Finished Kitchen
Posted by Wayne
Kitchen Before
Kitchen AfterÂ
Quite an improvement, huh?
Replaced garden window, replaced countertops, painted cabinets, new appliances, new sliding glass door, installed wood floor, new pantry door, new ceiling lights, installed undercabinet lighting, tiled backsplash, replaced outlets
Total cost: $8000. Total time: about 120 hours (that’s my estimate and I’m sticking to it). Most of the work was done in random 3 hour shifts over about 5 months.
Kitchen- Replacing a pantry door
Posted by Wayne
Like the rest of the doors in the house, the pantry door in our kitchen was brown and ugly. My first step in replacing it was to remove the matching brown trim from around the outside of the door. I was a little surprised to find that the builders of the house had sized down the door frame by building out pieces of wood trim to match the size of the pantry door. This inside framing was loose, a result of nails that were too short to hold it to the surrounding framing, but I didn’t really want to go to the trouble of rebuilding it so I carefully left it in place. I would resecure it to the surrounding framing and paint it to match the door before re-trimming the outside.
Before
Painting Oak Cabinets- Part 2
Posted by Wayne
To prepare for the messy job of spraying paint I hung plastic sheeting to seal off the painting area in the kitchen and also created a “painting room” in the unfinished basement in which I’d spray the cabinet doors. The “room” was made by stapling plastic sheeting to the floor joists above and I covered the floor with butcher paper.
My original thought on painting the doors was that I’d somehow hang all the doors from the floor joists but began to realize that this was just impractical to do in my basement. Instead I’d lean the doors against the walls in my sealed off space, spray them, and after they had dried I’d rotate them bottom side up for the second coat to make sure I was hitting all the sides (it was mostly the bottom of the door that I’d be missing on each coat as it was against the floor). Then I’d repeat with the backs of the doors. I was also doing a primer coat on each side. So for those doing the math, that’s three coats per side, or six total coats.
Painting Oak Cabinets- Part 1
Posted by Wayne
Figuring out what we were going to do with the honey oak cabinetry in the kitchen would determine whether or not we would bust our budget. There are three options I can think of when it comes to updating cabinetry:
1) Buy new cabinets- Obviously the most expensive option. Our cabinets are ugly, but still in good shape, so I didn’t see us replacing the cabinets without trying a cheaper option first. We didn’t even get a quote on new cabinets, but I’m guessing it would have been in the neighborhood of $5k.
2) Buy new cabinet doors and veneer or laminate the cabinet boxes with matching material- This was a much less expensive option, but still probably would have cost around $1200-1500. This was my first choice, but my wife got it in her head that any veneering or laminate on the cabinet boxes would start peeling off over time and claimed to have seen this. I totally disagreed, but was willing to try to save money first by going with option #3.
3) Paint the cabinets- This was by far the cheapest option (<$100) but most labor intensive. We had gotten pretty good results hand painting our bathroom cabinets which are made out of the same honey oak material, but those are not at eye level and it is a lot darker in the bathroom than the kitchen.
Updating the Kitchen
Posted by Wayne
Before
Oh boy, now we’re getting to the fun stuff. As I write I am in the process of finishing the kitchen updating. As you can see from the picture above, we started with your typical 1980’s kitchen: honey oak cabinetry, laminate countertops, linoleum flooring, ugly bay window, ugly sliding glass door (just outside the picture to the left), etc. If I go upstairs now and look at the kitchen, I can’t believe it’s the same space.
For this project I’d be painting (hopefully) and installing hidden european hinges on the oak cabinets, tiling or installing granite countertops with an undermount sink (and all the plumbing that comes along with it), adding in some sort of tile backsplash, replacing the appliances, replacing the lighting, replacing the bay window, replacing the sliding glass door, tearing up the linoleum and installing wood flooring, and replacing the pantry doors (not seen just to the right of the photo). This is a big job. Probably not so start-from-scratchish as the office space I completed, but there was just as much work to do here.
I read a while back that the absolute minimum cost for upgrading a kitchen is $15k. I knew for a fact I could do this for $5k, with all brand new nice appliances, and people wouldn’t believe how good it looked. Tune in again to see how I did it and how it all turned out (or come to our unveiling party March 1, invitations to be sent out soon).
Office Space- The finished product
Posted by Wayne
Finishing the office took me a couple of months just working on the weekends. I liked the finished office so much that I had to buy a 20″ iMac for the space rather than put my ugly old computer down there. My wife uses the office space to do her interior design work and we’re both down there frequently.
I also bought a pretty sweet set of Harmon Kardon Soundsticks II speakers off of Ebay and the subwoofer fit perfectly into the box I had built below the desk for that purpose. The sound in the room is incredible.
We also added a few extras like the shelf above the desk and the corkboard on the back wall.
Office Space
Posted by Wayne
This next project was something that I did to an awkward little room at the bottom of the stairs in the finished part of the basement. It could have been a good laundry room but there was no 220v electricity, venting, or plumbing nearby. Basically the room had no purpose. My wife wanted me to make her a little office out of it for her interior design work. Originally I had told her that this would be a piece of cake but changed my mind about that and put it off for quite a while until she finally talked me into it.
Despite the size of the room, this was the biggest project I had taken on in our house to this point. I would have to lower the ceiling two inches (more on that later), frame out the walls because 3 or them were cement foundation (the one closest the camera was framed already), while framing the walls attempt to square up the room, install a lighting canister, run electricity and install electrical outlets, do some difficult drywalling, paint, carpet, trim, and build and laminate a custom built in desk. This was a big project!
This is the first project where I’m going to try to break it down a little more step by step. Check back soon for my first installment.
Replacing the Deck surface
Posted by Wayne
A couple of weeks before our July wedding, after I had replaced the support column below the deck, I woke up one Saturday morning, took out my trusty scraper and was not looking forward to a day of scraping, painting, and getting baked by the sun. After about 5 minutes of scraping and cursing the idiot who ever decided to paint the deck, I decided to just replace the deck surface with a composite material that didn’t need painting. I figured it would take the same amount of time to replace it as it would to try to make the existing surface look good.
As you can see in the picture below, the old deck surface didn’t look very good and this picture was taken a full year before I made the decision to replace it. It was really peeling, the wood was rotten, it just didn’t make sense to paint it again.
Before
Updating the Fireplace
Posted by Wayne
The one thing I hated about our house when we were looking at buying it was the fireplace. Huge brown beams from floor to ceiling (one was twisted and warped), ugly brick, brown mantle….. just plain nasty and 1970’s. I knew that it would have to be the first thing to go, but it was an imposing task. I didn’t know what I’d find behind the brick or how easy the beams or brick would come down.
What I was particularly worried about was that all of the walls in the house have the orange-peel texture finish, and I wondered if the builders had sprayed the texture on the walls before (under the brick) or after (not under the brick) finishing the fireplace. If the wall underneath didn’t have texture it was going to be a nightmare getting it to match the rest of the wall.
One day a couple of months after we had moved in and gotten settled, my wife was at work (I was self-employed at the time) and I decided I was sick of looking at that monstrosity so I decided to go for it. The beams came out fairly easy. I just had to be careful not to pry against the good drywall.