Naked* Kitchen Photos
We have cleaned everything out of the soon to be operated on kitchen. So here are some photos of the room naked and prepped for rejuvenation surgery.
*Blatant ploy for search engine generated hits.
Kitchen
Some Final Preparations
A week ago with the cabinet guy we decided to make our normal depth refrigerator appear to be counter depth by bumping out the cabinet next to it. That meant we needed to order a longer than 24″ panel to finish off the left side. When we left cabinet guy he said he would get it written up and he would call me and get my credit card over the phone. He was late for his next appointment. The call never came.
Mid-week Donna called the store and our cabinet guy wasn’t there, but some other cabinet guy said he thought that our cabinet guy probably ordered it and used our card that was on file from the big order. Nothing ever hit our card, so today we went over to Lowes to straighten things out. Once again, our cabinet guy was not there, so back up cabinet guy spent 20 minutes redoing what our cabinet guy did last week. Only he followed through, he ordered the panel and I went up front and paid for it. Now hopefully it will get here in a timely manner.
I then came home and finished up the last real purchase needed for the BKR, under cabinet lights.
Tonight I removed all the doors off the old cabinets, while Donna pulled out the contents and placed the stuff in three piles; one in our makeshift kitchen in the dining room, another in a pile for Goodwill and the rest in the trash can. Our next door neighbor has a couple rentals places and he said he could possibly find use for the doors, so they are now stacked up on the back deck along with the interior doors and ancient screen doors that were stashed in the attic and the two of us comically removed from there on Saturday. If he doesn’t take them, they will go in the dumpster after it arrives next Friday.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1198
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1198
Kitchen Before Photos
Here is our soon to be remodeled kitchen. The cabinets are original to the house. As is the yellow tile counter top and back splash. The floor is currently covered in dark blue commercial grade carpet and there is at least 2 layers of vinyl under that, who knows what is further down. Currently the dishwasher is the old fashioned manual kind.
If all goes according to plan in about a dozen days this will be an empty room, maybe even just a skeleton. D-Day is February 11th.
“New” Kitchen
From the 1953 Crane Equipment Catalog via Retronaut
Redneck Networking
In preparation for the Big Kitchen Remodel (another acronym coming right up) we moved the computer workstation/office from the front room next to the kitchen to the middle bedroom in the back of the house. It took about two hours to remove all the separate pieces of computer gizmos, the 18 miles of cables and dust everything off. Another hour to disassemble the desk it all sat on and move it to the new location. Then about another hour to put everything back on the desk and hook it up.
Because we had cable TV in this spot prior all I had to do was use that wire for the cable modem, right? Wrong. No signal. When we originally installed cable internet they insisted on running a separate line directly to the modem. Not knowing just how many splitters this cable ran through, but knowing it was at least two, I figured this might be the issue. Called the cable company’s support line and they ran a check from their end and could see the modem, but barely. When I explained what was going on they said they would need to run another line straight to this new location. Forty-five dollars. We’ve got the high speed monkey on our back, so I said, “We’re in.” He said, “We can get somebody out there the day after tomorrow.”
Made it only a couple hours before I had a junkie style brainstorm. Put the modem & router back in the original room and buy a wireless adapter for the desktop. Off to Staples we went. For $25 I bought this little tiny USB wireless adapter and we were back in business. For the first few days it was fine, a little slow and occasionally flaky. As the days wore on the connection seemed to get a little worse each day. Instead of keeping the adapter plugged into the PC, I elevated it using a 6 foot cable. Didn’t help much.
When the connection was so poor that I couldn’t even reliably stream RP I needed another solution. I asked our IT Guy, John Smith (his real name) if we had any long pieces of Cat5 cable around. I was going to crawl under the house and run a piece of wire from the router to the back bedroom. When John asked how long, I said, “About 100 feet.” He said no, but he did have some surplus long cables in the computer room. Turns out he had about a half dozen 50’ cables all tangled up in a box and I could have 2 for the cost of untangling them.
Donna really didn’t want me crawling around under the house stringing cable just for use for a couple months, so she said we can just run the cable behind and under things for the duration. After all, the house is going to be in a shambles in much greater magnitude during the BKR, so how could a bit of Redneck Networking hurt. (Note the camo duct tape to “hide” the cable.)
We took the $25 refund from Staples in cash and turned it into a meal of Dragon & Phoenix at the Red Bowl tonight.
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1193
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1193
A Walk in the Woods
For the first time in quite a while we went for a walk in Hitchcock Woods. From slightly chilly at the start to just right at the finish, it was a great day for one. For the drive home we even got to drop the top on the Emperor. It was a busy day in the woods too; we saw 5 folks on horseback, 3 fox squirrels, 2 people entering as we were exiting and 1 lone jogger.
Friday we ordered the cabinets and counter top. Yesterday we bought a pendant light for over the sink, the white subway back splash tiles and picked up our online ordered faucet. Today we meet with the contractor and set a date, he starts demolishing our kitchen on February 4th. I also wrote him a deposit check of 30% of his fee and it took two tries. I ran out of room the first time when the figure was X thousand, X hundred, X tens, X ones point XX cents, so we rounded up to X thousand & X hundred dollars.
This evening we spent our $200 microwave allowance on a really cool retro looking microwave, a 4 slice toaster and a new electric teapot.
The only thing left for us to buy for the project now is the under cabinet lights and it is turning out to be harder than I thought. The little puck lights I first picked out were going to be like $80 for both sets. The contractor poo-poo’d them as they were more homeowner DIY and not really set up to be hardwired in like he planned. So I started hunting the web for something more appropriate and mostly found stuff the pushed the $400 mark for our set up. Gotta find a sweet spot somewhere in between those two.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1192
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1192
Heavy Lifting
We went to Lowe’s tonight and picked up the kitchen floor tiles. Nine boxes with 18 tiles in each and three loose ones. To even out the load some we put four boxes on the back seat and 5 boxes in the trunk of the Purple Whale. The car was still un-level enough that I had a couple people flash their lights at me thinking I had my high beams on.
After lugging everything into the house I went and got a bathroom scale to see how much a box weighed. 60lbs! Yikes, us old folks ain’t used to toting that much stuff.