Home Renovation for Peter (new condo in Davis)

Home Renovation, Day 1 for Peter

We have the keys to our new condo, and it has begun! Megan and I had the itch to start home improvement right away. So we did a few warm ups to get started. Job 1: Replace Towel Racks. This one was easy, and a quick trip to Home Depot was all it took. For some reason, we got a big kick out of it. Perhaps it's because the old ones were so ugly. (The silver are new.) Job 2: Replace Screens. The previous renters had a cat. Of course, then, the screen doors were trashed and clawed. Why people own cats is beyond me. So, I decided to take the screens down to Ace Hardware to have them re-screened. Trick Numero Uno: Fitting screen doors in a Honda Civic. It can be done. That's all for the first two days. Megan's dad will be joining us soon, so get ready for some real demolition!

Are we all warmed up? Good, as Sir Galahad said to Concord "Now the big one". We decided to replace the kitchen. Here we go.

 Job 3: Demo Kitchen Before: After: I came home from work and the cabinets were in the backyard. Apparently, they were pretty easy to remove, just a crow bar here and there and voila! You can be rid of cabinets! 

Job 4: Remove Linoleum
This has been the crappiest part of the whole process. Scraping contact cement isn't really my idea of fun. What you see there took hours of leaning over a giant metal spatula. It was actually rather disappointing not to have more removed after a morning's worth of work. Much of the day was spent planning our new cabinet layout at Ikea. I think we spent 3 hours in the kitchen section alone. I'm so excited - I'll soon have self-closing, self-dampening cabinetry with stainless steel hardware! What time was left after Ikea was spent at Home Depot picking out tile. You'll see what we picked in the next post...

Job 5: Install Tile

After several trips to home depot, taking home samples, and a little bit of agonizing, we finally chose a tile. It's a 12" square, earthy-tan porcelain.
This was about half of the tile. It near filled the back of this truck. Also, turns out that tile is not light, and you need to lift with your legs.

Most of the tile glued. It actually went pretty quickly once there was a rhythm.

Megan's Dad's tile saw, running full bore. It's water cooled - kinda like a Porsche engine.

Hooray! We have a tile floor. It looks five million times better than the linoleum. Megan and I are ecstatic.  Megan's dad was able to space everything so that the visible edges came out to perfect half and whole-tile cuts. Go Jay!

Job 5b: Grout and seal tile:  Most of this happened while I was at work. Megan, her friend Gabby, and her dad knocked this out in a morning. Here's a finished pic.


Job 6: Build & Install Cabinets:
So, Megan, Gabby and I head out to Ikea to pick up our cabinets. We were smart enough not to take our Civic, we took Gabby's Subaru Forester.

So we get there, do a little shopping, and head to the counter to pick up our cabinets. The guy looks at our receipt and is like "Whoa, this will be a while". So, we kill 45 minutes by going to Home Depot next door to pick up some new lighting fixtures. We get back to Ikea, and head over to the loading area. There are seven storage areas holding carts where large orders are held, ready to be picked up. I was like "which one is ours" and he was like "All of them". Oh boy. There's no way 7 hand carts of cabinets were going to fit in the Subaru. "Can we take half now and half later?" I said. "Nope, We close in 20 minutes and can't hold anything overnight" he replied. I needed help. Pronto.


So I made a call to my friend Max who lives in West Sacramento (where the Ikea is). Our conversation was a little like this:
Me: "Hey bro, what are you doing?"
Max: "Playing Wii."
Me: "Great. Do the back seats of your car fold down?"
Max: "Yeah, why?"
Me: "Awesome; I just bought a kitchen, and it doesn't fit in our car."

So, we filled 2 cars to the brim, the rear wheels were almost bottoming out from the weight. Max even stuck around to unload both cars when we got back to our house.

Disaster averted. Cabinets are home. It was late after everything was unpacked. We all headed straight to bed.

Day 5

Cabinets! Cabinets, cabinets, and more cabinets! Here's a wall of boxes (there were two more similar to this).

Megan's dad in production mode.


We start making some headway. These are lower Cabinets.

My elbow was starting to hurt quite a bit from all from all of the screwdriver work. After cabinet number six or so, I used a drill exclusively.

Wondering where all of the old stuff has been going? Here's a picture of our backyard:

Day 6

More Cabinets! At this point the soreness in my right elbow is really kicking in, I'm beginning to wonder why I took it on to assemble a dozen cabinets. We decided it would be easiest to mount the upper cabinets before the lower ones, so we could get under them, and it would be easier to measure from the ground. Thus, the old upper cabinets had to go.

We decided that while we had open access to the full walls, this would be a good time to put a fresh coat of paint on, without needing to worry about cutting in around the cabinets.


While waiting for the paint to dry, we tackled a few other things on our list.

Job 7: Replace Ceiling Fan.
The old ceiling fan was dark brown and gold, a color palate that wreaks of the early 80's. Don't get me wrong, '84 was a good year, but not for decorations still around in 2008. For any that don't know, Megan, Myself and this house were all three made in '84. We feel a special connection to the house as such.

Before:


Man, the white looks SOOOOO much better. Much more modern and light.
Keeping in this same spirit, the dining room chandelier had to go as well.

Days 7 through 14

Okay, so I apologize for not posting more pictures regularly. That whole life and no-extra-time thing. So without further ado, here's the rest of the bunch.

This is our friend Max posing with the freshly-installed cabinets. This is the same guy who helped my out by lending his car to the Ikea-Cabinet-Transport cause.

We decided to oil the butcher-block countertops before we installed them so we could coat all sides. And by coat, I mean three coats, one of which with an oil-wax mixture. A cool (kinda unplanned) side effect is that after oiling, the countertops match the hardwood floors perfectly. You may have to look twice to tell the floor from the countertop in that picture. The only difference is the width of the pieces of wood.

To install the counters, I had megan sit on them, while I drilled up from below. She proved you can look beautiful while doing home improvement.

Me installing the last of the drawers. What wasn't shown here was the long tedious step of drilling all the handles. They were one of the few things that didn't come pre-drilled and it was a major hassle. We made a little cardboard template the made things (a little) easier.

Ah, the finished product. The wires for the under-cabinet lighting was already wired when the house was built. Sweet.

Another view. Also, cutting, gluing, and placing the top molding was not a trivial task. Good thing I had a new 10" Craftsman Miter saw to get the job done ;-)

The final view. The dishwasher was also an addition by us, we had to route the power, water, and drainage from the sink after we put the cabinets in. We got the dishwasher from Ikea too. We love Ikea. We love our kitchen.

Stepping away from the kitchen... Here's the bathroom vanity. Note the beautiful (cough) yellow flourescent lightbox above the sink. Yeah, that had to go.

Much better. Megan painted all the bathroom cabinets white. It took three coats. Go Megan.

Here's the other vanity. They had different style lights, but they were both ugly and had to go.

So we changed that and added some consistency.

Overall, everything went well. The renovations went WAY over budget, but it still went well. We're totally in love with our house, and are glad we made the jump. Our dog Allie likes having more room to run around, I love having an office separate from my bedroom, Megan loves taking runs in the nearby greenbelt. Life is good.