bryant, a company that went out of business 32 years ago.
Here I am pulling new wiring. This room used to have one ceiling light on a switch at the bottom of the stairs. It had a weird spotlight on another switch in the cubby hole, and two more weird spotlights on their own switch in the cubby hole. The switches were in three different places in the room. I'm installing three recessed lights on one switch, a set of track lights near the far wall on one switch to light the new closet on the far wall, and track lights on another switch to light the cabinet I haven't started building yet. All three switches will be at the bottom of the stairs with the recessed lights on a dimmer.
Installing insulation. This will be one of two rooms in this entire house that are insulated. The other room is the garage. Seriously.
Here's the insulated room with track boards in the wall for attaching knotty pine boards.
I spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to install wainscoting paneling on the ceiling. The wainscoting is thin hardboard paneling that is very floppy and very slippery on the finished side. I started by building two ceiling-high T braces like you'd use to install sheetrock. But with just one installer, this paneling is way too floppy and slippery for that method. Then I had a brilliant idea. I attached an articulated beam brace to the Ts. First I cut 3/4" copper pipe for axles and then drilled 3/4" holes in the ends of two pairs of 2x4s to serve as axle guides. I drilled holes in the ends of two long 1x4s and put the axles through the 1x4s. I attached the 2x4s, axles, and 1x4s to the T braces so I could lift the paneling with both T braces simultaneously. Yeah, that idea didn't work at all. I abandoned that idea and decided to build this seven-foot-high table using 2x4s and the 1x4s.
Here's the room with half the wainscoting installed.
On Saturday, January 4, we took time out to celebrate Dad's 94th birthday. We've taken him to Market Street Grill every year, I think, since Mother died 11 years ago.
Here's the exercise room with the ceiling and floor installed. The ceiling still needs some molding over the joints. The floor is Maple Sedona engineered hardwood. Believe it or not, I wasted only one board and finished with one fewer case of flooring than I figured I would need. Not bad for a guy who's mechanically dyslexic.
The entire wall opposite the stairs has been and will continue to be a closet with clothes in one half and storage in the other. I decided to cover the closet doors with knotty pine veneer, but first I had to remove and plug the old finger-handles.
I also had to fill in the corners of the doors, where they'd been cut away to fit over the old baseboard.
Next I installed the pine stairs over the concrete stairs and started installing the knotty pine walls.
Here's the north wall with the knotty pine and pine doors to the utility and storage rooms installed. You can also see the closet doors on the far end with their knotty pine veneers.
Working in this room and around the treadmill is kind of messy.
I ended up installing the knotty pine on more walls than I had originally planned, like behind the cabinet I plan to build, so I ran out of knotty pine lumber with six feet of wall left, and I had to order three more boxes. Here I'm cutting the final boards for the last six feet of wall.
And I'm nailing them up. This wall has a high-up power outlet for a fan, a TV cable in the middle, and a power outlet low for the TV and other stuff.
With all the walls, baseboard, casings, crown molding and all installed, I'm ready to start staining all the pine. I covered the floor to protect it from both the stain and the paint that I plan to apply to the ceiling in a later step.
Here are the closet doors with two doors stained and one yet to be stained. The fourth door is behind these. The stain is Varathane (Rustoleum) Ipswich Pine. It will actually look much lighter when finished than it appears here.
After having lived in this house for over 30 years, I just realized when I was getting ready to paint the ceiling in this room that the room has never had any air vents for heating and cooling. So I located the duct that feeds air to the kitchen upstairs, cut a hole into it and installed a vent in the ceiling of this room.
And...Phase One is done. Hooray!
Phase Two has begun. I made more progress yesterday than I had expected I would. I also ran into some logistical problems that were a challenge. For example, I was planning to build the cabinet on the floor and then stand it up, but I realized there wasn’t enough overhead room to build it that way. I did build it on heavy duty steel casters with rubber wheels, so I can pull it out if I ever need to get to the plumbing pipes behind it.
I just finished this room, and already I'm making changes. Because I'm putting the cabinet on wheels in case I ever need to pull it out, I have to be able to remove the track lights. So I pulled them from the ceiling, installed an outlet in the ceiling, and mounted the track lights on a removable bar. It was kind of tricky, because I had to build that round piece above the track light junction box, which has different depths on the room side and cabinet side due to the ceiling being a couple inches lower on the cabinet end of the room, and splice in a cord with a plug onto the track light wiring. I still need to repaint the ceiling where the track lights were installed previously.
May dad gave me his old jointer, which I'm sure is older than me, a few years ago. I didn't really have a use for it, so it sat under a tarp behind our garbage can by our garage for the past couple of years. Now that I needed to join boards together edge to edge to make the cabinet doors, I realized that I needed a jointer. New ones are $500 to $1,200. So I pulled this heavy thing—it’s cast iron and easily weighs over a hundred pounds—into the garage and spent an evening with a wire brush and a can of WD40 cleaning off the surface rust. I also installed a switch where two bare wires had been twisted together and attached a new heavy-duty plug. And guess what. It works great!
The doors are getting closer. I've finished the rails and stiles. I had to order another router bit for the panels, which are cut but waiting for the routing. The bit should be here Tuesday, if the big snow storm over the next two days doesn't slow it down.
I had to build a table on top of my router table and build out the fence to fit the raised panel bit. I used my old router to cut slots in the table for the carriage bolts to hold down the table. I also got two knobs from Woodcraft to tighten down the bolts.
The cabinet shelves are getting their prestain sanding in the garage.
The doors are built, and the small ones are sanded and ready for staining, varnishing, hinge holes and handle holes. The bigger doors are glued and ready to be sanded.
I put up a sanding booth around the cabinet with the shop vac connected via a hole in the bottom left and an inlet vent in the top right. We'll see how this works this afternoon. I really don't want dust all over this room like I have all over the garage.
This doesn't look like part of the project, but it is right next to Lowe's, where I was headed for door hinges. This guy had about eight or 10 handbags on his handlebars. I couldn't tell if they held all his belongings or were someone else's belongings.
Here I am in my garage workshop finishing the finish on the cabinet doors.
And I'm installing the doors. After this I just have to drill for handles and install them, and I think I'll be done.
Okay, that's it.
Our exercise room project is completed.
Here are a couple of jigs I made to help keep holes straight and aligned. The jig on the left is for drilling the cabinet shelf pin holes. It's actually upside down. The dowel slides through a 1/4" hole and into the previous shelf pin hole in the cabinet wall. The dowel and the drill hole are 2" from the edges of the jig to align with the edge of the cabinet wall. I then drill a 1/4" hole into the cabinet wall through the lower hole. The jig is two pieces of 3/4" plywood, so it's 1-1/2" thick to keep the drill bit straight. The short dowel with the hole goes on the drill bit to stop drilling when the hole is 3/8" deep.
The jig on the right is for drilling the handle holes in the cabinet doors. It keeps the handles 3-1/2" from the bottom of the door and 1-1/4" from the edge of the stile (1/2 the width of the stile). Stiles are the right and left frame parts of the door. The top and bottom are rails. The center is the panel. So each door has five wood parts, plus hardware (taller doors may have more rails and panels, which is what I will likely do for the utility cabinet in the hallway). For taller doors with the handle in the middle, there's a half-way mark on the side to align on the door. For middle handles I have to remove the alignment piece on the end of the jig.
My next project is the hallway that leads down to the exercise room. We live in a split-level house, so there are four 1/2 levels. The exercise room is in the fourth level. I don't have preremodel pictures of the hallway, but believe me, it was a scary place. Hobo and other spiders have been inviting their extended families to spend their winters here. I'm doing the hallway in three steps: 1. Paint and finish the hall. 2. Build a utility cabinet. 3. Build the doors for the cabinet.
Step 1 is done. This is the hallway with new caulking, paint, and a light. The room on the left is a small bathroom. I remodeled this bathroom several years ago with a retro sink, glass brick on the shower, and a lot of tile. Sorry, no pictures, because it's currently full of paint brushes and paint cans. By the way, in its old life this bathroom was really tiny, so I moved the wall out into the hallway using the space that was intended for the washer and dryer, which have been in the utility room in the 4th level utility room since we moved here. Moving the bathroom wall left a corner space in the hallway, where I am planning to install a cabinet for the vacuum, ironing board and that type of stuff.
Part 2 is about halfway done. I precut the cabinet parts in the workshop-by-day/garage-by-night. In the mean time, the carrier on the garage door stripped out last Friday night. I spent half of Saturday hunting down and installing a replacement part. I ordered the part on Amazon on Friday night with 1-day delivery, but expecting it wouldn't come until late in the day, like 9 p.m., I drove to Lowry Doors in Orem first thing Saturday morning, where I got the same part the last time on a Saturday morning. This time the lady working there couldn't find the part and told me to come back on Monday, when someone would actually be running the store. Lowry claims the store's open, but really they have just one lady answering phones and that's about all she does. She even told people on the phone that she wasn't able to schedule appointments. So, they could have had a recording on the phone and closed the store. Anyway, when I got home, Amazon had already delivered the part, so I was able to install it right away. I also ordered an extra carrier on Amazon and taped it to the opener so I'll have it handy the next time.
I cut and routed all the cabinet parts and made sure everything fit together in the garage.
I also drilled holes for screws to assemble the cabinet in the hallway. I will sand, stain and finish the parts in the garage and just assemble them Ikea style in the hallway, but without the Swedish instructions. The doors to the cabinet will be Step Three of this project. I bought the lumber but haven't started planing and cutting it yet. That's Step 3.
Ok. After staining the cabinet, I have to wait 72 hours before applying the varnish. So now I'm starting on the doors. Planing is first. However, the electrical circuit in my garage couldn't handle the dust collector, two 500W halogen lights, and the planer, so the circuit breaker tripped. I need to find another power source for the planer. And wait for the circuit breaker to cool off.
All the boards are now planed. I can't believe how much sawdust planing a few boards produces. This 70-gallon bag filled once and a half.
It's been about 72 hours since I stained the cabinet structure, so today is varnish day. This isn't really "varnish." It's polyurethane, but it sounds weird to say, "I polyurethaned the cabinet." The polyurethane dries quickly, so I'll apply three coats in one day, sanding after the second coat. I expect I'll also be able to assemble the cabinet today, plug the screw holes on the side of the cabinet that will be exposed, and stain that side. I haven't stained the exposed side yet because I need to wait until I plug and sand the screw holes in the assembled cabinet.
Woodworking produces a lot of sawdust.
This stuff is fine, gets everywhere, and sticks to everything.
The dust collector filled two bags of about 70 gallons each. Much of this is wood shavings from the planer, but a lot was is sawdust.
Because I made such a sawdust mess in the garage when I built the exercise room cabinet, I decided to build a sanding booth to finish the hallway cabinet.
It works very well. The booth is 3/4" PVC pipe and plastic. The 4" dust collector hose is connected in the back corner near the floor behind me. Air comes in through the door, which is where this picture is taken from, and gets sucked out by the dust collector.
An N95 dust mask is also a must. Unfortunately, because people are hoarding these masks due to the Coronavirus out of Wuhan China, these masks are hard to find. Fortunately, I bought a box before they became scarce. Today they're available only on eBay for about $40 each.
I've stained and varnished the cabinet and am putting on some finishing touches.
The cabinet is primarily for the ironing board and vacuum cleaner, but it has shelves for other stuff, too.
Here's the cabinet at the top of the stairs to the exercise room. This officially ends the kitchen and exercise room remodeling projects. My next project will be the family room, but not soon.
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