Back from the Hiatus

I'm happy to say that even though we have not posted to the web in awhile we did manage to get a lot done. We have the kitchen to a 99.9% finish point.

Here is the way it looked in May of 2006 when we bought the house.

And here it is this past weekend.
We have also been working on getting the back hall ready for paint. The back hall needed a lot of patching I think that is where the apprentice plaster was at work the plaster is thin and brittle especially around the ceiling area so when they put up the paneling it just got destroyed.

We also removed the carpeting from the living room, dining room, and upstairs sitting room.


All of the floors were in relatively good condition however the living room and dining rooms have rug outlines in the center of the rooms which I thought may be the case considering the age of the house. We bought a rug for the living room and are waiting on the dining room for the time being. It still looks better than that carpet looked towards the end, ick!

We are in the kitchen

Well we are in the kitchen now and it's great to be able to cook on an actual stove and not have to run up and down stairs to eat. We still do not have a pantry but I'm working on fixing that. I need to finish the cabinet for the pantry.

The cabinet is going pretty well I was going to do one piece, but at 89" tall, 20" deep, and 33" wide it is a bit to large to fit in the pantry assembled and assembling it in the pantry will probably compromise it's integrity, so i chopped it in half. Now i have a 35" tall by 20" deep by 33" wide base cabinet and an upper cabinet which means that I can assemble them in the basement and just mount them to the wall when finished.

The deer have been in the Hostas which is a pain. I just need to remember to use liquid fence, it seems to keep them away, but only last a week or so.

I have some pictures of the garden and the cabinet which i will post later.



I will post pictures soon

Whoo hoo... running water!

This morning we had the plumber out to finish up the plumbing in the kitchen. We now have a working sink and a working dishwasher. The dishwasher is missing a vent so it doesn't drain the best, but that will be coming on Monday. The faucet we purchased also includes a sprayer this excites me a great deal it has been a long 2 years without one.

We also have a working dishwasher. I've never been a huge dishwasher fan but now working full time I find it difficult to be excited about spending an hour or so standing at the sink washing all the dishes by hand.
We should be in the kitchen by next weekend if we are lucky. The stove delivery will happen on Friday but we are still recruiting for people to assist us in moving the refrigerator on Saturday. If you are in the Central WI area next Saturday and have a strong back don't be shy. Other than the appliance moving we need to complete a small amount of trim, quarter round, a gas line, the pantry and that should be it. I'm still having a hard time that it's actually real. There were definitely some dark days in there days I thought that we might never ever finish.

Today well the plumber was here I got the opportunity to clean out my car. Something I haven't done since we started on this project. It's just so hard to find the motivation to do these small tasks when your weekends are all taken up by home improvement projects and traveling. After the kitchen we just need to bang out the back hall and the stairs and we should be back to living like civilized human beings.

Floor is finished

After 3 days of crawling around on the floor and the fumes oh my the fumes. Here it is all finished. This is 3 coats of Waterlox, which I think came out very well. It was pretty easy to work with albeit on a bit on the expensive side, nearly twice the price of poly . I think If we use it again the low VOC version might be worth the additional 30 bucks. All things considered I would use it again.

I am very happy with the finished product. It's rustic but I think it works for a kitchen.

Progress Report

Lots of progress to report. Chris's parents came up last weekend and did helped us with some gardening, no pictures yet. I'm trying to get Chris to post about the gardening since I hid inside sanding the floor while everyone else worked on the garden. I decided not to rent a sander so I've been doing the whole thing with a random orbital sander. I was concerned that if we rented a sander we would take off too much of the wood and that it would end up just a bit too perfect. In this whole project one of my overall goals has been to make the kitchen look like it belongs to the house.

With this goal in mind I've been going back and forth about floor finishes for quite some time. Most of our rooms still have the original shellacked floors with their nice orangey color. I toyed with the idea of doing the same in the kitchen but decided against it because of durability concerns, a kitchen is going to see a lot of water and it is very possible that alcohol may be spilled which could put the finish at risk. So then I was leaning towards doing an alcohol based stain to get a similar shade and then finishing with a water based poly I had a lot of concerns about that as well we have a lot of different boards pieced in to the floor that are a lot of different ages and I just didn't know how the different woods were going to take the stain and at this point I just don't have the heart to strip it down again and re-sand. So in the end I decided on Waterlox I think it's going to give me some of the color that I desire and it should be easily reparable but still have the durability that the poly would have given me.

I did some test areas with it this afternoon and I think it's going to work out wonderfully. Here is the sample from the stove area. The stove area is probably one of the areas in the kitchen with the most cobbled together flooring I figure if it can look good there it should look good anywhere.

Waterlox has a 12-24 hour cure time and unfortunately for us the kitchen serves not only as a kitchen but also as hallway so the plan is that I will begin starting tomorrow night at 6:00 and then do one coat each night until I'm finished. Fortunately we still have the stairs on the back of our house that used to lead up to the upstairs apartment so we should be able to avoid the room in the evenings while the finish is curing. I hope to finish up by Wednesday so the floor will have a day and a half to cure before the plumber comes Friday.

Grouted and caulked

Here is the updated pictures the tile is grouted, caulked and we got to take down all the plastic and admire it. The next and last hurdle is the floor. Wish us luck.

Grout Finished

I finished grouting the counter top and back splash last night. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. Over all the Epoxy grout was not difficult to work with, but the float is heavier than a standard grout float so by the end of Monday my hands just hurt, but the counter top was done.

The back splash was more of a pain because there was not as much room to work the grout in with the float. I ended up just using my fingers to press the grout in then I finished up with the float to clean the excess of the tile. That worked pretty well and I was able to finish up the back splash last night.

Freezing the grout does lengthen it's cure time so I used a bucket of ice water while i worked to give myself more time to grout and wash. I even froze the leftovers from Mondays work and used them on Tuesday and while the grout was a little thicker it applied nearly the same. Visually there is no difference between the epoxy grout that i froze over night and the batch that I made fresh which is very handy as the pot life the the grout is only around an hour at 70 degrees F room temperature.

Pictures to come.