Welcome to Bruce's Web Page

 Updated July 10, 2005
Ok, I haven't updated this in a long time, but the not much has changed in the kitchen since I have nearly completed it.  There remain some small touch up sort of things to do.   I can say that after one year I definitely like the new kitchen.  I love having space to actually work on food preparation and be able to set out the things I'm working on with out have to shuffle around things that were there.

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The home remodeling project of 2003.
A little history, I moved into my house in south Minneapolis in the summer of 1988.  It is a story and a half with 1400 finished square feet that was built in 1918.  For the last 10 years or so I've been considering remodeling my kitchen to get more than the 15" of counter with which to work on.  Well this fall, when I peeled off some peeling paint on my kitchen ceiling, I noticed that the plaster under it was all discolored and cracked and soft to the touch, uh oh, water damage.  A visit to the roof to look at the chimney revealed that instead of nice metal flashing around my chimney, I had some sort of black goo that had completely peeled back from the brick and was acting as a sort of funnel for rain water into my house, and to my kitchen ceiling, not good.  The chimney flashing has since been fixed.  Since I had to rip up and repair part of the kitchen, I may as well do it all.

The project was started over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend of 2003 and I had initially figured the work would take about 6 months to complete.  But as usual, some unexpected delays and some project add ons pushed the actual time spent working to 9+ months.  However, it was time very well spent and I am EXTREMELY happy with the results of the remodel.  The additional counter space and the new appliances have made working in it much easier, no more juggling stuff between the only workspace and the dining room table.

Click on the thumbnails below to view a larger image, use your back button to return here.

Weekend 0, Remove Old, Grungy Carpet
Part of my plan for the new kitchen is to relocate the door between the kitchen and the living room.  That created the need to pull up part of my ancient, ugly living room carpet.  Since the carpet is in pretty bad shape, if part of it was coming up, all of it was.  Ripping up the old carpet revealed the maple hardwood floor beneath it.   It appears to extend into the kitchen, I may luck out and have a decent floor underneath the yellow stuff that is there now.  From what appears to be a date code on the back of the carpet, it was manufactrued in 1961! the stuff was over 40 years old.

Before
Living Room 1Living Room Before 2		 After
Living Room 1 Living Room 2 Hall


Here we go, the before pictures, going clockwise around the room:
Kitchen Sink area Back Door Area Wall & Fridge Counter & shelf

Weekend 1, Get everything out.
First off, all the cabinets and appliances had to get out of the kitchen before I could start ripping out the floor.  The top layer of particle board coated with a yellow substance was stapled down on top of two layers of linoleum tiles on top of more maple hardwood floor.  Which appears to be in good shape Yeah!!, but the first layer of linoleum had a tar paper underlayment that is now stuck to the wood, requiring some effort to remove it to get down to the wood.  A vinyl floor is not looking so bad right now.  In the photos below show the floor in progress of being removed, the old top layer is in pieces laying on the old linoleum.
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These two show the tarpaper coating on the hardwood floor that remained after removing the linoleum tiles.  You can clearly see the edges of the boards, so it can't be that thick.  But the stuff is on pretty good.  That small patch of wood you can see at the bottom of the 2nd picture was revealed after about 10 minutes of scraping.  1/4 of a square foot done, only 90 more to go.  I'm thinking a belt sander should take the tarpaper off a little faster than scraping.
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Week 2, Demolition Continued
This week I managed to expose more of the wood floor beneath the tarpaper.  Much scraping and an attempt to use a chemical stripper, which didn't work out real well, I was able to expose two foot wide swath of floor leading into the kitchen from the existing door.  Also this weekend, I knocked down the plaster on the kitchen side of  the wall between it and the living room.  I know there were many people interested in smashing my walls with a hammer, but I discovered that using the hammer and the wonder bar did a much better of job of taking the plaster off.  In the photo's below you can see the exposed floor, the pipe in the wall that I need to reroute that is in the way of the future doorway.  I was also pleased to discover that the water damage in the ceiling plaster was not as widespread as I feared.

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Week 3, Plumbing Part 1
This week besides scraping up more floor, I went after the drain pipe in the wall that is in the way of the future doorway.  I first separated the small pipe from the larger one and was able to easily remove that one all the way to basement floor.  Next I cut the larger pipe free in the base and started to try to unscrew that one apart.  After applying much force on a fitting in the basement for >45 minutes, I went to the kitchen and noticed that the whole pipe in the wall had turned.  Time to cut it free, from there it came out in large chunks.  I then rerouted it with PVC pipe.  It looks much cleaner now and there is space for the new doorway. YEAH!!  The photos show the new pipe in the wall and in the basement and the stuff I removed.
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Week 4, The Range Vent Duct
My plan for this weekend was to get the duct in for the range hood exhaust fan and to get the metal trim off the south window.  Well, a holiday party on Friday caused a late start on Saturday, but I did work until 10:00pm.  I planned on running a rectangular duct between the range hood and the ceiling and to convert to 6" round duct to the outside.  After cutting down the ceiling lath I discovered that there was not enough room for a 6" duct.  Redo duct plan using rectangular duct, run to Home Depot to exchange the unusable round stuff for rectangular stuff.  The narrow space between the ceiling joists meant that I had to fabricate a combination dual 90 degree bend shown below, (high school sheet metal class came in handy, thank you Mr. Alm)  I then cleared the rest of the way and encountered a wire that was in the way and needed to be moved.  Rip down more ceiling down and reroute wire to ceiling light wall switch.  Next came making the hole for the exterior vent.  2+ hours and 6 destroyed blades of working the recip-saw to make a hole that is slightly too small, so work will continue.  The pictures show the hole from the outside and the path the duct will take with the hole plugged with leftover upholstery foam.
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Week 5, Finish Range Vent
Well, with Christmas this week, I didn't have much time to work, but I did manage to enlarge the hole to the right size after grinding down 3 tapered stones down to a nub.  Next I put up the shiny new duct for the range vent, shown below.  The ceiling is now ready to be sheet-rocked over.  Next up was to remove some outlets that will be in the way of boxing in the upstairs heating duct and install the outlet for the refrigerator.  This could have went smoother, but I had a change of plan midway and ended up redoing more than I thought I would.  The new outlet is in place and the old outlets are gone and their holes are ready to receive the drywall patches to cover them up.
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Week 6, The New Door
Big things this week.  I boxed in the upstairs heat duct that runs through the kitchen, which if I can figure out how to measure correctly would have taken less time, but after 2 tries, I have an almost square inside corner.  Then I framed in the new doorway and carefully cut the opening on the living room side of the wall.  This went remarkably well, the only additional breakage occurred as result of some hammer "persuasion" used to get the doors header in place before I cut the opening and the really thin plaster at the bottom of the wall.
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Week 7 & 8, Floor Repair
These past two weeks have been doing prep work to connect the hardwood floor between the kitchen and the living room across the new door opening.  As you can see from the picture, there were several holes in the floor from the plumbing and electrical runs in the wall.  Also note the floor grate, that is a 15 x 15 inch hole the floor that needed to be patched.  Week 7 saw little progress as I was working on removing the maple floorboards in the kitchen with doing as little damage as possible to the boards being removed and the adjoining boards.  Week 8 made up for lost time.  The nice guys from 1-800-Got-Junk came and took away the debris on Saturday morning and I went to it from there.  Finished up removing maple boards from both the kitchen and living room sides.  Then used my router to make a notch on the ends of the boards I had to cut to provide some overlap so I can secure the new board to it.  It was time to fix up the sub-floor.  I patched in from above and below a couple of pieces of plywood flooring to cover the old vent hole and the other holes.  The pictures show the doorway floor ready for new boards to be patched in.
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Week 9, Hardwood Floor Repair
This week the maple floor got connected between the kitchen and the living room through the new door.  I was initially going to hire someone to this until I saw in a book how this is done and realized I can definitely do this.  This was a time consuming but fun process of deciding which board to use and to cut and trim and notch the replacement boards to fit the gaps in the floorboards.  The photo below shows the end result that I am very happy with.
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Week 10, Back to Only One Door
This weekend was the Food & Wine Experience, (a great time), so no work on Saturday.  On Sunday it was time to close off the old doorway.  After framing in the old door opening, I put up a piece of sheetrock and no more door.  I also started to run some wires for new outlets and lights.  The pictures show the closed off door.
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Week 11, Wiring and the New Window
This week was spent bringing in wiring for the new outlets and light fixtures.  First off was to add the outlets to the left of the sink.  After 1.5 hours of  poking, probing and pushing I discover that my basement block walls are much thicker than I had at first thought and made my hole deeper and wa-la, light from above and from here pulling the wire up was easy.  The new outlet and the hole required to pull the wire up is in the first picture to the right of the window.  Next up was wiring the lighting.  This too required bringing wire up from the basement, but I learned from the previous ordeal and that part was easy.  This wire run got hard when I hit the sill plate in the wall.  After successfully making one hole through, the next hole was much more difficult.  I made two attempts and both I believe, the drill bit found its way to the stucco.  I trashed this bit in the process and had to make the long skinny hole visible below the new window and drill up from below.

I could have probably picked a better day (not -5 degrees) to rip out and replace a window, but it needed to happen.  It took about 3.5 hours total to make the exchange.  Many thanks to my friend John for his assistance on this cold day.  We had to rip out the old window in pieces while preserving the exterior molding so I can reuse it.  Then frame up opening to bring to bottom up the new height for the smaller window and then slide in the new window.  Left to do is finish priming the exterior trim and attach it and put the aluminum trim covers over it.
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Week 12, Gas Connection for the Range
In addition to continued work on the wiring for the kitchen, I rerouted the natural gas from where the old range used to be to where the new range will sit.  I also added a shut-off valve for range too so I don't have to shut off the whole house anymore to work on the range.  This is a good thing since I had to shut the gas off to work on the pipe, I also turned the furnace off so it didn't try to run.  Well,  4-days later I noticed that the house was really cold and then remembered that I should turn the furnace back on.  The pictures show the new pipe run and the shut-off valve in the basement and the connection for the range in the kichen.
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Week 13, The Wall is Back
This weekend the sheet rock was hung on the kitchen wall and ceiling hole.  We only had to re-do one piece, the ceiling, because of miscutting the hole for the range duct.  Otherwise, the rest of the sheets went up with only minor "adjustments" for the holes for the outlets and switches.  I then spent some time patching the holes I made to run wiring up from the basement and scrape down the ajoining plaster to the same level to make mudding over the joints easier.  It's starting to feel like a room again.
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Week 14, It is Looking Like a Room again
This was taping and mudding weekend.  I created a deadline for myself by scheduling the hardwood floor refinishing to start in 10 days, so I made a big push to get ready for their arrival.  This required that I get the sheetrock taped and mudded and the black stuff off floor.  I made good progress on both fronts as the drywall and wall work only requires minor touch-ups to be complete and I only have <25 square feet of black stuff left that is coming up very easily.  I am very pleased with how the ceiling is turning out.  I was questioning how it would go since the old plaster and the new sheetrock joint had about a 1/2" difference in thickness where they meet up at one point, but one more pass should do the trick for this.
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Week 15, Getting ready for the floor guys
This week was spent preparing the kitchen and the living room for the floor sanding and refinishing crew.  I spent the week putting the finishing touches the kitchen walls and scraping up the remaining 25 square feet of black stuff on the floor.  I've been told that the refinished floor should look like the color of the kitchen floor with all the dirt gone, a nice goldish honey color, it should look good next to near white natural maple of the cabinets and the cobalt blue counter top as well as brighten up the living room.  The photos show the empty rooms awaiting the sanding crew.  It feels strange not having something to do for kitchen.
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Week 16, The Floor Gets Refinished
Not much for me to do this week but wait for the JB's Wood Floor Maintenance to sand and refinish my floor.  I spent the week thinking about what color paint to put on the walls now that the floor is done and before the cabinets show up in the next couple of weeks.  Well, they started work on Monday patching the old stub wall spots on the floor and a start on the sanding.  This is the big drum sanding machine they used and the work in progress in the kitchen.
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The next day a get a call from JB, letting me know that the old wax on my floor was creating little wax balls the worst he has ever seen and we would not be able to put down the first coat of polyurathane until the next day and I could not walk on the floor until Saturday.  On Saturday afternoon I walked into the house to see the beautiful maple floor pictured below.


Week 17, Paint the Kitchen
With the floors done, it was time to get the walls painted before the cabinets and appliances start to arrive.  This week was a big push to get the kitchen painted before the new refrigerator arrived on Saturday.  The paint I chose to use in the kitchen is a Ralph Lauren Duchesse Satin in Ballroom Gold, which looks like satin fabric, it has a different look depending on how the light hits it.  However, for best results it was recommended to use a High Volume, Low Pressure sprayer to apply the paint.  I was able to get the walls primed on Tuesday, a base coat of the finish color was put on Wednesday, and on Thursday evening I rented a HPLV sprayer and was able to spray on two coats on what will be the exposed wall areas.  It looks really good.  Well, I pushed to get the painting done by Saturday before my new refrigerator arrived, and guess what, the delivery truck breaks down on the way to my house, I have to postpone the delivery.
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Week 18, Install the Cabinets
With the refrigerator delayed, I made and attached the baseboards to the walls that will be behind it.  This time the truck did make it to my house, but they initially unloaded the wrong refrigerator, and the right one was at the front of the truck.  I felt sorry for the delivery crew having to unload half the truck to get to my refrigerator.  The kitchen cabinets were delivered on Friday morning and on Saturday myself and a couple of friends went to work installing them.  I planned on getting all the wall cabinets installed, but ran into a problem with a corner cabinet that only had 2 of 3 columns of holes for the shelves.  Finding this defect stopped the wall cabinets, so we moved onto the base cabinets.  Since my floor slopes A LOT, I decided to prevent a 1.5" shim job on the lone base unit and sand off some of the bottom of the cabinets on the other end to try to reduce the amount shimming required.  This process took awhile to take off just enough and to keep the base cabinets level.  After all the sanding and test fits, the lone base unit ended up being shimmed up 3/4".
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Week 19, Build Recycling Bin
The recycling bin will be under the window to the left of drawer unit, this needs to be small enough so the door will still open, but big enough to hold 3 grocery bags.  Unfortunately no photos of this process, but after cutting the top & bottom parts of the front panel frame too short twice and one mis-cut in the process of cutting the rabbets to hold the inside panel, it was not a good day.  Once the panel was done, it was time to start drinking heavily to end this frustrating day.

Weeks 20 & 21, Mountain Bike Vacation
After several months of work on the kitchen, I needed a break.  So, I went a 5-day mountain bike trip that went to the Maze section of Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT.   For pictures of the trip Click Here.  Trip was not entirely for pleasure, on the way back from Moab, I stopped in St. Louis to pick my Briva dishwasher.  While picking it up, I was told that I was the first person to get one.  Kinda cool.


Week 22, All the appliances are here
This week was spent doing a lot running around getting my appliances.  They are all in my possession now, though with the old & new appliances in my garage, it is looking like an appliance warehouse.  I was able to finish up building the recycling bin this week and started on applying the finish to it.


Week 23, The Replacement Cabinet Arrives.
The replacement for the defective corner cabinet arrived this week and was immediately installed along with the adjoining wall cabinets and the recycle bin.  I also installed the microwave oven & range hood.  This would have been better, but an incorrect measurement and cutting the vent too short meant a trip to Home Depot to get more vent.  Wow what a difference having them in makes.  Also this week, the counter top guy came and measured.  Now, wait 3 weeks until they can be installed.


Week 24, Scrape & Sand Living Room
Since kitchen work is sort of stalled until the counter tops arrive, I thought I would make some progress on getting my living room back.  But first I need to paint it.  This week was spent getting all the crap from installing the cabinets out of the living room and start scraping the walls and crown moldings.  I did not realize how much stuff had accumulated in the living room until I had to clear out the boxes, corner guards, packing from the cabinets, and all my camping equipment from the trip was still in the living room.  I did manage to get everything scraped and I got started on the sanding job.


Week 25, Plumbing Part 2
With the counter top arriving next week, it is time to finally run the supply & drain pipe to the new sink location.  This weekend was spent cutting and connecting pipe.  First off, after shutting off the water, I cut out the old stubs that went to the old kitchen sink location.  As long as I was down there, I decided to move my concrete laundry sink closer to the wall, which turned better than I expected.  It feels a lot less cramped down there now.  I ran the new copper supply lines to the new sink location and spliced them in.  Much to my surprise when I turned the water back on, nothing leaked, YEAH no do-overs like all my previous efforts at soldering copper pipe.  Then I went to work on running the drain using PVC.  As expected, the original plan was modified to work with reality when I started to actually fit the pipes.  While I was at it, I hooked up the refrigerator, providing some running water to the kitchen.  I was only at Home Depot SEVEN times to pick up supplies, so this was a good plumbing project.


Week 26, The Countertop, Pass 1
Week 26, I have been at this for six months, I can't believe it.  Actually I can.  Although my initial plan was to be done by the end of April, but now it looks like I'll be at this into June.  I'm happy with the progress and the results so far.  I can't wait to be able to use my kitchen.

This week I had hoped to be able to install my sink & range after the counter was installed.  Well, there was problem.  After wriggling in the big piece of stone into the kitchen I notice that one of the corners in the range cutout was rounded off and it shouldn't have been.  Big oops.  The installer was immediately on the phone to the office to clear up the problem, whose solution is to expedite an order for a replacement.  Wait some more. Well, the cobalt blue counters look good, check out the pictures.  Instead, this week I did some more work on the plumbing and was busy working the detail sander on the living crown moldings.


Week 27, Waiting for the replacement countertop
This was week of waiting, I guess expedite means 2 weeks instead of 3.  I was able to finish sanding the crown moldings in the living room and started the process of filling in the cracks and holes with spackling compound to get ready to start painting the living room.  I still have my front hall room left to spackle some of the larger cracks.

Week 28, The Replacement Countertop
The final countertop is IN!!   I was worried that taking out the old one would really scrape up my walls, but one of the owners was here and made a command decision to cut the old piece in two to make removal easier.   Then the new slab was wiggled in and they cut the hole for the sink and put up the backsplash.


With the countertop in place, it was time to install the sink/dishwasher and range.  The briva dishwasher dropped in with ease, but my cabinet floor was 1/4" too high to have the dishwasher's water heater under it as is.  The only solution was to cut a hole in the floor and build a platform for the water heater to sit beneath the dishwasher.  Once the clearance issues were resolved, goop up the edges with  sealer and drop it in place.  Next up was getting the range into the kitchen.  Given the tight clearance between the refrigerator and the counter, I was concerned that this would be difficult.  But with sufficient help, (thanks John, Jeff, & Brent) we were able to lift it over the counter and into the kitchen.  First was to install the backsplash, then slide the range into position.  With the appliances in place, it was time to install the remaining cabinets, the two glass front ones over the sink and the one over the refrigerator.  The next day I connected the water & drain to the sink & dishwasher and connected the range to the gas line.  I have a functional kitchen again, YEAH!


Week 29, The Cabinets are done.
This weekend the glass for two cabinets over the sink arrived.  I installed it into the door frames and attached them to the cabinets.  I started to work on the panel that will go over the sink to enclose the recessed lights that will light up the sink.  The photos below show the cabinets with the seeded glass installed and the frame for the panel clamped up waiting for the glue to dry.  Then I got started painting the living room.


Week 30 & 31, Painting Living Room
These last two and half weeks were spent painting the living room with the hope of getting my furniture back into it relatively soon.  I realized early on that I have a lot of wall to paint, and a lot of stuff to paint around.  Each coat of the yellow took about 4 hours to cut in and another hour to paint using a pump roller.  So this part of the project took 2-1/2 weeks working fairly non-stop.  I am very happy with the result.  I must thank Marina for suggesting that I bring a swatch of the fabric that I reupolstered my couch with when shopping for paint.  It is from that I found this yellow color, which looks really good next to my dark wood trim.


Week 32, The Lights Go In
After waiting for a couple of weeks, my under-cabinet lights arrived at my doorstep.  I immediately installed them and they work very well.  With the under-cabinet lights in, time to put in the lights over the sink.  This involved building a sort of box over the sink with a panel that matches the cabinet doors on the front to conceal a pair of 4" recessed lights.  I wanted a tight fit so it was up and down a lot sanding bits off to get the bottom panel to fit.  I really like how that turned out.  It joins the two sections of wall cabinets together very nicely.  With the lights in, time to start on the trim work, I started off by stripping off the old finish off the old door jamb so I can get that stained and installed so I can fit the new trim.


Week 33 & 34, Hang the Trim
After spending a lot of time staining and polyurathaning the new trim, it was time to hang it.  This took a little time to carefully fit all the pieces in around the windows and to fit the baseboards in the spaces on the walls.  I only had to re-do one piece I cut too short and didn't have enough to make another.  On the living room side, the old door trim had to adjusted slightly to fit the new doorway but went up easily.  The old baseboards were nearly a perfect fit in thier new locations.  It turned out quite by accident, that the new doorway is nearly in the same position from the inside wall as the old doorway was from the outside wall.  I just had to cut 1/4" of the short peice, and put some wood filler in a corner on the long piece.  Looks great.

Left was a just a day of cleaning up and bring the furniture back into the living room.