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January 27, 2004
Late January: Tell Me Again Why I Needed to Renovate the Kitchen Now?
I didn’t even try to include pregnancy information here, so be forewarned. This chronicles the first two weeks of our kitchen renovation saga.
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I knew this would happen when the cabinet order wasn’t made until December first, but I really, really wish the kitchen was done already. It would be so much worse if the baby was already here. It is easy to be patient waiting for the baby when I think of having a teeny one with us here in the Dust Bowl.
The cabinets were due to arrive on Wednesday, January 14th, although the cabinet store man kept hedging on the exact date. We spent the better part of the weekend before that running between Home Depot and various other stores buying an over-the-range microwave, sink (for some reason, I fell in love with a cast-iron one), faucets, garbage disposal, and kitchen light fixture. The sink was too heavy to get out of our car, but my parents were kind enough to come over and lend us a hand. While here, they helped us decide on paint colors for both the kitchen and the baby’s room. I could handle choosing between five garbage disposals, but finding the perfect red from the fifty available isn’t my strong suit. After waffling for months, we did settle on a counter choice—laminate with a maple edging. We were told it would take about two weeks to come in.
Tuesday we got word that the cabinets would definitely be delivered midday Thursday. We arranged with the contractor for work to begin that day. Wednesday night the panic struck. I was fine until I realized that Dan had hours of homework to do and we still needed to empty the kitchen. We had dinner with my parents and bought the paint on the way home. I was a bit nervous when the Home Depot man told me my pink paint was ready. Pink? We had a creamy off-white and Daredevil Red, but no pink. I had been the only one pushing for the more-obviously brown beige, so I figured I’d better bring it home before assuming it wouldn’t work. Luckily for our sanity, we had picked up my sister’s car while at my parents’, and we will be a two-car family until May. I spent the next couple hours washing the giant piles of dishes that had built up as Dan did his schoolwork. Finally around 10, we began clearing out the kitchen. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as painful as when we moved since we didn’t need to wrap anything up and only had to carry everything ten feet to the dining room. We arranged for Dan’s dad and sister to help us empty the baby’s room Thursday morning.
I didn’t know what to expect on Thursday. I sat and waited for SOMEONE to show up. Around 9:30, my FIL and SIL came and began moving furniture from the baby’s room into our bedroom. Now, I love my FIL, but working with him makes me crazy. He’s been doing things the same way for 65+ years and he’s not too keen on anyone trying something different. The cabinet guy showed up shortly after they did and I spent most of the morning running up and down the stairs between people. I’d go up and find my FIL and SIL trying to determine where to put a dresser. I really didn’t care where anything went so long as it was possible to get to the bed, the closet, and our dressers. My SIL would think of some reasonable way to fit things in, but my FIL would have some other method in mind and wouldn’t move anything until I came up and resolved things. Agh. Meanwhile, the cabinet remover, the former partner of the contractor, was talking about how irritated he was that the contractor hadn’t made it more clear what he was supposed to do. No one seemed to think it was their own responsibility to patch up the walls once everything was taken down.
By late morning, the baby’s room was emptied and my SIL and I began tearing down the trim along the ceiling and part of the window. We left the base molding because it was wood, but tore down all the particle board and foam stuff. The ceiling trim in particular was infuriating—it was one inch wide foam pieces, stuck to the wall with nails and lots of glue. As we pulled it down, the wall plaster came with it. It was clear that the only reason the former owners had hung it was to cover their bad paint job along the ceiling edge. It wasn’t even along the whole room. My FIL was trying to stop us, saying that the painters or someone else should be dealing with the trim because we didn’t have goggles, and heaven forbid I step on the bottom step of the step stool while pregnant. After a few minutes of that, I left and went downstairs to watch the old cabinets get splintered.
The big surprise of the day was that the soffit along the sink wall was just a fake wall. No hidden pipes, no asbestos, just an empty space. The worker, Steve, had to wait an hour for someone to show up with a ladder to remove it, but I thought it was amusing that we spent so much time wondering what was up there a couple months back. I was pleasantly surprised by the condition of the walls under the cabinets. The upper cabinets had been built into the wall around 1970, going by the receipt we found tucked behind a board. They had to be removed board by board because of the strange construction. The plaster behind them was in good shape. It wasn’t until the sink cabinet was removed that I got my first glance of lath. Rather than build the pipes into the wall, a two foot by two foot hole had been cut into the cabinet and the wall so some of the pipes could stick out. O-kay. Some insulation was showing there. And then Steve removed the tile backsplash, and with it, the plaster. Suddenly, the whole middle swath of wall was just lath boards. Oh my. That’s about the point where he quit and went home.
The painter, who’d said he’d wanted to be done by Friday, showed up just long enough that afternoon to let me know that he wouldn’t start until Saturday after all.
I got to work around 2pm, where visions of a kitchen filled with plaster dust forever wouldn’t leave my head.
On Friday, the electrician came so we could have more than one outlet in the room. My dad was kind enough to house-sit for the afternoon so I was able to have a normal work day. I mentioned to him that if it was straight-forward, it would be great if our entry light could be fixed so that both the upstairs and downstairs switches would turn it on (currently, the upstairs switch needs to be up in order for the downstairs switch to do anything). Around 3pm, Dad called and mentioned that the electrician had spent the last hour and a half mucking around with the entry light. Uh oh. I took an early bus home and just missed the electrician. We did have some extra wires sticking out here and there.
Dan spent the better part of Friday evening trying to calm me down and convince me that this was the worst it would look and from there on out, things would be fixed and not torn down.
I originally planned to spend Saturday at work, both to avoid freaking out at the state of the kitchen and to make up for missing part of Thursday. As it turned out, both the painter and the electrician came that day, so I stayed home to see what they were up to. The painter mudded the baby’s room (which had the worst painting job ever beforehand—he had to cover entire walls with mud to fix the wallpaper lines and repair jobs of owners gone by) while the electrician knocked a couple more holes in the kitchen plaster. He also replaced the kitchen light fixture (not the funky entry one).
Saturday night, we left the painter working on the second coat of mud and escaped to Dan’s parents’ house for dinner. I must have also exchanged the pink paint for the pale beige I originally wanted that day.
Sunday, the painter returned and did more sanding and mudding in the morning, then left and returned in the evening to start the actual painting in the baby’s room and mudding in the kitchen. We escaped the house in the evening—maybe to my parents’, I’ve lost track—and when we returned, the baby’s room had a red wall! Very exciting. It needed another coat, but finally we were getting somewhere. The other walls were finished too. I’m a little nervous that the red will be too dramatic and the baby will have nightmares, but we’ll deal with that if it comes up, I guess. I’m just not interested in using pastels.
Monday the 19th was a federal holiday, so as a state government employee, I got to stay home. The painter was back for the second coat of red and the contractor came to see what could be done with the sink wall. He ended up tearing off the plaster that used to be under the upper cabinets himself. That was the last time I saw my living room without a coat of dust on it. I’m trying not to think too much about the fact that a simple plastic sheet in the doorway would have prevented most of the mess. I just stayed in the corner near the computer and blew the dust off the keyboard every once in a while. That afternoon, a couple extra workers showed up and they began hanging greenrock over the exposed lath. Of course, they had to leave the instant the clock struck 5, leaving it hanging half attached to the wall. The painter came back that afternoon to paint over the flat kitchen walls so that hanging cabinets might be possible the next day. My SIL and her friend stopped by that night and we convinced them to help Dan put the furniture back in the baby’s room. It felt very nice to be left with only a few boxes of miscellaneous extra things in our room.
Tuesday I began a habit of waiting for workers to show up at the house, driving most of the way to work (because I’d miss the last express bus), then parking just outside of downtown to catch a local bus the rest of the way. It’s too hard to walk eight blocks from the cheap lots while eight months pregnant in January, and I’m too frugal to pay $8 a day to park at a nearby lot, but too impatient to take the 45 minute bus all the way from my house when a car is available.
While I was at work on Tuesday, the rest of the sheetrock went up on the bad wall. The sheetrock guys also mudded over the rough spots before they took off. The contractor managed to convince the painter to come in at 7pm once the mud was dry to sand and paint the rest of the kitchen.
On Wednesday, I woke up a little later than I’d planned and was just getting out of the shower when the cabinet guy showed up. When I went downstairs ten minutes later, I found him mudding over the fresh paint! I was fairly upset because we’d told the painter he was done. The cabinet guy convinced me that it would look better in the long run and that he’d make sure they were painted over again. He hung the cabinets on the stove wall that day and the electrician came back to finish up some of the sockets.
I was not pleased to come home Wednesday night to find the mud not painted over.
On Thursday, all but one remaining cabinet was installed. The doors weren’t all straight and the trim wasn’t attached, but finally we were getting somewhere. I was able to put a few dishes into the cabinets to get an idea of how it would look. The workers did have to remove the trim from two sides of the back door in order to make the cabinets fit. The trim was in bad shape anyway, so that wasn’t too big a deal. Once again, the mud spots were still there. That night, I bought halogen lights for under the sink cabinet and the brackets that will hang our bookshelves.
Thursday night it snowed. A lot. Our cabinet guy lives an hour away and the contractor told him not to bother with the traffic. That killed my hopes of getting the cabinets finished before the weekend, but a different worker did come in and mud over a funny part of the ceiling where the fake wall had been. Despite my requests to the contractor and a sign left for the worker, the mud spots didn’t disappear. Phooie.
No work got done by the contractor’s guys over the weekend but we stayed busy. I spent most of Saturday evening washing dusty dishes in the bathtub. I was able to put all the plates, bowls, and glasses away and also some of our food. For the first time in ten days we had clear areas on our dining room table, even though there were plenty of pots and pans and odds and ends underneath it still. There’s hope that we might stop having to eat out some day.
On Monday it was snowing again so I wasn’t surprised to hear that there wouldn’t be cabinet work done. Apparently my pleading about the paint finally came through because the mud spots were nearly gone when I got home. Thank goodness. The irritating news of the day came when I called the cabinet store from which I’d ordered the counters. They wouldn’t be ready until Thursday instead of Monday afternoon as originally projected. Now, the sales guy has seen me and knows how desperate I am to get this project over with. He must realize that I will come throttle him if things are delayed much more, so he said he’d contact the manufacturer and see whether the delivery could be moved up at all. Good man =) Of course, I didn’t hear back from him.
Tuesday morning (the 27th), we were still dealing with snow aftermath, so I wasn’t sure what to think. At 8:15, I got a call from Steve, the cabinet hanging man. He said there was under half a day’s worth of work to do until the counters arrived and he preferred to wait until they came to come out and finish the job. My comments about the difficulty of living with dust and pots and Tupperware in the living room weren’t enough to convince him to drive out immediately. We ended up making a deal—on the day of the countertop delivery, he would stay as late as necessary to level the cabinets, install the microwave, the counter, the sink, and the garbage disposal. I can live with that. Then he mentioned a few things. First, our cabinets don’t quite reach the wall on the left side on the sink wall. Huh? Guess I didn’t notice before, but that’s certainly not what we’d planned. Second, the door with missing trim is in pretty bad shape and really ought to get rehung, particularly since there’s no sheetrock or plaster under the missing trim. We’d talked about fixing that this spring, but will probably go ahead and have it done now so the lath won’t be showing. The only trick is that Steve doesn’t deal with doors, so we’ll have to wait until the contractor can do it, which probably means it’ll be next week. Boo! I want a perfect house before February! That really isn’t going to happen. I’ll settle for a non-dusty house with a working sink by the time the midwives come for the home visit on Tuesday the 3rd. Steve mentioned a few possibilities for covering over the inch gap between the wall and the cabinets. It sounds straight-forward, but is just another thing to add to the list. Sigh.
By the end of the day Tuesday, I hadn’t gotten news of the counter delivery being moved up (and I called twice to check), so it looks like Thursday’s the day. Steve can’t work on Friday, so this darn well better work out for Thursday. At least that’s only two days away. I need to buy some sink parts and leave instructions as to where the bookshelf brackets should get hung. I might need to call the cabinet manufacturer and plead naïve to them to get our crown molding exchanged. Apparently the stuff we got is too big and goofy looking for our cabinets. I thought we’d just ordered the standard, but Steve thinks we should look into it. The plywood/hardwood for the shelves disappeared on Friday, which was a good sign. The tile backsplash might get put in over the weekend. The contractor was meeting with the plumber this afternoon and would determine when our stove could be worked on (a big old pipe needs to be removed). The bookshelves and probably the door rehanging are likely to happen early to mid next week. I’ll be 37+ weeks pregnant then, which is relatively safe. And somehow, my blood pressure is still low. Astounding.
I’ll post this now and wrap up the next week’s house drama when everything’s finished. I have to get all this off my chest before I can concentrate on baby news. Maybe next time, we shouldn’t buy a century-old house.
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