Kitchen Renovation - Part 2/10

This update is about the ongoing saga of choosing the right granite for our kitchen. If you want nice granite for your renovation, be prepared to get pushy (and wear proper footwear at all times)! We were looking at granite in a couple of different places, including our cabinet store, another renovation place across the street, several tile and granite stores, and a wholesale distributor called "Terico". Terico has the cheapest prices by far, but they also carry very nice and unique granite. You just have to be lucky enough to get the good stuff while it lasts, and don't expect any hand-holding from the staff there. There all a bunch of grumpy dudes (including the woman running the joint). I think it might have something to do with the fact that they open at 5:45am every morning. Yup, 5:45am! I'm usually in the middle of my last or hopefully second to last REM cycle at that hour... I'm sure there's a medical link between jerk personalities and lack of REM sleep... accentuated by inhaling granite dust all day.
Anyway, Terico had 2 slabs of a really nice granite called "Shalimar Gold". It was the nicest one I saw out of everything we had seen so far, so I was pretty set on getting it for our kitchen. However, the granite gods were having fun at our expense because although the slabs were 1 foot longer than the typical length (typical 8 feet), we were short by exactly 1 foot of granite. I tried a bunch of other granite yards near Terico, and throughout the South Bay but very few people carry that particular type. It turned out that Terico did have another piece in stock, which was on hold for someone else, but yada yada yada we ended up getting that piece too. YAY! How has my life done such a 180 that getting 3 pieces of matching granite makes my day?

The toilet seat is always up

I've come to the realization that I'm the only girl that's been inside this house for the last month. As I said, the toilet seat is almost always up. :) One day, Jai said there were 7 contractors here at once. That's 8 males in 1620 sq feet. There were a few guys for the skylight, our kitchen contractor, the wall texture guys and the fireplace guys picking up their broken bricks.
I'm making a tiny breakthrough for female-kind though. I've whipped out my Body Shop scented oil burner to get the scent of orange-passion-mango-fruitiness in the air. I've also purchased a big Flokati rug for our master bedroom (although it's possibly too big so I might re-sell it). And in the tiny bathroom that we've been using I've still managed to line the single shelf with 5 types of moisturizer (sunscreen included). :)

Kitchen Renovation - Part 1/25

It feels like there'll be 25 blog posts for the kitchen renovation alone, but I've probably missed 10 writing opportunities already, so maybe not.

We hired a contractor for the kitchen that came highly recommended by my manager and another co-worker who used him for cabinet work in the past. Being engineers, they were impressed that our contractor (Mike) seemed to have an above-average level of skill and competence when it came to their renovation questions. He's definitely proven to be a resourceful guy since our kitchen is not an easy fix. We hired Mike to demolish the existing cabinets and counters and haul that junk away. All the old appliances were built into the cabinetry so those had to be hauled away and removed too. After doing the demo, we learned that the original owners made two gaping holes in the kitchenette drywall, which they didn't fix, they just covered over with a giant wood cabinet. They also installed a pipe going towards the fridge (possibly for an ice maker hookup?) that was never used for anything, but was slowly dripping water onto the floor and down to the subfloor. That bumped up our quote for the job because Mike had to cut away the rotten floor and put in a new subfloor to support the porcelain tiles we want.

We also had an electric stovetop installed previously, but I want a gas freestanding range instead. We were expecting to have Mike run a gas line over to the stove area, but it turned out that there was already a gas hookup there. I guess they had a gas stove before the electric one... or just set things up for the future like the leaky water pipe. Hmm... note to self: check for gas leaks in that pipe.

The floor was another interesting discovery. We had yellow linoleum (obviously the most flattering colour for linoleum) in the kitchen and kitchenette area that we got Mike to take out. He discovered that the linoleum wasn't put down on the subfloor, but on an original floor of tiles. I guess we could have put our tiles on the linoleum and made a nice little tile-lino-tile sandwich, but that would have made the step up from the non-tiled areas even higher than it's going to be. :)

Our cabinets arrived a few days ago and have been occupying every free square foot of space we have in the garage, living room and family room. The cabinets look so much bigger when they're on the floor in individual pieces than when they're hung on the wall. Today Mike hung a couple of them up, and installed our microwave/range hood combo.

The appliances are a whole other story and probably should have their own post. On that note I'm going to wrap this up and save the appliance research for the next post. :)

It's just painting... or is it?

The original texture of our wall was a pretty old-fashioned look called "skip trowel" I believe, but just imagine the look of a dry, ashy elbow. As attractive as that sounds, it didn't look that great to us, so we got quotes to make the walls "smooth". Making a rough texture smooth is as the locals say, hellllllla expensive, so we opted for a less expensive but still nice look, "orange peel".

The texture guys basically sanded, then applied plaster to all the walls and ceilings of the house, over about 3 days. I unfortunately didn't get a picture of it, but apparently the main guy was wearing these stilt-like things to reach the ceiling. He brought his son to help him out too and he was a cute little 10 or 12 year old. It was nice that he was helping his dad but I felt bad that he fell off a ladder one day. :( He came back the next day so I guess he wasn't put off from the experience. After letting the plaster dry completely, the guys sprayed the walls and ceilings with a machine called a "hopper" that blew flecks of plaster onto the walls to create the "orange peel" effect.

Jai spent lots of time and $$$ at the local Benjamin Moore paint dealer, getting paint, primer, brushes, rollers, tape and other little things for the big job of painting each room. We were going to get a painter but he sort of flaked and we felt that painting was something we could do ourselves (i.e. Jai would do it all during the week instead of waiting for the weekend so I could help him!). The first application of primer on the texture was the hardest because the texture was pretty sandpaper-like and didn't allow for a smooth spreading of the paint over the surface like a painted wall would. Poor Jai has been randomly sporting white paint flecks all over his hair, face, arms and hands for a week. Oh, before I forget to mention it, the tenants living in the house used to smoke so there were smoky, gray areas at the tops of the walls. I used a mixture of water and TSP to clean the walls before the plaster was put on. I probably didn't have to do that for the plastering, but it's a good idea before painting/priming.

Last Sat we finished painting the first room, which we carefully taped off, and painted together. Paint dries really quickly (these days anyway) so we had to keep moving quickly to make sure we always kept an even coat on the wall. Jai used the roller while I painted the corners and edges and tried frantically to wipe out our mistake smudges on the ceiling or trim. There's no "undo" button when it comes to paint. :|

Lastly, we pulled up the carpet in the first room (future office) and anxiously awaited our first glimpse at the condition of the hardwood underneath. The floor in the office wasn't too bad. We're not re-finishing the floors yet because of the cost and other projects going on right now. With the dust generated from the refinishing we'd have to move out for three days. The worst part of pulling up the carpet was the burden of pulling out the nails and staples from the floor afterwards. The carpet installers were apparently worried that the carpet would spontaneously decide to get up and walk out the door if they didn't put 1000 staples and an equally insane number of nails to attach it to the hardwood floor underneath. Have I mentioned how annoying some of the design decisions of the previous owners have been?
This is the ongoing list:
1. Nailing carpet to the hardwood floor
2. Putting an impenetrable metal grate over the family room window with one-way bolts that can't be drilled out
3. Making the hinges on the side garage door on the outside
4. Putting up a second antenna and tying it to a gas line
5. Planting 9 trees in a small backyard, including one that blocked almost all the preciously needed sunlight to the master bedroom
6. Making two gaping holes in the drywall of the kitchenette and covering them up with a big ugly cabinet
7. Putting linoleum over the original kitchen tiles
8. Gluing bookcases to the dining room wall
9. Intentionally making the family room fireplace monstrosity
10. Making a random water pipe in the kitchen that didn't go anywhere but continuously leaked water for years and created a soft water-damaged area in the kitchen.
11. Building in all the appliances into the cabinetry... including the world's oldest microwave! I'll have to post a pic if I have one.

Whew, too much complaining... don't worry, still happy with our house! :)

Love in the time of Cholera

That's what Jai calls our current experience in our house. Neither of us has seen the movie or read the book so we have no idea what "Love in the time of Cholera" really is, but this feels like what we think it might be. There's a giant hole in our kitchen floor because of some ongoing water damage in the corner where the fridge was. The whole house is covered in dust from the wall texture guys. The side yard has tons of broken bricks and stones and shingles and cabinetry and doors. The family room floor is covered in a layer of popcorn ceiling plaster and also has a bunch of tools, cabinets, air duct grates and boxes of plaster. The garage is crammed with tools, our stuff, tiles, cabinets and our mini makeshift kitchen. The fridge is in the living room covered in a tarp and there's a half-cut tree in the backyard. :S
Yup, Love in the time of Cholera. :) But that shows that we're still in somewhat high spirits. We're still in love with the house and of course in love and happy with each other so we'll get through this crazy week. In the last two and a half weeks we've accomplished a lot already. We fumigated, took down two antennas, cleared more than half the growth in the backyard, planted flowers in the front, mowed the front lawn three times, scraped the popcorn ceiling from the family room, had the bookshelves and bar removed from the family room, tore down a fireplace and walled over it, plastered the whole house, textured half the house, fully painted one room, pulled the carpet out from that room and removed all the nails and staples, put in a skylight, tore out all the kitchen appliances and cabinets, made lots of meals without a kitchen and managed not to piss off our neighbours with all the traffic and noise.

There's a big hole in the roof... but we put it there

We put in a skylight in the kitchen this week. Actually, a big dude who looked like a Mexican rapper (and turned out to be a part time DJ) put the skylight in. Since our house is over 50 years old, it doesn't have much of that fancy, newfangled feature in modern homes, called sunlight. We have exactly one window per room. It doesn't matter if the room has two exterior walls. It will only have one window, caked in calcium, per room. Here are some pictures of the skylight installation. The new skylight helps SO much in terms of brightening up the kitchen. We're considering more or possible solar tunnels which have helped some of our neighbours a lot too.

1. This is the ceiling in the kitchen before the skylight. There's a giant fluorescent blob for a light there.


2. After the light was taken out and the first holes were made into the ceiling
3. Exposing the first attic beam

4. The messy kitchen after the drywall and roof were cut

5. The wood frame for the skylight which has to go all the way up to the slanted roof

6. The radio the skylight guy listened to

7. The actual skylight before installation

8. The skylight being put into place from the roof

9. The skylight from the roof of the house
10. The view from below after the frame was drywalled

Bye bye tacky fireplace! Hello emphysema

The biggest event of the weekend was the monster job of removing the fireplace in the family room. Jai found a couple of masons to jack hammer it to pieces for ten hours on Sunday. The house was incredibly dusty all day long. It was great having it gone, but the main guy doing the work looked like he emerged from the deepest coal mine in the middle of a WW2 war zone while an earthquake was going on. He was the dustiest thing I've ever seen. Even his eyelashes were full of dust! I felt kinda sorry when looking at him, but I guess that's his job. Actually his job is usually to build fireplaces for people. I don't think he fully knew what he bargained for when he agreed to tear out our monstrosity. It was really like two fireplaces in one. There was already a normal brick fireplace in place UNDER the giant stone thing they built up to the ceiling. That must have been a kick in the pants. Like in a cartoon where a guy struggles to get to the top of a hill and the clouds clear out and you see that the hill really goes on for another 10 miles. BTW that's exactly how climbing Half Dome felt the first time.

Here are some pics from the demolition.

My cute neighbourhood

There were a couple of fun moments this weekend that made me really thankful (again) for moving to our particular block. Honestly, when we were looking at houses, if you walked into this house with all the junk the previous occupants had in there, you'd think we were crazy for buying it. But the neighbourhood is what really sold us on the place. For instance, I was working in the front yard on Sat afternoon when I heard an ice cream truck in the distance. Maybe it's because I haven't lived in suburbia for a long time, but I thought ice cream trucks were a thing of the past, like analog TV and rotary phones. I think the last time I saw an ice cream truck in my parent's neighbourhood, we had both those things (but that's not saying much since they probably still do). It turned out that the ice cream truck driver was a super nice Indian uncle who gave me my ice cream for free and offered to help us with the repair work! Those annoying Saturday morning language classes finally paid off in life. While getting the ice cream I met our neighbour from two houses down who Jai and I hung out with for 6 hours on Sat night.

On Sunday, Mike and Thu stopped by to check out the action and see the house. Our neighbour's kids pulled up with a wagon, selling lemonade by the glass for 25 cents. It was incredibly cute! I love how those kids spend the weekends doing things outside instead of watching TV.








The neighbours we hung out with the night before also came by to check out the crazy demolition going on inside our house. I got the job of dog sitting for a couple of minutes while they were inside. The dog with the blue collar is actually a "puppy"! The big one weighs almost 160lbs. I'm glad the dogs were well-behaved because I can't afford to pull a shoulder out of its socket until after the house is renovated. :)

All about the lawn

So like I said a few posts ago, I can't write up one entry about the weekend because there were too many parallel, unrelated things going on. This post is all about the lawn. A whole blog entry about grass? Oh, my friend, lawn is more than just a square of grass. As we observed early on, people on our block LOVE a nice clean lawn. Last weekend, even after a long ordeal of moving and unpacking, we decided to pick up a lawn mower on Sun night because we didn't want to piss off anyone with our crappy yard. Part of the motivation was fueled by the fact that one of our neighbours mowed it for us the week before... SO we're pretty sure a neat lawn is a big deal around here.

We decided to start off with buying a gas mower from Craigslist for $80. Jai found a great deal from a guy in San Jose who buys broken mowers and fixes them up for a profit. He apparently had a whole showcase of various types of mowers in his backyard. I'm glad someone out there is making use of the stuff that the rest of us throw away. I feel a little guilty now for throwing away a half-broken pair of sunglasses last summer. There's a pirate out there who could be benefitting from the UV protection of that perfectly fine remaining lens. This picture shows the effect of Jai's mower and manpower on the back yard. Pictures can't convey the improvement over the jungle mess it was before.

I went on my own mission with the front yard, but the results were less visible. I noticed a couple of snails in the flower bed, so Sat afternoon I set out to completely clear the front planter box and sprinkle some snail repellent in the box.

It started out looking like it would be an easy job, but as usual, I underestimated the effort it would take to uproot anything in this house's garden. The first obstacle to get over, was the grossness factor of everything. Snails aren't as scary as bugs since they're pretty smooth and slow (FYI, in my scientific opinion, scariness of a bug depends on its number of legs, number of antennae, wings, speed and size). So snails are pretty benign in these categories. But man, that planter box is FULL of earwigs... I forgot to mention that pincher-things are another scary bug feature. There were lots of spiders and centipedes too. EVEN THE PLANTS were a little freaky. Like look at this picture of a weird bulby, plasticy plant in the corner of the box. What planet is that thing from??

The bugs in the box and the hornets (again!) were driving me crazy so I equipped myself with my weapons of mass insect destruction, and sprayed all around the house. I don't consider myself a sadist, but after an afternoon of running away from hornets and doing my "Ew, ew, ew" dance if a spider touched me, I felt a warm glow if my insecticide spray ever actually landed on a bug. I hope no environmentalists are reading this. Don't worry, I'm sure the army of bugs is much stronger than my wimpy bug spray. So just let me have this one! BTW, that hornet trap in the picture didn't do a thing! It only attracted a couple of small centipedes. I don't know what Mother Nature's answer to controlling the wasp/hornet population is. Should I buy a couple of frogs? Or do birds eat them? If anyone knows how to get rid of hornets, tell me!

After a weekend of careful pruning along the edges and clearing out the box, we had a nice, neat appearance.... that will last for exactly two days I'm sure. :S

Good ol' ghetto

Here's a photo sampling of how we've been living for a little over a week. Since we're basically gutting the place, we can't really spread out into the bedrooms yet. The kitchen appliances are all broken, except the fridge (thankfully), so I'm making semi-gourmet meals from a convection toaster oven, hot plate and a microwave. We didn't have a can opener so Jai used a Dremel to open up a can of tomato paste for me. I made sure to only use the stuff in the middle of the can.

Now that I think of it, we've still managed to have some decent meals with just those three. We had soy-ginger teriyaki chicken skewers one night, chicken tikka masala another night, homemade tomato sauce with pasta and veggie fajitas yesterday. I even made cake in a 9 inch pan in the toaster oven! What can I say? My man eats well. :)

Up until yesterday we were also sleeping on a mattress on the family room floor, along with our entertainment system (AKA Jai's desktop computer) and our living room furniture (i.e. a lumpy old loveseat and my nightstand doubling as a coffee table).

Our "closet" is in the garage, and is made up of my 2 little bookshelves stacked up, with a sheet covering them to prevent dust from blowing in. Like I was telling Thu earlier, it feels like we've been camping for a week, because there's the same feeling of having to set up camp when you want to cook, and having your closet/kitchen/sports equipment/bed all mushed together in a weird arrangement. But it's also fun and exciting like camping, so I think I can put up with this randomness for a little while more.