Kitchen Remodel Week 2

This week saw the end of Demolition and the beginning of Construction.

With a day to ourselves on Saturday over we had the electrician show up on Sunday to start wiring up our new outlets in the open wall where our counters and appliances will be.

If you look closely you'll see both white and yellow wires. The white wires are 14 gauge wire and the yellow is 12 gauge. The thicker wire in the yellow jacket will allow up to 20 amp circuits if needed. The wires are routed to the corner so that a new breaker panel can be installed to service just the kitchen.

Once the wires were routed on Sunday by the electrician, the contractor took back over and started installing the recessed lights in the ceiling. There are lights over the counter/appliance area and along the back wall near the backyard. This has always been a dark area in our kitchen, apparently it will be nice and bright soon.

Thursday at lunch time we met the contractor at a marble/granite shop in downtown San Jose. I had no idea that there were at least 10 different counter-top companies all one two streets around Fry's in San Jose. We must have seen at least 100 different slabs of granite or marble. We initially thought that we wanted a light color, but since the contractor had brought the floor and a sample of the cabinet door that is the same color we have ordered, we eventually ended up going with a dark green color.

While this isn't the best photo you can see what we were seeing, the relationship between the floor color we already have and the door color we're going to have. This green with black really works well as a contrasting color. Since our contractor is pretty close to the owner of this particular shop, he was willing to break off a 3 inch corner of the material for us to use when choosing paint colors. I scanned the chunk on our scanner.

You can see light green, white and dark green. At this point we're debating whether we should copy these colors on to the side walls or have a light color that makes the dark counter material stand out.

By the end of Thursday the electrician had installed the circuit breaker panel and set it inside the wall enough that it looks really great instead of a big box hanging off the side of the building. It looks simple and that's a good thing in my book.

Today, Friday, the contractor decided that enough had been done in the walls so that he could close them up and get ready to texture and paint next week.

So now we have the house to ourselves for two whole days before the contractor comes back and starts "floating" the walls, applying an "orange peel" wall texture, then painting. We'll see what colors we chose next week.