Kitchen Progress

It seems that this time of year, I always take a little vacation from blogging in order to work longer hours.  This year is no exception, but I promise that some late nights of work have left me with dozens of half-finished posts so I'm hoping to be publishing them more regularly for a while.

Corey's been making incredible progress on the kitchen.  He's hustling to finish for a party I'm throwing for some of my clients next month and we're super excited to have such good motivation.  I'm really looking forward to showing my clients and friends the progress we've been making on our new/old house!

Most recently, Corey has added the spacers between cabinets and the hardware as well.  Doesn't that brassy gold just pop against our grey cupboards?  

He still has some drywall to touch up but we're so close to being ready that we ordered our paint today.  I can't wait to show you guys the finished product!

Let There Be Light! ... In Our Kitchen

Guys, I'm pretty excited to say that our kitchen is in the "finishing touches" stage.  That means spacers, knobs and pulls, cover panels and the odd shelf and the trim that will hide the lights (no idea what it's called) still need to be installed and then Corey can tile the backsplash and we can paint.  Woot woot!


Unlike our kitchen in the condo, this time we really wanted both under-cabinet and in-cabinet lighting.  It gives the kitchen such a wow factor, don't you think?  Because these cabinets are so high, I can't really access the top shelf (even on a stool) which means the top shelf of our glass cabinets will be assigned to purely decorative items (hello, milk glass collection) and the top shelf in the other cabinets will hold items we don't use very often.

It won't be long until our kitchen is actually finished. :)

Our Kitchen Flooring

With weeks to go until baby Bruiser makes and appearance, an irritable and hungry pregnant woman in the house and no functioning kitchen, Corey's working quickly to rebuild it.  Normally a lone worker, he even enlisted the help of my brother (top photo) who has spent a couple of days helping out.

The first step was to install a new subfloor to ensure an even base for our new flooring.

Corey laid plywood after filling any holes.

Once the subfloor was secured, it was time to lay our actual kitchen floor.  With hardwood throughout the house (with the exception of the heated tile floor in our bathroom) we wanted to choose our flooring for our high-traffic kitchen and family room carefully.  

A friend who happens to be a chef once showed me the marmoleum flooring in her own kitchen.  Not only was it attractive, she said it was easy to clean, durable and it felt fairly soft and warm under my feet. 

When we mention our choice in flooring to most people, they're like "marmol... what???" but marmoleum is actually a brand of linoleum, which comes in array of colours and patterns, has a layer of cork underneath, and is a durable, sustainable and allergen-free flooring option which is gaining popularity.

It's still not easy to find, but we ordered ours from Avenue Interiors and had it in a few days.  We chose long tiles (it also comes in square tiles and sheets) with edges that click together for ease of installation.  Choosing a colour was also a challenge, but we opted for a neutral charcoal grey with some subtle marbling.

It clicks together like a laminate floating floor but it's virtually seamless once installed.

It's now finished and that means.... drumroll please.... It's time to start putting together our new kitchen!!

What's Behind Door Number Two?



So we were enjoying a glass of wine and admiring this little corner of the house and I said to Corey, "You know what this room needs?  Another hole in the wall!"

Okay, that's not exactly what happened but... it's not far off.  Here are some photos taken of our kitchen the week we moved in.  Note the cheap laminate flooring in the dining room and the lack of a giant hole in our dining room wall.  Ahhh... those were the days. 

We knew right away that we wanted to move the access to the basement from the kitchen (where it was taking up prime kitchen storage real estate) to the dining room.

We knew that if we moved the door to the perpendicular wall, we wouldn't need to move the stairs or the landing.  Check out our brilliant master plan:

But we were forced to set our plan in motion a little earlier than expected when we realized that we would need a larger opening to fit our new washer and dryer down the stairs to the basement.

And so Corey was forced to open that wall over a year before he would have time between projects to close it.

With our kitchen reno underway, it was important to close the wall from the kitchen side.  We also decided that, while a dog gate keeps the dogs out of the basement, it might be nice to actually have a real door... that we could actually close... in place of the big ugly hole.

First, Corey framed and drywalled the opening in the kitchen.

Before framing the doorway in the dining room and finally...

Adding a door!

The touch-ups are being done on an ongoing basis, but I would say this is an improvement over the empty hole.

If You Can't Take The Heat...

Get out of the kitchen!  Which is exactly what I've done these past couple of weeks so that Corey could demolish (and start rebuilding) it!  I know it's a crazy thing to do just weeks away from the arrival of our baby but I just couldn't live with this kitchen anymore.

Since we bought this house, we've known that the day we demolished our sad kitchen would be a reason to celebrate!  We dislike everything about it from the outdated cupboards and counters, the random window from before the family room was added to the back of the house and lack of storage space (we don't even have drawers) to the grungy and cold tile floors!  In the time we've lived in our new/old house, we have updated the fridge and bought and installed a dishwasher, but we've held off on a new oven (because I wanted built-in) so we've been cooking with our old gas stove (which takes roughly 3 days to boil a pot of water) and oven (which produces the most unique cakes, which are liquid on the inside and black around the edges) for a year and a half.

Let's just say that when Corey started tearing it apart, I could have cried!

Corey covered the window in duct tape before removing it for the sake of safety.  Smashing it would have been satisfying, though!

Excuse the pink family room in the background.  We'll get to that in 2015.

Okay, what's that wire that we found hiding behind a random piece of drywall?  Apparently is was connected to.... nothing!  Old houses are full of surprises.  It was a little anticlimactic, but we got our share of excitement when Corey found a live wire that a previous owner had run up through the floor.  Yikes!

And speaking of the floor... I don't know why we were surprised when there was more than one layer of tile.

For those of you who recall our first days in the house, we tore up the flooring upstairs and in the living and dining rooms to expose the hardwood underneath.  We were shocked at the number of layers of flooring that we had to pull up before we were rewarded with hardwood and even more shocked when we took the old flooring to the dump and discovered that it weighed over 1000 kilograms!

Well, the kitchen wasn't so different.  Under the ceramic tile was a layer of even uglier ceramic tile.  Under that was a layer of peel and stick tile.  Under that was a layer of the nastiest looking subfloor I have ever seen.  Under that were some random boards nailed throughout the room... perhaps to ensure that the floor was nice and uneven.  Aaaannnnd the green grass grew all around all around and the green grass grew all around!

Corey managed to remove everything but it was clear that we'd need a new layer of subfloor before  we laid our new kitchen floor down to ensure a proper, even base.

It's certainly not pretty, but to us, it's a blank canvas!

The Ikea Kitchen Event Is On NOW!

...  And my Love-Hate relationship with Ikea continues.  As some of you may know, this is not our first Ikea kitchen rodeo.  When we purchased our condo, our kitchen looked like this:

And, thanks to Ikea's 2010 kitchen event (we got 15% back in gift cards and used it to buy our dining room chairs) as well as Corey's handiwork and the amazing photography skills of my real estate photographer, Thea Menagh, these next two photos show what our kitchen looked like when we sold nearly three years later.

Not bad, right?  But at the time, we were renovating to sell and I didn't want to over-renovate for the price of my unit.  For this reason, I chose the cheapest appliances and finishes I could find that would still look impressive.  Nothing was to our personal taste and we hated our splashy faucet.  Even the cabinet doors were chosen because they looked modern and were on clearance.  We gave ourselves more storage but I never really loved that kitchen.  To make matters worse, the staff at Ikea didn't give us all the cover panels and spacers we needed (They're supposed to look over your kitchen plan before placing an order) and so we ended up with a huge gap by the stove and a random drawer that we couldn't put a pull on or it would prevent another drawer from opening.  We would have ordered the spacers and cover panels but our kitchen was clearance because it was discontinued and there were none available so we just grew to tolerate our secret drawer.

Last time, we were surprised by the lack of assistance we received when we went to Ikea to plan our kitchen.  Even though we had taken room measurements, we found the process to be complicated and not entirely user friendly.  We lived with our first Ikea kitchen for years and kept a mental tally of mistakes we wouldn't make again.

When we purchased the house, we remembered that Ikea can be a great resource for renovations and the love-hate relationship quickly resumed.

We knew from the beginning that our kitchen would need to be redone and we assumed we'd do another Ikea kitchen... only with nicer appliances and finishes this time.

We had already decided that most of our wedding gift money that had not already been specified to be put towards something else, would help us with our kitchen.  We desperately need more cupboard and counter space before the baby arrives and I had wanted a grey and white kitchen.  The Inspired Room had a great inspiration photo (below) which helped me sell my idea to Corey. ;)

And so, I spent an evening planning our new kitchen on Ikea's online kitchen planner.  I knew I wanted a big apron sink (for baby's first baths) and some glass cabinet doors to display some of our pretty dishes and stemware.  We also wanted a gas cooktop with an electric oven.  Also on my list was a pantry (which will be a great feature when we eventually sell the house) and as much extra storage and counter space as we could squeeze in.  To top it off, I have longed for white quartz counters for quite some time so that is exactly what we're getting.

Hours later, we finally had a rough plan.

I even found room for a small wine rack and a tiny bit of open shelving, which used up some dead space.

After a couple of (not so quick) trips to Ikea, our order has finally been placed.  By the time Corey puts the finishing touches on our bathroom and demolishes our current kitchen, our new one should be delivered.

What would your dream kitchen include?

Bonsoir Monsieur!

One of the expenses we accepted when we purchased our new/old house is that all of the appliances were well past their life expectancy and would need to be replaced.  New appliances are expensive, and we were determined not to "cheap out" since this is going to be a long-term home for us.

Here's a brief recap:

When we moved in, the house only had a washer (no dryer) and the "laundry room" had been filled with so much stuff during our home inspection, that we told our inspector not to even bother testing that it worked.  The thing looked older than me (or at least older than Corey) and we knew we'd need a dryer right away so we decided to just buy a set.  Luckily, Lowe's was having a sale so the dryer was half price.

I never named these but they're a pair, so we can be creative.  Mary-Kate and Ashley?  Ernie and Bert? 

It was nice to finally be able to do laundry again, (... and I'm sure my mom was happy to stop doing our laundry!) but we soon realized that there was a giant elephant in the room.  This elephant took the form of a pile of dishes that reached nearly to the ceiling and swayed with the lightest breeze.  Obviously, I'm exaggerating a little, although not as much as you probably think. 

The bottom line is that we both hate doing dishes.  That's where Gunter came to the rescue.  (That's what I'm calling our new Bosch dishwasher.)  With Gunter around, we now have a little more free time after every meal.  Time for bike rides and picking wildflowers.  Better make sure you have enough sunscreen there, Gunter!

But alas, the romance with Gunter has ended, because there's a tall mysterious stranger in town, and I think he's French...

 

Enter Philippe, with his sexy French accent doors and his icy cool demeanour.  It was love at first sight... He was also on sale!

 

Here's what he said:



"Come away with me to Paris... My drawers are full of cheese, and my shelves are full of wine..." 

I glanced back at Wolfgang Gunter (oops- forgot I changed his name while I was writing this.  I thought Gunter sounded more German.) with a pang of guilt, but then he spoke again:

"Mon Cheri, I know you detest ice dispensers on ze doors.  You think it is a waste of space.  But I have a secret for you in my bottom drawer: a secret ice dispenser for all your favourite drinks.  We can make ze drinks, you will drink zem, and Gunter can clean up!"

And so we embraced.  It turns out, he really was filled with wine and cheese!

Here's a shot of our old fridge from the day we moved in:

What you can't see from this photo is the fact that many of the shelves are broken and this fridge is clearly about to die.  We're absolutely thrilled to have a new one!

Presently, our only old appliances are the microwave and stove.  If they don't die on us, they may stay until we can afford to renovate our kitchen, but at least this gives us a great head start.

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