The Kitchen Project

Apologies for the title, but I couldn’t resist. This morning, the plumber came and started his work. We thought he’d be coming Thursday, but he came today in the hopes of finishing up on Wednesday afternoon and getting his inspection on Thursday. Today he started with hooking up the water and icemaker in the fridge, and is next going to hook up the radiator and the washer, as well as the stove.

So by tonight, we’ll have ice cubes.

The builders are also installing crown moulding in the hallway outside the kitchen, installing shelving in the pantry closet, and working with the electrician to hook other things up. (Washer/Dryer, please!)

This is the week we’ve all been waiting for. All of us, even the cats. This week we get a working kitchen back. No more dishes in the bathtub, no more laundry in our tenant’s washer/dryer. No more hotplate cooking. Many many pictures to follow this week.

Wednesday: Countertops are installed in the morning.
Thursday: Sink installed. Dishwasher and Washing machine hooked up to water supply. Fridge water hooked up. Stove installed. Radiator installed.
Friday: All door handles & pulls finished. Glass shelves installed.

The tiles, alas, will not arrive for another week to week and a half, while either we or our contractor is on vacation. (I just called this morning, and they said a 3-3.5 week turn around)

We went basic, but huge. Here it is.

Single-bowl is best for us. As a baker, Greg can pile up dirty pots, utensils, and cookie sheets, and we need a place for them to soak in bulk.

The picture doesn’t accurately convey the size and depth of the sink. I think that putting the sink in the corner will turn out to be one of the most rewarding decisions we–ok, Greg–made in laying out the new kitchen.

In other news, Home Depot in Everett was a ghost town on Saturday afternoon, and Lowe’s in Saugus was scarcely doing better this evening. Four kitchen planning stations at Home Depot were manned and awaiting customers who weren’t coming. Pretty remarkable to have so many people tied to their desks, since it’s often difficult to find an employee when you’re wandering the aisles…

Edit: Added a different link. No, that’s not what Home Depot charges.

Our third gallon of paint was not sufficient to undo the damage caused by the second gallon of paint, so Greg set out to find a Benjamin Moore dealer with the top of this third, “good” gallon to match the tint.

Our Somerville dealer was closed. Our first option on a Sunday afternoon was a hardware store on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. It’s probably the priciest hardware store in the state, but it was the closest, and how much could they charge for one gallon of paint? We never found out; their machine spit out lime green in place of Marblehead Gold, and after two tries the clerk gave up.

The next stop was Warren Hardware on Tremont Street near the Boston Herald building, and Greg had better luck there. He came home and we completed the paint to our final satisfaction. As you see, we conserved by only painting areas that will be visible.

Later, we applied a second coat to the ceiling, and painted Alyssa’s name in white on a spot destined to be hidden in gratitude for the use of her camera. Greg scrubbed the paint splashes from the floor.

Oh, and we bought a faucet.

We’re ready for the cabinets.

Okay, so the story we all know has that on day 1. Billy and John didn’t have the blank canvas to start with like the more famous version of that utterance, so we’ll give them a few days slack. I came home after the gym to find Mark typing away (see On the Surface, below) and was eager to poke around and look for progress. The exterior light was fading, but it was clear, the drain pipe in the center of the room was gone! I looked around for the switches controlling bare bulbs we’d had the previous days, and they were gone. I turned around and flipped a switch. We have LIGHTS!

Most of our cans (or hats, or recessed lights) have power and bulbs in them now. The room finally has a sense of some progress away from demolition and towards build. The pipe was indeed gone, and more outlets had been placed around the room, including one for the stove, the fridge, and our network cable. The plumbers had run the line for the fridge’s water supply, and again, that big pipe was gone.

Our basement door doesn’t close well. We have to latch it. So i had Mark hold the door shut while I peeked downstairs. It was a little reminiscent of the King Tut discovery, but I grew up on that story, so “What do you see?” “Marvelous things!” is one of my favorite exchanges. Mark came down to look at things, but Phoebe managed to get the door open a few times. (The photo was her fourth trip in, since I wanted to film it.)

The second post hole had been filled in, and two temporary beams were in place. They’re just 2×4s, one buckling slightly with the jack underneath it. (That was that contraption we’d seen before that looked like a brass megaphone) The real lally columns are on the ground and will be put in place when the concrete has cured.

The plumbers have finished hooking up our drains, and have moved a few lines around to accommodate the new beam and remove some old brass pipes. We did find an old closet under the stairs. It had always had stuff in front of it, so I have stayed away from it. It’s a rather sizable closet, so we’ll have to figure out what we can store there.

The exterior work is all done with replacement shingles up. We’ll still have to paint, naturally.

Tomorrow: probably electrical and plumbing inspections. Those are both big steps, and will mean we can start to move forward with some other significant things, like floors and walls. We do have to get the floor level first.

Yesterday spoiled me. I was hoping to be wowed with something completely impossible, like a full set of drywall or half a floor or something else that isn’t likely for Day 3.

And? Nothing thrilling. A full day’s work, to be sure.

The hole in the floor that Phoebe explored has been filled. A hollow core door to the dining room has been put back up for the time being. I went down the basement and saw they’d abandoned and refilled one of the test holes for the lally column, but completed digging the other several feet deep. I assume this means we only need one support column.

I thought that was it, but when I went to wash my hands from the basement, *sputter* *splash* showed that plumbing has been done. An e-mail from our upstairs neighbor confirmed. I’m glad to get his inconvenience limited to fewer chunks.

I think we’re going to see a lot of progress today. At least I hope so. The electrician is hoping to finish up his stuff, including putting in a network connection so I can hook my laptop up in the kitchen. [Okay, so I really want to do a flat-panel touch screen monitor connected to a mini computer so I can hook into the net and manage recipes, shopping lists, music, etc. Mark said "That's sound like a nice idea. Just like having a pony."] Billy said he’s hoping to get the electrical inspection done by Friday, so things are moving nice and quickly.

The plumber is in today to finish his vent work, and re-route Craig’s water supply lines and drain. Most of that work has been done, and we were lucky to find an old vent in Craig’s closet so we could tie right into that without having to create a new hole in the roof.

In the basement, the guys are digging through the barely 2″ of concrete to set new footings for the lally columns, and they’ll work to put the beam in after all that’s done. I was assured that we do have a foundation thicker than 2″, but the builders probably conserved on concrete (read: were cheap) where they didn’t need it. Who put things in their basements in 1905, anyway? It does keep our wine nice and cool.

According to Billy, we might have walls and floor next week, then we wait for the cabinets to arrive. We’ll take that time to paint, I imagine.

Today’s pictures include: shingles on the outside, the old door (in the dumpster), some electrical work.

When everything was ripped open, I heard the plumber say something I already knew was going to be true: our sinks weren’t vented. The previous owner, a bit of a DIY disaster, was pretty cheap with his construction projects. So it was no surprise to hear that the required-by-law vents just weren’t there. What to do? Well, you have to vent up through the roof, and we’re on the first floor. So that means going up through the second floor and the attic, venting our sink and our tenant’s sink along the way.

We’re lucky there’s a staircase behind where our sink is going, and above that, a pantry, so the pipes can be routed through interior spaces without being terribly obtrusive. Then up through the roof they’ll go and we’ll be legal again.