Kitchen Remodel (And Not Quite Dead Yet)

Hey ya'll!

If you're thinking "Man, where did Garry go?" well, two things. #1 - Work got crazy. #2 - I embarked on a somewhat insane kitchen remodel. Said remodeling job soaked up all of my spare time since about Memorial Day, and it's not totally done but all systems are now functional.

I'll get organized and share pics of the progress in here.

First, the story and why we're doing this. It all started one day about two years ago when I was cooking pan seared chicken and kept setting off the fire alarm. Now - whoever lived here before built this kitchen and they were kind of an idiot because there is NO VENTILATION ON THE RANGE.

So then we thought, hmmm, we should ventilate this. However, there's a cathedral ceiling in the room and the range is on an island. So we're either doing a very large stack type hood or we need to move the range. So then I started playing with ideas and realized that if the range moved, the sink had to move, etc. etc.

I realized I was out of my element and also know that this kind of stuff wasn't in my wheelhouse so I engaged with a designer to make sure that we're coming up with a viable plan that is engineered well and technically feasible.

So off we go to design land and had some really interesting conversations (and yeah my wife cooks a ton and had a lot of opinions). Big problems with a lot of the design options were that we either had to sacrifice windows, doors or cut into the living room. Anyway, we finally found a design we were happy with and committed.

As far as who did what - I have champagne tastes on a beer budget. I decided to make some investments in really good cabinets, professional design, and cabinet install. I handled all the demo, disposal, electrical, finish plumbing, and fine carpentry. It ended up working out well, as you'll see there was some engineering required outside of my skillset and allowable time!

Not to be a tease, but it's late. I'll share a before picture and a pic of the rendering of the plan, and then fill in the progress on this thread until I get to present day.

 

Haha - yeah I wish! I have about 2-3 more cord to split, gotta get crakin' but I"ve been doing nothing but finish carpentry! Here's a few more pics of hte early stages of the project...

First is our "temp kitchen" - basically jammed everything we would need to survive on a shelf.
Second is the "circle of death". Plumbing, natural gas, and electric all in one spot haha. Things like this - no big deal but take a ton of time and I had to re-engineer everything since we moved everything in the room.
Third was the old kitchen - I sold them on Facebook for over a grand! Definitely helped subsidize all the other work I was about to embark on...

 

More shots of demo, flooring arrived, and opened up the ceiling to do some work to move the natural gas. I put a union in when I ran the line initially which made the job to move it pretty easy. I prefer to run black pipe right to the appliance, not a fan of the flexi stuff. Ran 1" trunk because that one run powers the range (up to 150K BTU) + clothes dryer + natural gas grill on back deck.

For floor - went with solid unfinished maple. Hired a guy to install and finish (and they were GREAT). Maple was chosen because 1) I love wood, duh. 2) the rest of the house has the same stuff.

 

Flooring is installed, bought some sticks, and reframed new wall for bathroom. Expanded the bathroom by 12" so there will be room for a tub. Hole in the top is for a window to let more light in.

Put "Ram Board" down on top of new floor to protect it during the madness to come.

 

Cabinet delivery!

 

Love the floor! How wide are the planks?

I like how the project is evoling into a bathroom remodel too!
The yellow gas line I "think" can't remember is code to run to an appliance.

We lived out of one room re doing our house! Brings back memories! Microwave and take out!

 

Floor is 4" wide. Code here is black pipe to the appliance location with a shutoff available at the appliance followed by flex pipe from the stub into the appliance. I don't see too much track pipe up here, although I was told it meets code in certain situations. I've done so much black pipe I stuck with what I know and it's undoubtably the most robust form of transport IMO.

Yes - bathroom was a part of it, that's "phase 2". Had to move the wall during phase 1 though since there was power & vent pipes that had to move. I'll hack away at the bathroom in the months to come I'm sure.

 

I didn't do the install on the floor - I subcontracted it out. FWIW it was $9/square foot for the materials, installed and finished. They had this monster sanding machine with a 20HP vacuum which sucks up 99.999% of the dust. Worth its weight in gold.

 

1st Cabinet Mockup. The Kitchen had three anchor elements. One was this cabinet we bought at a historical salvage yard. Two was the Viking range (I didn't buy the stove it was in the house when we moved there, but it's a treasure). 3 will be a surprise for a later post..

 

Ok - final update for today. This was around mid June.

Started electrical upgrades including a 4 gang light switch inside a cabinet, and the carpenters fit the first few cabinets and got the pantry mostly together.

 

Ok continuing the journey - the next big journey was the wall that the kitchen was moving to. I mentioned Anchor point #3 above and the plan was that we had to remove a big window (3X5') which means we lose a TON of glass. The room's already dark since it faces north.

So we decided we'd kill two birds with one stone and solve the light problem, and the backsplash problem at the same time by using.... GLASS BLOCK!

I wanted an uninterrupted span so we had some serious header-ing to do. Also got the pantry cabinets installed.

 

Here's the updates from the post above - pantry, and the layout for the new kitchen wall, and demo day 1 of the wall with the header installed.

 

So now that there's a big hole in the wall, we started with electrical planning. I had exactly one day to design and install all the wires, as they were planning on closing up the wall. Thankfully (spoiler alert) - everything worked!

So I had to run 3 circuits into the wall, two power circuits and one lighting circuit, with a few switched legs on it. Always fun. Also ran a feeder wire for a fan sensor since if you install a legit range hood, you need a make up air unit to open to avoid pulling a vacuum on your house (negative pressure = carbon monoxide and/or smoke getting pulled out of the woodstove).

You can laugh at my plan- I'm no electrician, but I know enough to be dangerous. And yeah, I don't/didn't bury any junction boxes or anything dumb like that. Then the team came back in and closed up the wall and started installing more base cabinets.

 

Annnd we have a HOLE! And the hole's full of glass block. AND the glass is also installed in the pantry cabinets. GETTING THERE!

 

Interesting idea with the glass block backsplash. How does it look from the outside?

 

Trimmed it out to match everything else - generally matches because all the windows on our house have the faux grills on them.