Kitchen Nightmares: Somerville Edition

Merry Christmas everyone!

So we just got back from our trip and found the kitchen fully plastered.  Gone is the dark gray drywall and now we have a shiny coat of white all over the room.  It’s so much bigger and brighter now.

Supposedly there was going to be a first coat of paint applied on Friday, but we can’t tell if that happened.  I’ll have to ask George in the morning.  I’m hoping we can move straight into cabinet installation to get some of them out of our useful spaces.  Plus, I really want to see what the cabinets look like in the room.

On to the pictures:

White, white, and more white

New walls joined up with old walls

Lowered ceiling with recessed lighting

Nicely finished off ceiling/wall transition in the hallway

If there were a coat of paint applied, it would have been only a white primer that in some places is still shiny like plaster.  Still, I’m hoping that we can see some cabinet progress tomorrow as originally planned.

After the long drive back, we placed a Dining In order from Jose’s in Cambridge.  I had never eaten there before but their enchiladas were very good.  I guess they’re over on Sherman Street, kind of far from everywhere we usually go.  That’s why Dining In is the best thing ever.

One cat-related note before ending: while we were away, we confined Ruskin and Clyde to the bedroom with their litterbox, food, and water so that there was no chance of them getting downstairs while work was going on in the kitchen.  When we got home, the bedroom smelled awful and they had covered every conceivable surface with fur and litter.  Not unexpected I suppose, but totally gross.  I’m off to close the windows now that we’ve had a chance to air out the entire upstairs.  There’s just no good solution for what to do with them during this project.

Uncategorized construction, drywall

As of early this afternoon, there are no more open walls.  While the cabinets were being piled up in the dining room and hallway, drywall guys were at work in the kitchen covering the walls in dark-grey sheet rock.  So now we’ve gone from finished white walls to no walls and dark wood to dark grey unfinished walls.

Note the white splotches in the picture below.  They only appeared when I took a picture with the flash.  I think there were lots of fine reflective dust particles in the air.  We couldn’t see them, but they really had a dramatic effect on the photos.  Makes me wonder how much of that we breathed in.  Note to self: save photos for future class-action lung-disease lawsuit.

New drywall. Also, apparently, it's snowing.

I think Ruskin likes the simplicity of the gray monotone.

Tomorrow the walls get a few coats of plaster and will be back to white and ready for paint after Christmas.

Also, here’s Anne reheating pizza in what space is left in the dining room:

Cramped quarters

And peeking over the stacked-up cabinets:

Can't get there from here

Uncategorized construction, drywall

Score one for Kitchen Interiors and Plain & Fancy.  The delivery truck arrived over an hour early today and within about a half hour all of our new cabinets had been unloaded into our cleared-out dining room and hallway.

At about 10:15am, a giant semi pulled up our street with a Kitchen Interiors van just ahead of it.  This truck looked absolutely HUGE on our little city street.  In fact, with the snow and lack of parking in front of the house, it completely blocked traffic up our street for the length of the delivery.  A Somerville public works truck was among the several frustrated motorists who couldn’t make it past.  We apologize to them for the inconvenience, but to be fair, there was a way around using other side streets.

Enormous delivery truck

At one point a police car came by with its sirens on and I thought we were in trouble.  I had flashbacks to January 2005, when we moved to this place just after two huge snowstorms.  Our moving truck blocked Anne’s street in Cambridge, and several times it had to circle the block in the middle of loading just to let other cars or Cambridge police officers pass.

Blocking the entire street

Now the dining room is literally packed wall to wall with cabinets.  The two tallest cabinets, the pantry and oven units, are blocking the front hallway.  We can’t get to the basement or downstairs bathroom at all, at least until the plastic separating the dining room from the kitchen is removed and we can come around from the other side.

Dining room not so empty any more

None shall pass

A very tall pantry

The good news is that the delivery happened on time and the cabinets look amazing.  The bad news is that because we’re a couple of days behind and this is Christmas week, they won’t start to go up until this weekend at the earliest.  Most of the work won’t happen until next week.  Not a huge deal, but it does mean that they’ll be taking up lots of space for longer.

Uncategorized cabinets

Just as we were getting used to living in two rooms downstairs - the living room and dining room - we had to clear everything out of the dining room to make way for the cabinets, which will be delivered today.  To the basement went the table, chairs, bookshelf, and the kitchen blinds which had been safely stored in there since they were taken down the first day.  Now I’m hitting my head on the chandelier every time I walk through the room.

Empty dining room

Of course, all of this was necessary for the project to move forward, but losing the use of another room is actually pretty inconvenient.  We’d been using the table like we would have used the kitchen counter before - for drying dishes, holding pizza boxes and take-out containers while we ate, and so on.

Still, I’m not complaining.  It’s exciting that the cabinets will be here today.  We’re looking forward to seeing what we bought so many months ago, even if they’re all disassembled and in boxes.

Today the drywall goes up, and tomorrow it gets plastered.  Pictures when the work is done…

Uncategorized cabinets, commentary

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