Emerging from hibernation

I smelled fresh cut grass yesterday on a short walk outside, which must mean that it's time to wake up the blog and all the house/yard projects. I wish I could say that we spent the winter painting or re-arranging or decorating or doing anything besides sitting on our rears, but alas. We needed a nice long break from home improvement.

But, we're back! And after hopping around all winter trying to get boots on and off, we decided to put some time and effort into cabinetry for the mudroom. I think we needed a break from Ikea, too, because going back after a looooong absence wasn't as painful as we were expecting. Their showroom had a nice butler's pantry/mud room set up, using a new dimension of wall cabinetry (18"x30") as base cabinets with a counter on top for a nice bench surface. Given that this is a relatively private room in the house -- we're pretty much the only ones who ever see or use it -- a less expensive, but still totally functional solution appealed to us.


We need to thank our friend Larry for coming over and helping us maneuver heavy flat-pack boxes in and around the yard. (Tai cracked a couple of ribs in a ski accident a few weeks ago, so moving some of the bigger stuff was pretty painful for him.) Nice-ish weather meant an expanded work area.

And, of course, I have no "before" pictures. Just imagine an enormous pile of dirty shoes, framed with a random tall cabinet (reject from the kitchen), our stash of grocery bags, and a ski boot or four. Our dimensions didn't exactly match Ikea's, so Tai hacked together an end piece that fits quite nicely.

 

 Wouldn't be a project without a little pain, or in this case, a drywall gouge on an otherwise mint wall.

 

We are very pleased with the look. We had debated going with a more expensive countertop or door option, but this seems to fit our house just perfectly and actually looks like the much more expensive white doors we passed on.

(And of course those are my shoes still on the floor. Tai hasn't trained me yet.)
And if we can ever get the Flor website to cooperate, we may have some rugs to show you in the next week or so...

Closets and Organization

In the hustle to finish the house at the end of last year, building out the closets in the 2 smaller bedrooms ended up being pretty low on the priority list of things to do in order to move in. When we moved in though, that meant that a lot of things didn't have a place to go. Both rooms ended up becoming the limbo where all of those things went.

After a couple of months of always wondering where things were and feeling a little frustrated that even though we now have twice as much living space as we have ever had, we didn't have place for all of our things I spent the last 3 Saturdays working on building out the closets.

I was able to use unused shelving from our Ikea cabinets from the house and from our previous condo for shelving in the closets and I was also able to reclaim some shelving that my Dad had taken out of his house a couple of years ago. I used paint we already had so the only expense and new product I had to buy was the shelf rail material. Both closets cost me a total of about $50. Had we bought a pre-fab closet product from a hardware store it would cost at least 4 times as much. Though it would have taken much less time. Since I have more time than money these days it was a good trade off. Plus I felt good about reusing things that would have just ended up in a land fill otherwise.

They are not as refined as perhaps they could be, but since they are in a closet I think I will be able to overlook some of the rougher details.

A big part of the clutter in the rooms were boxes and boxes of books that we had no place for so we went to Ikea and got a couple of Billy bookshelves and installed them on the landing.

It really gives the landing upstairs a much more lived in feel, which is nice.

Glut of Photos

We've been in the house for a few weeks now and are still working on getting things put away and completely finished, but we are loving it and it instantly felt like home. We haven't really taken any photos since we moved in, but here are a bunch of photos taken from mid November to mid December that shows the process.

So Tired

I haven't updated in awhile because I have been crazy busy working on the house. I am doing most of the interior finish work so since I last posted I have spent more hours than I can count finishing the and grouting tile, installing the bamboo floor, putting up base board, installing cabinets etc etc etc... My dad has been great, putting in many late nights with me and my brothers in law were really helpful getting a lot of the bamboo down two Saturdays ago.

The metal siding is almost done outside, most of our exterior concrete is in and most of the final grading has been done as well. We are really closing in on this.

Here are a bunch of photos that I'm too tired to narrate, so hopefully they tell the story pretty well on their own.

Kitchen and other finishing touches

I've been really busy working at the house. This last week I took a break from tiling to work on the kitchen. We assembled the cabinets on Saturday and Monday night I started to hang them. My dad came and helped me Monday night and we were able to hang most of the upper cabinets. Shortly after he left at 9:00 I realized that in my haste to get going, I skipped a step and we ended up hanging all the uppers about 5/8 of an inch too high. Not wanting to lose a day, I took them all down and re-hung them at the correct height. I finished around mid-night, which would set the tone for the rest of the week. Late nights. Kersten also started painting this week and got the mud room, office and master bedroom painted. If you've seen the pictures of our other places, you'll recognize some of the colors, but they work and we really like bright colors for accents. My brother Quinn came by on Saturday and helped her paint while I continued to work on the kitchen and picked up bamboo flooring. It was also nice to have some help unloading the 29 boxes of bamboo.

The metal siding also started in earnest on Friday and by Saturday afternoon much of the south side was up. I'm really excited and think it will look great. They also started prepping for the outside concrete, starting with the sloped entrance to the front door. It will have retaining walls on the sides to keep snow melt and rain from easily making its way to our front door. We have a drain in there as well to handle any water that does make its way towards the house.

Here are some pictures of what's happened the last week:

Early kitchen sketches

Here are a few sketches Tai did of a kitchen layout:


He drew these using Ikea dimensions and products — we have an Ikea kitchen now and are pretty pleased with the way it came together. Pleased enough, actually, that we're planning on using their cabinetry and few of their details again.

We're still working on those contract details and trying to get as much information about the lot as possible before we go to Australia. (So, yes, we're stalling on the posting!)

Haiku in honor of L'element

Traditional (5-7-5)

You were the greatest
investment we didn't know
we needed to make


We could not believe
Ikea cab'nets fit so
well, until we saw.


Modified

To the bamboo floor
you huffed, "eh, bring it on,"
but your tires rode low.


Free form

Your clean lines evoke minimalism,
but so many people shirk
from your boxiness.


You were cheap and easy —
the only cheap and easy thing
about this remodel.

It took a few minutes to sink in

We're adding quite a bit of storage to this kitchen by ripping out a pantry closet and adding space where a pass-through between the living room and kitchen used to be. When Tai and his father worked on framing and adding drywall to that corner of the kitchen, they specifically measured out a spot for a tall Ikea cabinet that we knew would add a lot of space to a tight room.


Fast forward a month. As Tai tries to muscle the cabinet into the cubby hole, it's apparent that something is horribly, horribly wrong. The space was built to be 30" wide and the cabinet is 29 7/8" wide, so it was too tight and the old wall on the right not being square made for an impossible fit.


The sad solution was to pull off the new drywall freeing up about 1/2", shove the cabinet in there and hope that we'll have time to repair the damage before moving in.



Lesson learned? Always leave a little room to maneuver.

An angel named Becky

We hit a snag in our enthusiasm last week and decided to spend a couple of nights shopping for stuff for the condo instead of killing our knees with more baseboard work. After we hit up a few places (I can offer solid recommendations for inexpensive Salt Lake-area appliance shopping now, fyi), we ended up at Lowe's in Murray on a lark. We never go there; we try to avoid shopping in suburbia in general.

We are reformed. Because of this woman:


...who is the friendliest, kindest appliance saleswoman we have met. Such a joy. Also? She sold us a kitchen oven/stove combo for one-third of its retail price, meaning that we got a stove worth three times our budget.


We bought a microwave-hood and a dishwasher from her, too. The microwave-hood combination came with a little snack:


It's all beginning to come together quite nicely.


As you can see, part of what we worked on this weekend was putting doors on the cabinets. The color is off in these pictures because the doors come with a protective layer of plastic. Once you remove the plastic, you have to immediately wash the doors and then let them "cure" for 24 hours without touching them. That will be the last thing we do before putting on the handles.


But the kitchen is really starting to look like a real kitchen.

Countdown

I'm putting this out there to hold myself to it: we want to move in on Dec. 15. That's two weeks from tomorrow.

In those two weeks, we need to do the following:

Install and paint baseboards, paint door trim, install kitchen cabinet doors, install kitchen trim pieces to match cabinet doors, build and install a concrete kitchen countertop, install a kitchen sink, install a kitchen sink disposal, install a kitchen tile backsplash, reseal the tile, build living room bookshelves and fireplace cover, install window coverings, find a plumber and get a washer drain line hooked up to finish the washer-dryer nook, purchase and install a refrigerator, install a bathroom sink and cabinet, install a bathroom mirror, find and install a bathroom light, paint interior of hall linen closet, install hall linen closet doors, install closet shelving systems in two rooms, touch up living room paint, paint inside of living room coat closet, rehang remaining doors, install new doorknobs, find and install kitchen lights, put up a shower rod, install a bathroom fan cover, saw off and cover the toilet floor bolts, caulk baseboard, install threshold pieces between bamboo and tile flooring, replace the bedroom ceiling fan with something better looking, and clean everything.

Oh my.

Cabinets the Ikea way

Now that the flooring is in, our attention has turned to the kitchen. The Monday before Thanksgiving we spent the evening in the deep recesses of a gigantic blue building in Draper where we picked out the different cabinet pieces we needed to make our kitchen. About 3 hours later, the Element was absolutely loaded to the hilt with flat-packed cabinets and we were on our way to having a kitchen.


Tuesday evening Kersten's brother Daniel and his wife Lacy were kind enough to come up from Provo and help us assemble the cabinets.


After an entire evening, and a trip back to Ikea to replace a tall cabinet that came pre-shattered, we had our cabinets assembled.


Wednesday evening after work I set out to install the cabinets, starting with the upper cabinets. Given the fact that there are no right angles in the kitchen, it took some time and a lot of fine tuning to get them installed just right and leveled.



Thursday we took the day off to consume the traditional Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes but we were back at it Friday and Saturday.

After the upper cabinets were installed it was time to get going on the base cabinets.


The sink base cabinet was especially fun because the plumbing comes out of the wall in exactly the wrong place, so I had to do a bit of work with the jig saw and then reinforcing everything.


We picked up the cabinet doors last night and this weekend I am going to start working on the counter top (more to come on that later). Things are starting to feel like this could be a home someday.

Cheap and Swedish

My mother refused to help us remodel until we could provide a functioning bathroom — you know that I'm excited about the toilet since I've already done two posts about it (maybe it goes in tonight?), but here's what we're planning on for the vanity and sink:


And here's what we're thinking of for the faucet:


This setup appeals for us for a couple of reasons: one, it's IKEA which means that it looks decent for not a lot of money, and two, the sink eliminates any need for a separate bathroom countertop. I'm relieved because the idea of having to come up with a few square feet of bathroom countertop was giving me a headache (for instance, does it match the kitchen? if so, is it worth it to do concrete in the bathroom? if not, what do we get that looks good but doesn't cost a fortune?, etc.).

Kitchen

So, the kitchen for the place we are buying needs a little work. And by a little work, I mean that it needs to be ripped out.

The layout is not that great and it is, well, ugly. It feels so cramped and chopped up as it currently is. Here are a couple of photos of the kitchen now.




So, what we want to do is open up the kitchen a little bit. This is a hard task because it is a small space, but we want to take out the island and wrap the kitchen in an L around the wall. We will lose a little bit of the dining area to do so, but I would rather have a more comfortable place to cook and in a 950 square foot condo, you probably don't need a gigantic dining room.

Here are some renderings of what we would like to do using the Ikea cabinets that Kersten mentioned earlier in the blog.




The tile back splash in the rendering isn't exactly what we want to do, but it was the only texture option I had in my rendering program. We would likely do something like this: