Kitchen Nightmares: Somerville Edition

In the past couple of days our home has zipped through the 19th and into the 20th century with the re-addition of running water and refrigeration.  The kitchen sink works, as does the fridge including water filter and ice maker, which means that plumbing is done.

Insert angelic chorus here

Today it was the electrician’s turn to finish some things off.  Recessed lights got new collars (cats were jealous) and some of the outlets and switches were installed, but most interestingly, the pendant lamp was hung over the sink.  Finally some light in the corner!

Bright spot in the corner

More stuff happened with the cabinets too.  A lot more of the crown molding is in, as you can see on the far-right cabinet in the photo above.  For a better view, here’s a close-up of the upper cabinets above the laptop station (along with the finished-off recessed light):

Finished crown molding and light fixture

Tomorrow more cabinetry work will be done, including hopefully some of the finish work on the dry bar.  Thursday and Friday should be the last days for the electrician, after which all of the appliances should work.  I am pretty excited to have a dishwasher again.

Tonight I really wanted Chinese food, which is just a terrible idea if you have to eat out every night.  We should be focused on healthy options because most take-out is decidedly unhealthy.  But we’re not.  I got General Gau’s Chicken.  When this is all over we’ll have a brand-new kitchen but eat nothing by salads for a month.

Uncategorized cabinets, electrical, lighting, plumbing, refrigerator, sink

It’s already Sunday and I haven’t posted anything about Thursday and Friday’s progress.  Whoops… On Thursday, the last pieces of soapstone were delivered and installed, and the first coat of mineral oil was applied to help them oxidize consistently.  As a result, they look much darker than before.

Darkened segment of countertop

Darkened top of laptop station

On Friday, the faucet was installed, one of the first really final finishing touches to be done.  It’s stainless steel, like all of the appliances and most of the other decorative accents.

Decorative faucet and matching sprayer

Also on Friday, the insert and part of the blower fan were installed in the vent hood.  It’s not too interesting to look at, so I won’t post any pictures.  It’s yet another appliance to be installed though.  This week it’ll be hooked up to the vent duct, which will also be cut and capped off outside.

A lot of work was done last week on the crown molding around the top of the room.  I’ll post pictures of that when more of it is done, there’s not too much to look at right now.  Most of the finishing boards around the bottom, underneath the lower cabinets, are done as well.

The last thing to report on is the dry bar: the frame that was sitting in the middle of the dining room in my last post has moved into the space and had its countertop installed.

Dry bar frame and countertop

Next steps will include removal of the existing trim, installation of new trim to cover the frame, electrical work to support the wine fridge, lighting, and an internal electrical outlet, and addition of glass doors.  The goal is to use very low-wattage LED lighting in the dry bar; we would have used it more throughout the kitchen, but complications and misunderstandings about what it requires made it impossible.  Specifically, you can’t get LEDs which run on line voltage.  Instead, you need to install large transformers to lower the voltage between the main electrical wiring and the LED fixtures.  The transformers need to be planned for before wiring.  Since we didn’t know that up front, we couldn’t plan ahead.

Work continues tomorrow despite the holiday.  Plumbing work will be completed and finish electrical work will begin.  All of the new wiring will get routed to the panel downstairs, outlets and switches will be installed, and the pendant lamp will be hung.  It’s conceivable that we would have a functional kitchen by the end of the week, but there’s still a lot to do and I’m not getting my hopes up.  Still, we are very close.  It’s hard not to be really impatient.

Uncategorized cabinets, countertop, dry bar, lighting, plumbing

Yesterday was the TripAdvisor/Smarter Travel Media holiday party so I didn’t have a chance to post.  The best thing about yesterday was that the electrical and building inspections were crossed off the long list of visits required by the City of Somerville.  That cleared the way for installation of insulation today and - hooray! - walls early next week.

The room looks very pink now:

Pink insulation in the outside wall

The insulation in the roof had to be replaced because the previous stuff didn’t meet building code for cathedral ceilings.  Apparently what we needed was “R30″ insulation.  That means nothing to me, but it’s there now.

R30 insulation in the upper ceiling

All of this happened just in time for the first big snowstorm of the season.  It’s been pretty cold in the house lately, with the kitchen completely un-insulated.  Now we should be warm and toasty like we were before.

Another new touch that was added today is a directional piece on the light fixture at the back of the room.  Now the light points straight down, rather than into the room at the angle of the ceiling.  It’s much brighter and (I think) means that we don’t have to move the light farther back in the ceiling.  Here’s a closeup:

Pointed downward, not inward

Less glamorous but still exciting is that the gas line for the cooktop was installed yesterday.  There’s a short back story on it: apparently the gas line that we had running to the old stove was too small to provide enough gas to the new cooktop.  The plumber had to run a larger line off our furnace in the basement to fuel the five 15,000 BTU burners and one 9,000 BTU burner that are part of the one we’re having installed.  I don’t know how much a BTU is, but that sounds like a lot of them.

Endless BTUs

Lastly, I couldn’t resist posting this picture of nasty red goop that’s sealing the base of each basement penetration along the wall:

Red goop

I’m assuming this is to keep cold air from the basement from flowing up into the kitchen walls.  This in particular is around one of the drain vent pipes.  Yuck!

The next thing to do is to put the walls up and plaster them.  No more open walls!

Got take out from Cambridge Common for dinner tonight.  I was there for a couple of beers after work.  They have a southern fried chicken dish with biscuits and mashed potatoes that is really excellent, even after a short drive through the snow.  Still very little momentum for cooking at home, though Anne’s been eating microwaveable macaroni and cheese this past week.  That and coffee are just about it.

Uncategorized construction, inspections, insulation, lighting, open walls, plumbing, stove

So I had a request for more info on the big support beam we had installed yesterday.  I’ll try to describe the issue and show some more detailed pictures.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, our upstairs bathroom sits on top of the kitchen, but it only covers about half of the room.  The other half is where we have a higher ceiling in the back of the kitchen.  At the back of of the bathroom, a load-bearing wall across what is now the kitchen must have been removed at some point.  No replacement support for the upper floor was added.

Now, I don’t believe that the upper floor was completely unsupported because we never had any settling or or instability up there.  I think it just wasn’t supported in a way that met modern building codes.  It looked like the framing of the upper floor may have been attached to the side of some large support columns on one side, but there was nothing supporting it directly from underneath.  The bottom of the upper floor looked like this:

Kitchen ceiling

Unfortunately I don’t seem to have any pictures of the sides of the upper floor, where it meets the two kitchen walls.  Just the photo above, which shows what the main part of the ceiling looked like before the changes.  The old strapping, about 3 inches’ worth, was removed, lessening the amount that we would have to lower the ceiling to accommodate the beam.

Yesterday, the new support was installed across the kitchen.  It’s the large, medium-colored horizontal beam in this photo:

New support beam

It’s now sitting underneath the back of the upstairs bathroom.  The old wood above the beam in the photo is the outside of the bathroom.  On what would be the left side of the photo above, it’s supported by a large column that was already part of the structure.  A notch was cut out of the column and the beam was set into it, like so:

Left-side support for new beam

The existing column is the ancient-looking wooden piece in the lower-right.  A new 2×4 was also placed to the left, presumably to add extra bracing to keep the beam in the notch.  The three horizontal slats below the beam are unfinished strapping for the ceiling to the right.

On the right side of the first photo, a new support column had to be built.  It consists of three 2×4s stacked together and placed alongside part of the brick wall.  You can only see one of the three 2×4s (the others are stacked behind it), and there’s a lot of other stuff going on in this photo, but here’s what it looks like:

Right side support for new beam

Again on this side, there’s an extra 2×4 to support the outside of the beam and hold it in place horizontally.  The plywood over top of the column is extra support for cabinets.

In the end, we lowered the ceiling below the bathroom by about 6 inches.  The old ceiling was somewhere around 9 feet, so we’ve still got an 8 1/2-foot ceiling in that part of the kitchen.  Not too bad.

Progress today was less dramatic.  There’s a lot of that plywood bracing for cabinets:

Plywood supports for cabinets

And the plumbing for the sink was moved:

A very exciting picture of new pipes

I am pleased to report that we have had daily inspections and have, to my knowledge, passed them all.  Every day when he’s allowed downstairs, Ruskin heads straight for the kitchen and sniffs everything from new construction to floor protectors to tools that the workers left behind for the night.  As far as I know, his only complaint has been that it’s “different.”

The inspector at work

Also today, Anne had her LASIK enhancement.  We ordered from Redbones and ate in near-darkness to avoid hurting her eyes.  Afterward I finally washed some dishes in the upstairs bathroom.  It was awkward without a drying rack.  I was constantly worried about clogging the drain with the little amount of food left on the plates.  And I just know I’m going to drop a bunch of glasses trying to carry them up and down the stairs all the time.  Maybe plastic is best.

Uncategorized construction, framing, inspections, open walls, plumbing