The Kitchen Project

The crown moldings and bottom rails on the cabinets have been installed. The baseboard molding and last bits of the wall crown molding have been put up. We need to paint the crown molding soon, which will be a challenge as some stretches are quite inaccessible above and behind the cabinets. All of these are visible in the photo below:

All of the appliances save the dryer have arrived. We’re hoping to see the electrician and plumber next week. The dryer should arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, at which point they can cart away our old fridge.

The templater for the countertop pulled up to our house just as I was leaving for the busstop this morning. I’m looking forward to hearing from Greg how that went.

The blog has been quiet these past few days because Greg and I have escaped to Washington, D.C. for a long weekend. He’s swimming at the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics competition in College Park, Maryland and I’ve been happier than a pig in you-know-what roaming the museums. He’s trying to get another hour of sleep before his final meets today. I am up with the sun.

Last night, we met up with a friend of Greg’s from high school with whom he recently reconnected through Facebook. We walked over to his townhouse for introductions before heading over to his friends’ home for cocktails on the roofdeck. Both homes were beautifully updated and decorated from the walls to the woodwork to artwork. At the second home, I could only hold out for a minute after introductions before I had to ask the name of the paint in the stairwell adjacent to the open kitchen. It’s called Desert Tan by Benjamin Moore and it is at the top of my list for Monday’s shopping trip.

Their kitchen was darker than ours in many ways and primarily painted with a dark terra cotta, but they used this yellow as a unifying element across several floors, so we saw it in different exposures and across large expanses. We both like it and are eager to test it. The experience reassured me of the viability of painting a sizable area in a vivid color, provided the color is grounded enough to work with the cabinets.

I am underwhelmed with the Ralph Lauren test.

Only #1 and #3 are on the path to contention, and the title refers to #3, so let’s say I’m not sold yet. What I am finding is that no element is so neutral that it does not influence what is acceptable elsewhere. Here our floor, unfinished at it is, is uncomfortable alongside all but the palest yellow. But we’ll have molding, presumably painted white…

The Benjamin Moore franchise in Somerville opens at 7:00 AM so I may make a run for more colors on Monday morning.

We’re looking ahead to about 10 days of downtime between the completion of the floor and moulding and the arrival of cabinets and appliances. We’re going to paint, but we’re also hoping to stack three convex glass shelves (118371) over the sink. These will sit next to the windowed cabinets and, directly in the line of sight from the living room.

I’ve been told to keep an eye out for a birthday gift: the first contribution to the Kitchen Tchotchke Fund. Perhaps we’ll find something tasteful on the Cape in July to add some color here.

This morning, we met a friend for brunch in Wellesley at 10:30 AM, and we figured that as long as we’re out there, why not stop at the Expo Center in Burlington with our color book and our countertop and cabinet samples to identify a wall color?

If you are familiar with the geography of Boston, you know how ridiculous this sounds. If you don’t live here:

View Larger Map

Note that the label for Somerville is somewhere else. It’s just not on the way. Nonetheless, it needed to be done.

The store was deserted–I guess most fathers don’t want to look at this frou-frou stuff on their special day, or maybe it’s because of our national renovation hangover, your call–and we had plenty of time to play with the tile displays and confirm our taste in yellows for walls, if not our preference for tiles. We shifted away from the grassier tones and toward the purer, lighter yellows, while Greg is reconsidering the neutrals.

After this, we wandered back into the fan area and identified a simple three-bladed ceiling fan that is compact enough for our space and contemporary without feeling alien. I think this is it. We didn’t form a strong attachment but we do now know what we’re looking for. A center light is not essential. We lack the ceiling height and, frankly, the urbanity in our design to go with a visually adventurous centerpiece. We’re going to go to a specialty lighting store soon to look at more fans and a pendant for the sink area before we make a purchase.

Historians are warned to avoid reading consumer displays as an expression of a culture’s aspirations, but it’s fun and David Brooks got a column at the New York Times doing it, so there you go. Greg and I were surprised to see so many fans for sale in a New England store that capture the spirit of the Mandalay Bay hotel. I love that I live in a country where someone designed, and multiple marketing managers green-lighted, the Jetsons’ tennis racquet fan. There’s some serious ugly out there and no doubt some of it has found its way into our brains and will manifest itself in our kitchen. That’s all part of the process.

We went home without making any purchases, primed the walls and ceiling, and ordered testers of all the reasonable shades of yellow Ralph Lauren paints off the web to arrive by mid-week.

I told Alyssa we needed some direction in choosing a color for our walls, and she shared the good news.

It’s hard to find a color that will work with everything else when we have only small samples of the cabinet and countertop and nothing for the tiles–although the tiles go last, and can always be modified if the first three elements come together in a certain way that forces our hand. Our experiences painting the old kitchen taught us that the results can be worse than you ever imagined.

We’re looking for a yellow or gold that is neither too neutral nor too saturated, and not in the lemon or chartreuse family. I flagged some yellows and neutrals and handed the book back to Alyssa, who identified a few more yellows and browns, including one we very much like that is similar to her recommendation of Beverly Hills by Benjamin Moore. I won’t link to it, because looking at paint colors on the web is useless. Greg looked through our flags, seconded some of the yellows, and confirmed my feeling that neutral putties and creams are too bland for what we’re going for. Our plan is to go to the paint store or Home Depot and get some testers matched to colors in the book.

We are responsible for the painting. We prime this Sunday, and I think we’ll be able to start testing colors on the huge wall in the evenings next week after Billy and John have gone home. They’re working on molding and floors during the day.

Billy called us last night to let us know they’d see us Monday. The plaster is all done (and looks great) and we can start priming the walls on Sunday. In the mean time, we just let the plaster dry. I was sure the plaster process was going to be one of much more dust. I’ve always heard it was the worst part, since sanding it down can create clouds of the stuff. We seem to be in much better shape than I’d imagined.

As Mark mentioned, there was only one area of the floor with a little plaster dust on it. We should have hung sheets up earlier to contain the demolition dust. Lesson learned. Putting in the oak floor may raise some sawdust, but I don’t expect it will be nearly as bad as what we’ve been through.

One weird consequence of the new plaster: the kitchen echoes. Phoebe’s meows to get into the basement are amplified by bouncing off of the newly smooth walls, and my recent sneeze had a short follow-up a la echo canyon.

The walls have been plastered. The entry to the hallway, which was shredded when we left this morning, has been squared off and smoothed over.

Greg hung sheets to contain the dust this morning and we closed all of the doors we could close. There’s only a bit of a plume on the floor by the entry, and that was an actual workspace, so what else would you expect?

Another good day.

It’s hard to believe the photos in the entry below were taken this morning. Nearly all of the blue board is up and we have a true sense of the room. We’ve effective doubled the working space of the old kitchen. I’ve seen it on paper for years but could not appreciate the change until now. Viewed from the dining room, the space is enormous; from the hallway, not as dramatic a change, but still evident. The ceiling is high.

A challenge: the interior wall leading to the back porch goes on and on and we have no cabinets planned for the surface. At the very least, it will need to have some decoration.

Whatever we do has to be shallow and close to the wall for two major reasons. First, a cabinet or built-in ironing board would feel tacked on and naked because the space is just too big for any scattershot solutions. Second, we don’t want to interfere with the sight lines down the hallway or clutter the space.

Greg is considering restoring our old spice rack to its spot. We shall see.

Mark mentioned in his weekend update that the guys were putting the insulation in. I had them insulate the ceiling as well, partially for sound reasons. These old houses squeak a bit, and horsehair plaster is pretty good about masking sounds. Drywall is easier to put up, but it doesn’t block sound as well. On the exterior walls, they put up a vapor barrier tyvek plastic sheeting.

I stuck around this morning to take pictures of the plastic sheeting for the inspector to see. Apparently he asked for a picture so he could have it with his records. I felt bad for our guys today, with all the extra dust and fibers flying around. They were wearing masks, and it was already really hot and humid. We left the A/C on in the front of the house since it’s over 90 degrees today. I didn’t want anyone keeling over in the heat. They were a little giddy during the process… I’ll blame it on lack of oxygen.