It is finished! Final steps to completing remodel

We can officially say that we're finished with the 2012 remodeling project.

We finished up modeling the living room in the computer and started moving in furniture and getting organized. The only problem is that there is still a lot of "stuff" out in the garage. I guess we'll really be done with the project when we can move the car back in the garage.

The lighting worked out really well.

The recessed lights in the Living Room are recessed deeper:

It's hard to tell, but that's a light on the ceiling, with a 1.5 inch deep trim. This places the bulb higher up so that you don't see the bulb so directly, unlike the kitchen.

There are two lighting zones and a ceiling fan/light.

This gives us a lot of control over what gets lit up. The four lights over the main area are also on a dimmer so we can dim the light to watch TV at night and relax.

The two lights the to left in the picture above are on a three-way light switch, one switch is near the front door and the other one is near the hallway to the back rooms. These lights act as a sort of hallway light for the room and light up our pictures along that wall:

 In addition to the contractor finishing the lighting and paint in the Living Room, I actually did some work around the house. Sandi picked out a new address plate for the front of our house so I put that up. Here's an edited version of the plate, removed the address, so you can see the pattern:

We also installed a new screen door on the front of the house. My daughter asked if needed the contractor to help me, no I can manage just fine thank you very much. I did take care of this place for 18 years before I asked a contractor to come and do some major work.

Tyler actually did some of the work around here too. The contractor took the butcher block back off of the island and had him sand it smooth. Once it was sanded we applied multiple passes of Mineral Oil to seal and give the wood a good color.

So now we get to enjoy our Holidays and then we'll be clearing out the garage again and hopefully getting the van back in there very soon. I still remember when I brought home the China cabinet in May and told the family it would be months before we parked the van in the garage again and everyone was surprised. Hopefully it will be before May that we can park in there again.

Living Room Ceiling and Paint

Living Room Paint and Ceiling

As part of our plan for remodeling the kitchen our contractor scraped the "popcorn" off of the ceiling. Since that ceiling is connected to the ceiling in the living room and hallway we needed to make a decision. Do we only scrape the kitchen or continue the remodel through the living room? We decided that we should go ahead and scrape the "popcorn" off the living room ceiling as well. We were told that in order to properly do the ceiling we would need to empty the living room. Since we had planned a week long vacation out of town we made it our mission to be down to just the piano before we left.

We keep a lot of stuff in our living room, so it was quite a feat getting everything boxed up and stored in the garage. Not everything would fit in the garage so we had to put a few items in the kitchen while we were gone.

If you look closely at the ceiling wall boundary you will see a border wall paper, here's a closeup.

 

It was great while it lasted, but it was time for the wallpaper border to go.

We weren't really sure what color(s) we wanted to paint the living room, so we went to Lowes', again, to pick out paint. In addition to color paint "chips" they also have suggested combinations. We saw one for a "apple-red" for the walls and "percale" for the trim. We bought a sample of the apple-red and when we brought it home we were worried that it would be too dark. Sandi suggested that instead of painting directly on the wall, I should put up some butcher paper and paint on the paper. I put down two coats of the red and we were worried, it was too red, too much for our sensitive palettes. Sandi was sorting some papers getting ready to pack and found a blue color chip and remembered that we had originally discussed using that color for the living room. So early the next morning I ran over to Home Depot and got a sample of that paint.

We decided that the blue would be better for us, keeping the "percale" which is a slightly off-white color for the trim. It may be hard to tell, but the color chip is hanging on top of the paint on the upper edge of the blue. I guess the sample matched the paint chip pretty well.

In addition to scraping the ceiling and putting down a new texture on the ceiling, a number of recessed lights were added. When we had the lights installed in the kitchen I really liked them, but had one concern about them in the living room, glare. Since you can see the bulbs essentially sticking out of the ceiling you look directly at the bulb. I made it clear to the contractor that we really didn't want that in the living room. Fortunately they make a different trim, more expensive of course, that allows the light to be slightly recessed in to the ceiling, so it's more of a down light and much less going out the sides. I am really glad I said something, because it really works great. We ended up with six recessed lights in the living room, the same number as the kitchen, but on two circuits. Four of them are on a dimmer and light the "main area" of the room. The other two lights define a hallway that leads from the front door to the kitchen. I took the opportunity to add a 2nd light switch for these lights so they can be turned off from either end of the "hall." The contractor did a great job selecting the proper location in the ceiling so that they are shining down on what you're reading or working on, but not so far out as to cast shadows. They also don't light up the TV screen and cause eye strain when watching TV or movies.

When we were leaving our vacation, I wrote our contractor that we would be home that night and were looking forward to moving everything back in the next day. Not so fast, it had taken him longer than he thought to finish the paint job, and when we returned home, this is what we saw.

We loved the color, but there was much work to be done. Fortunately my work schedule is flexible enough that I could go in that day instead of wasting a day of vacation "watching paint dry." Another day and the contractor was finished.

We spent Saturday cleaning couches and rugs that we had taken out of the room a week prior. We moved enough furniture in to have a few places to sit.

As part of the set with the China cabinet we bought for the kitchen, we also have a tall curio cabinet that we are going to have to display nice items in the living room. We already had a packed living room and resorted to using a 3D modeling system in order to best lay out the room before we started moving furniture around. The one thing we were pretty sure of was where the TV had to go in any configuration so we put it back on the wall. Here's a screen shot of our latest thinking.

 

It may be too small to see, but we have the same couches, but have brought a book case in from another room, as well as having the curio out and visible along the dominant corner of the room. We'll be doing a little more modeling before we finalize the room. I really don't want to damage the floor, or my back, moving heavy furniture too much.

I have to say, I am really glad we decided to go ahead and have the living room worked on, it's really nice and if we can keep it uncluttered, it will be a good place to visit with family and friends.

Exterior House Paint - "Well, it's green"

As part of our house remodel we wanted to get the exterior painted since we had never had any painting done since we first bought the house more than 18 years ago. In case you're wondering, that's about 8 years too long in a good situation, and we had a couple of spots that could have used it sooner. Never the less, I made sure that we budgeted to have the house painted.

In case you're wondering, here's what it looked like before in late afternoon (sunset)

Apparently the CC&R's for our neighborhood initially stated, in the early 70's, that all houses had to be painted "natural earth tones." I'd say this tan and brown is pretty earthy.

We looked for inspiration by driving through neighborhoods and eventually found this beautiful house in the Willow Glen area and started from there.

We wanted to be sure that we had picked the right color and bought some samples to put on the house and looked at them in various lighting conditions. (picture also seen last week as part of the paint prep)

It seemed to us that the "J" sample, Jungle Chameleon, most closely matched the house shown above, so we were certain we wanted that for the body, but instead of sticking with the creme color for the trim, we went with the slightly darker "Scallion" paint. This may have not been the best choice, but we're still getting used to it.

In this daylight view, the green of the trim and the green of the body are almost indistinguishable. We kept the garage door white and the vinyl trim of the windows is also white. Maybe we should have gone with the creme/white for the trim. After finishing the work the contractor came up to me and simply said "I am just going to say that you need to add some color, it's hard to see where the yard ends and the house begins." We are going to heed his advice and get some color going in the front yard now.

In these backyard views, you can see that it's not so extreme, and in fact looks quite nice.

In addition to painting the house, the contractor sealed the cut wood of the awning with a reddish sealer that was applied to all cut surfaces and we kept the original "pressure treating" reddish look. The color is pretty much the same.

Now all that's left to do on the house is clear out the living room and have the "popcorn" ceiling removed, resurfaced and the living room painted. We're going to spend a little more time planning the paint and get some good advice before we make that decision.

One last before and after set:

Kitchen Remodel Week 7,8,9, ???

This is a catch up blog post since a lot of little things have happened in the last 5 weeks or so.

When the contractor was installing our cabinets, he noticed a few of them had some broken plastic pieces and talked to the manufacturer about getting some replacement parts. Apparently replacement parts are surrounded by entire shelves.

So, we ended up with three entire shelves that we're going to use for something in the garage.

Once the new refrigerator was installed and leveled we moved the food from the fridge outside in to the new fridge. The kids had a good time taking off the plastic.

After we had moved all of the food out of old fridge we wanted to donate it to church, but we needed to clean it out really well. I thought, you know it's outside, so I figured I could get it good and clean with the hose.

As part of the finish work in the kitchen the contractor installed the toe kick.The toe kick was continued around the exterior of the island and looks really nice.

The lights over the island worked out really well.

The windows had previously been covered with 1 inch aluminum blinds and we wanted them to look a little nicer. We chose 2 inch PVC blinds with a "Sand Sandstone" paint appearance. The contractor measured the windows, ordered the blinds then installed them when they arrived.

The real reason we needed to get the blinds installed was to finally move the china cabinet we bought months earlier in to the kitchen. We had talked about taking out one of the windows and putting in more cabinets, but it was going to be too expensive and wasteful of the window that we had replaced  a few years earlier. Fortunately Sandi was able to find a china cabinet on Craiglist and we bought it back in May and have kept it in the garage since then.

One of the great features of most China cabinets is the mirrored back interior. The benefit to us is that it reflects the image from the backyard making it look see through. Another nice looking feature is a built in light and glass shelves that make it beautiful at night.

Now that the kitchen is essentially finished, our attention turns to the outside of the house again. I wanted to be sure that in addition to getting the kitchen looking nice, we painted the exterior so that the flaking paint, stucco cracks and raw metal of the gutters would be covered up. The biggest decision we had to make was "what colors?" We had found a house in the Willow Glen area of San Jose that we liked back in August but didn't write down the address, all I knew was that it was at a corner. So after I got back from being away for a week I printed out a map of Willow Glen and sat down at a computer and looked at Google Street View. This allowed me to view every intersection and check it off my list. Fortunately within about 10 minutes I found the house. We picked some house paint samples and put them on the wall.

We had initially that that "SC - Scallion" or "P" would be the right choices, but seemed way too dark. We went back and picked some lighter colors "J - Jungle Chameleon" or "LS - Light Sage" Light Sage is way too light, so we have selected Jungle Chameleon for the wall color and Scallion for the trim. Let's hope it looks nice when we're done. Now that we've chosen the colors the contractor has brought in a painter. The first step was pressure washing the walls. That broke free some loose stucco and chipped paint. Then he came back and sanded, scraped and applied stucco patch.

Some of the facia boards needed to be primed

Hopefully by this time next week the paint will be mostly done.

Kitchen Remodel Week 6

The end is near, the finishing touches are being applied and we are starting to move back in to the ktichen.

The new Dishwasher was installed and is working now.

Not much to say about it except that it seems to be working.

However the Reverse Osmosis filter is another story, we kept the original filter and when the contractor went to install it he found that I had cracked one of the "finger tightened" nuts by using more than my fingers to tighten it the first time I installed it years ago. For some reason wehn I installed it there wasn't an issue with leaks, but he couldn't get it to work without dripping. Fortunately the company that makes the unit still sells pieces on their web site. I ordered a new piece and it should be here next week. I had previously used the RO water to feed the refrigerator ice maker. Now that we have a new refrigerator with TWO ice makers it was important to get that going and it seems to be working OK, albeit slowly. We now have a fridge with water and ice in the door.

The next big finishing step was to install the baseboard around the outside of the floor. One of the things I never completed when I installed the floor five years ago was installing the quarter round around the edge of the kitchen like I did in the living room. Turns out, I should have done a little more homework and made the space between the edge of the boards and the wall be 1/4 inch or less, instead I set it at 1/2 inch. Fortunately my contractor was able to come up with an elegant solution

There is a white baseboard with the original quarter round from the floor installation. It covers the gap and provides a nice transition

More finishing work was done on the window sills and sliding glass door frame. Another example of something that I had put off from when it was originally done, oh 10 years ago or so, was painting the frame of the "new" sliding glass door we got when the retrofit windows were installed. I always knew we'd get around to fixing up the kitchen.

The last finishing touch that got done this week was adding the wood panel to the back of the island. I had never known that an island wasn't sold as a single piece. I always assumed that the thing in the kitchen was brought in a one big piece, however I learned during the design process at Lowe's that you select the pieces that you want and then they're screwed together to make the front look nice, but the backside needs to be covered in order to make it look nice. A single piece of 1/8th inch thick veneer was purchased with the cabinets so that the contractor could cover it up. That got done this week:
BEFORE:

AFTER:

There are corner pieces that will cover the seam between the cabinet walls and the veneer along the back. As you can see there is a duplex outlet on one end of the island and another under the shelf on the end near where the kitchen table is located.

One final thing I did this week was swap out the incandescent floods for fluorescent and LED lights. We now have 6 recessed light cans, that original had 65W incandescent bulbs, for a total of 390Watts. The Fluorescent and LED bulbs are 13Watts each for a total of 78 Watts, a savings of 312 Watts, which was mostly heat, for the same amount of light. Think of it this way, turn your hair dryer on low and that's how much heat we were unnecessarily pouring in to the kitchen. Sandi had actually started this by asking if there was any way to reduce the heat coming from the lights. There is a "problem" with the fluorescent lights they come on dim and slowly "warm-up" to a full glow. The LED light comes on quickly but costs literally 10 times what the fluorescent costs.

For next week we needed to have the pendant lights for over the island, so we chose the mini-pendants lights from Lowe's that look like this:

Hopefully they will look nice in our kitchen.

Next week: Exterior House Paint, we have to choose yet another thing! Hopefully we're coming round the corner on wrapping up this project. While we're getting the outside painted we have to move in to the kitchen, clearing out the garage so that we can move the living room items in there to complete the popcorn ceiling removal project. Of course, we're going to have to paint in there too, so that's another thing to have to pick. Oh well, I'm thankful that simply having to make choices is the hardest part of this project.

Kitchen Remodel Week 5

The word for this week is Granite!

We took a day for vacation on Monday, but the contractor didn't so when we came home there was plywood in place on top of the cabinets underneath where the granite will go. I don't know why, but I was surprised to see it.

The next day our appliances arrived and I got a call from Sandi and the contractor making sure that we had received the refrigerator we actually wanted. Refrigerators are much larger now than they were when we bought our last one almost 20 years ago. You can get a "normal" or "Cabinet depth" fridge. The "counter depth" fridges are generally smaller interior volume and cost more. So thinking we wanted a good size fridge and didn't want to pay extra we bought the normal size. Turns out normal means "Sticks out pretty far from cabinets."

The contractor said that we could still return it if we wanted to, but I chose to keep it.

 In these two pictures you can see the sink sitting about where it will be mounted and that the oven/range has been put in place.

We needed to decide on a faucet by Wednesday night so that the contractor could pick it up on his way to our house Thursday and install it after the sink and granite were in place. Who knew that choosing the faucet would literally keep us up after midnight trying to make the right choice. We looked at Home Depot to get a feel for what they had, then went to Lowe's and saw that there were three that really matched what we wanted. Sandi wanted to look online and see what the reviews were before we made a choice. Turns out every one of the faucets that we saw at Lowe's had glowing reviews for those that had just installed them, but the rest of the reviews were from those that had owned them for 1 to 3 years. Most of these people were complaining about what broke or leaked. We finally gave up and told the contractor that we just couldn't choose and needed to talk to him the next day. The only advice he gave was that hard water causes all plumbing to fail and that they are all pretty much the same. We picked a faucet we had looked at the night before and went on with life.

Thursday was granite installation day. We had selected a large piece of granite at the shop in downtown San Jose and the contractor had a "fabricator" in mind that would take this piece of grantie and fit it to our kitchen. Some of the questions he had were "how tall of a backsplash" my answer "whatever is normal." We also wanted to put something behind the stove and below the built in microwave. Previously we had a piece of stainless steel, but the fabricator thought there would be enough material to make that out of granite too.

When I came home Thursday afternoon, it was all done.

The L shaped piece that starts at the Dishwasher and ends at the oven/range is a solid piece. We had initially talked about how the fabricator would choose the best place to put the seam between the pieces around the sink, but he was able to keep it all one piece.

The sink is stainless steel with a coating on the outside and sound absorbing panels so that it doesn't act like a big drum. The sink on the right is smaller than the left and holds the garbage disposer. There are four holes in the granite, one for the main faucet, one for the water filter faucet, one for a soap dispenser and one for the dishwasher drain air gap. We are going to get a new water filter faucet to match the stainless steel look of the sink and main faucet. The main faucet came with a matching soap dispenser.

The contractor also installed the built in microwave over the oven/range.

 

He's concerned that it's a bit loud when it's running, so he said not to use it until he decides if it can be fixed or just exchanged.

The cabinet in the lower corner has a lazy Susan so we can reach whatever gets hidden back in there. We also have under counter lighting so that we can see back in to the corners up there.

Next week should see the dishwasher being installed and the island being bolted down to the floor in the middle of the room.