Kitchen's done!

We finally finished up in the kitchen. Well, almost, B still has to decide what to do with that big blank wall next to the window. It’s a tossup between open shelves or a big painting, still undecided. Our original design was with birch cabinets with a small square detail. But when we drove down to Ikea to look around B noticed a kitchen setup with glossy white cabinets, and she thought about how easy it would be to clean them – I do most of the cooking and she does most of the cleaning, so for her the idea of a smooth finish with no details to catch dirt was very appealing. So we changed our style and decided to do a more modern look, with shiny white cabinets, long stainless steel handles and an all stainless steel island.

Anyway, here are some ‘before’ shots. I didn’t really think ahead and take good photographs of what it looked like before we started, sorry. Our house was built in the late ‘60’s and the kitchen is original. The cabinets were all custom built, probably pretty good quality when they went in but after forty years they were kind of worn out, with the drawers starting to come apart. When we moved in it was the original dark wood stain. B painted the cabinets white because she just couldn’t take how dark it was. After a few years I took down some overhead cabinets that were separating the kitchen area from the small seating area.


To the left of the refrigerator is a door that leads to the laundry room, a small bathroom and the garage. The cabinets I took down were over the small peninsula right in front, so with them in place you would not be able to see the window from this angle. There was an open foot or so below the cabinets, I guess so that you could pass things back and forth, but it was just too confining. Overhead were two long fluorescent fixtures, each with one bulb so it was never very bright in there.


Behind where the camera is in the above photo is an outside wall which had a small window which we replaced with big French doors out to an eating area on the patio.

To the left of the above shots is the cooking area. Only two burners of the electric cooktop still worked. Just to the right was a small wall oven that would not keep an accurate temperature. B painted the wall behind the cooktop, and eventually stuck up some glass tiles. The walls behind and to the left are what we took down and we pushed this area back three feet to make the kitchen wider.


After seven months of slow work this is what we ended up with. It’s a major change from our old ‘60s kitchen. We took down the wall between the kitchen and our family room, extended the kitchen three feet and put in the large countertop bar. I moved the stove and installed a gas cooktop in a new island with exhaust hood. The sink was there in front of a small window which I replaced with an 8’ window which brightens things up considerably. We used to have the old style ceiling fluorescents with plastic panels which we pulled out and raised the ceiling and installed all led and fluorescent lights in ceiling cans. The bar is about a meter deep and two long, plenty of room for working on my cakes and cookies. There are now cabinets along the entire outside wall, over six meters worth. Again, a lot of room to lay out whatever I’m preparing.


All of the cabinets are from Ikea, with pull out drawers. We’ve got so much more storage now that we didn’t need any overhead cabinets, and with the drawers we don’t have to kneel down to dig things out of lower cabinets. That’s a small cabinet to the left of the window with a roll up door in which we keep the coffee maker.


In the above picture you can see the microwave with two big convection ovens below. They are in about the same place as the old oven, but pushed back three feet. To the left of them is where the old cooktop and wall was. Pushing that back made the area pretty large, and instead of the peninsula that was original there we put in an island with a new gas cooktop. When built the house was all electric, but shortly after we moved in the gas company started laying lines in our neighborhood and we had gas brought to the house, originally for a water heater but in anticipation of a gas stove. I now have five burners that all work, one of which is big enough to cook just about anything. The only overhead cabinets are above the ovens and the refrigerator. There is room in the island for all of my pots and pans. Cookie sheets are in a roll out next to the ovens. We could have made the island bigger, but there is enough countertop space and we wanted room for a small table to sit at in there.


The door that was originally to the left of the refrigerator was covered up and moved to the right of it, making room for a large walk in pantry (which is behind the refrigerator). I changed the door to be a sliding pocket door, so it doesn’t take up any room when open. Countertops are bright white quartz with a grey marbling, much nicer that that yellow laminate we started with, with stainless steel on the island. We put down a cork floating floor as the concrete slab developed a long crack which limited what we could do. Didn’t want tile, we felt it was too hard and cold to stand on. The cork is soft and warmer to walk on. B picked a glass/marble mosaic tile for the backsplash, which was also put up vertically next to the bar to provide some color.

That's it - the cabinets and appliances have been in for a while, so I've gotten to try everything out. The countertops went in and finally the flooring. Crown molding finished things up, so now it's on to our next project.

Upgraded kitchen and key lime pie (with Valerie again)

We finished up the tile and trim in the kitchen last weekend – only thing left to do is put in the flooring and kickplates. We are doing a floating cork floor, found what we wanted at Lowe’s and order it, got a phone call yesterday that it’s in, so looks like in a few weeks we will be done. (can then move on to changing around the office). Here is what it looks like from the TV room – can’t see my big ovens, they are behind the tile wall to the left, you can just make out the edge of the refrigerator.


Lots of counter space for working – the counter under the window is eighteen feet long (5.5 meters), and the one up front is seven feet by three (2m x 1m). The tall cabinet to the left of the window has a roll up front, where we put the coffee machine and some appliances. All the cabinets have drawers, so we don’t have to go crawling into lower cabinets to find things. No upper cabinets except over the fridge, but we still have lots of storage space. B is trying to figure out what to put on that blank wall to the right – either some stainless steel shelves or a big painting. Quite a change from before, and what I originally envisioned. We were going to do more traditional cabinets, a light birch wood with simple frames, but when we got to Ikea B saw a sample kitchen with the shiny white cabinets and thought how easy they would be to clean and our whole design changed.

The lights are a mixture of fluorescents down the center and LED spotlights over the counters. It’s pretty bright in there when everything is turned on, at a lower power cost than those big fixtures that were in there before. We’ll probably change from that round table to a rectangular one right at the end of the island, then move the fan so it’s centered over the table. So still a few things to do. Behind the refrigerator is a nice big pantry, a place to put canned stuff and tools. I also got something else I’ve always wanted, a big stand mixer. The only thing I’m missing is a good food processor, have a little one but a lot of recipes expect you to have all of the tools.

What have I been doing in there? Well, enjoying that big gas cooktop for one thing – I like cooking with gas instead of the electric range we used to have. And also using those two big convection ovens we put in. Over there on the right is a link to Valerie , who posts lovely baking recipes. I’ve been trying several of her recipes and enjoying the summer fruit that has been available. I posted a few before, but one of the latest has been a key lime pie.

Key limes are these little limes that originated in Florida. Small and not very tart


Her Key lime pie recipe called for a lot of zest, which did make it rather tart. I think I used too much, ended up a little too tart for my taste, but that’s the fun of recipes, you can make it again and change things around. It might have been tart, but with that marvelous crust it still went rather quickly.


Go look at her site for the recipe. You can use regular limes if you can’t get the little ones, but will probably have to use more sugar to compensate. I’ll be posting more of the things I’ve been making, and a full kitchen tour when the flooring is in.

Dining room done!

We moved into our house here in Vegas ten years ago. One reason that we purchased a house instead of renting is that we like to change things. Not sure exactly why, but it is difficult to leave things as is.

Since we moved in we made major changes to the yard, the biggest was removing about 20,000 square feet (1900 square meters) of grass and converting the area to desert type landscaping, with low water requirement trees, shrubs and ground cover. Since the major change we’ve swapped some trees and bushes and put in more things. Many plants don’t do well here because of the poor alkaline soil, and others don’t like the below freezing winters. Most plants can take our heat as long as they get enough water. A number of smaller plants get frozen out each winter and are replaced with hardier ones. One really cold winter caused a few young trees to die.

Inside we have also done a lot of changes. Our house was built in the late 60’s and some things have worn out, other things required updating. We’ve replaced a number of the single pane windows with dual pane energy efficient ones, replaced the big tank water heater with a tankless, installed gas (the house used to be all electric) to drive the water heater and cooktop.

Most recently we’ve been working on the kitchen, moving a wall, replacing cabinets and appliances and lighting and flooring. There used to be a door from the kitchen directly into the dining room in addition to an opening from the kitchen to the family room. We closed in the door to the dining room which resulted in more wall space for cabinets as well as a longer end wall in the dining room. This allowed us to install some nice cabinets on the dining room wall, resulting in this:


The dining area isn't a separate room, it's the end of our front room. The mirror, lights, cabinet and table are all from Ikea. B did the big painting. We still have to get a new rug for under the table, can’t find exactly what fits somebody’s image. I installed the small spot lights on the wall, tiny fluorescents. Over to the right is the family room, future step is to pull up the carpet and install the wood flooring like the front room.

Waiting on the countertops for the kitchen (ordered but slabs not here yet), we finally picked out the flooring (a natural cork floating floor). After the counters go in we have some backsplash tile to put up, then the flooring goes down, trim put in and we’re done! I’ve been using the new ovens, and so nice to have a big gas cooktop. Photos of that to come when we’re done.

Trips

We are planning on a trip next month up to Portland to visit granddaughter E and be up there for her eighth birthday. The trip is over a month away, in the window that several places suggest as the best time to make plane reservations so last night we went on line and spent some time and money to set up the trip. This will be my first flight up there – B has been going a few times a year and when I go along we usually drive so that we can take a car full of stuff up. She flies Alaska Air, the flights are convenient, cheaper than other airlines and she can check a bag and do a carry on without paying for it. (After one disaster with a really cheap airline last year that ended up costing more in the end)

I've read that airlines are cutting back flights in order to fill fewer planes and save money. Well, here we are almost two months ahead of the trip and it looks like most of the planes are already pretty booked. We get to sit together in the back row on the flight up but have to sit in different rows for the flight back. Guess I’ll check my bag instead of carrying it on and fighting for bin space. And hopefully get to see Portland when the weather is nice. And birthday number eight!

On Monday we drove down to Ikea in LA again, to pick up what will hopefully be the last of our kitchen cabinets. After putting the planned kitchen together and living with it for a while B has decided that it would be better to just fill up one whole wall with cabinets. We used to have a small kitchen table in the corner, but since we moved a wall back the table can now come out into the room a bit and we can do cabinets all the way to the corner. It’s a five hour drive down to LA pulling a trailer – California limits the speed of trucks and cars pulling trailers, so that added an hour on to what it would normally take. I knew just what to get – several more of the three foot drawer units and a bigger sink cabinet, but of course we still took five hours in there, wandering around through the displays, having lunch, and wandering some more through the marketplace before filling up the trailer with a pile of flat-packs and the trunk with odds and ends. I still am impressed with how well Ikea does their displays, and all of the wandering they force you to do in those huge stores to slow you down and get you to look at more stuff. Very well done guys.

The drive was interesting – we had a very impressive windstorm that extended through Nevada all of the way down to southern California. It was our first time driving on a Monday, usually we do Saturday in order to avoid the weekend drivers coming to Vegas from LA on Friday and returning on Sunday. The roads were almost empty, and the high winds forced almost all of the big trucks to stay parked. I think the winds were gusting up to 65mph during most of the drive, but we kept to the road just fine. One stretch south of Baker was interesting, it’s in an area with lots of sand, and the wind kept throwing it across the road. It looked like a snow storm, with very limited visibility and stringers of sand dancing on the asphalt. Then we hit some rain at the bottom of Cajon pass, and finally sunshine in LA. Coming back the wind was a little less, and so all of the trucks that were parked were moving again, trying to catch up the lost time. Still not many cars, I would much rather share the road with truckers that drive for a living than with people in cars just speeding trying to get somewhere.

So now I have a living room filled with boxes of things to put together. And some of that lovely drywall has to come down so that we can have electrical outlets all along the extended counter, plus more spotlights in the ceiling. But we will end up with some huge work areas and lots of shiny counters to put things on. We finally found some countertop material that we like; now we just have to find who in Vegas works with it and get some estimates. Yea! It looks like we are getting closer to finishing. But I’ve been enjoying the big cooktop and the ovens already.

more kitchen - cabinets in

More kitchen stuff – this was taken prior to those window photos, the first thing we did was take down the ceiling, mainly to get rid of those big fluorescent light panels. We tore it down and then put up new panels rather quickly, as it’s cold in December and we needed to keep the heat in the house instead of escaping up into the attic and out the vents.


I moved the tv room wall back four feet to give us more room and plan on putting in a large counter that we can sit at. New ovens went in along with a matching microwave. The cabinets are from Ikea – we had originally planned on a raised panel birch cabinet, but when down there we walked through all of the kitchen displays and B liked the glossy white ones, which we ended up getting. This is just a test fit, to be sure it looked OK.


We are also putting in a center island with a gas cooktop. This is a test of the cabinets, to make sure that we have enough room to walk around them.


After a month and a half of work we finally have most of the cabinets in, and a lot of detail work ahead of us


We took out the door to the dining room, which is next to the ovens in the upper picture, and moved the door to the laundry room over to the right, shifting the refrigerator from its old place over to the left. The door to the laundry room shifted to a pocket door, to take up less room, as did the new door to the bathroom (down in front of the dryer). The cooktop is in but not yet hooked up, but the exhaust hood is up and working.

We are planning on a white quartz countertop, but haven’t picked it out yet. The island will get a stainless countertop along with the stainless sides and cabinet fronts as a contrast to the rest of the counters. Setting up the cabinets and moving our kitchen table back in made B realize that it would be nice to continue those outer cabinets the whole length of the wall rather than stopping at the end of the window, so it looks like another trip down to Ikea to get another seven feet of cabinets. We are planning on a cork floor, but again haven’t picked anything out. There is a crack in the concrete slab, so we can’t put down tile as it would just crack along with the slab, so need some kind of floating floor.

Kitchen remodel - window replacement

We’ve been working on remodeling our kitchen for several weeks now, don’t know if I posted these before, but this was part of the first phase of the work. We had an area of the ceiling that was lower than the rest with fluorescent lights up behind some frosted plastic panes, which was standard in a lot of kitchens built the same time as ours. We pulled that whole area down and installed can lights in the ceiling to get back that foot of height (you can see the area around the top of the wall in this photo). Pulled out some cabinets (the white areas) and are about to pull out the sink. The door on the far left leads to the dining room, and we just covered that over with drywall, and the opening was a door into the laundry area, with the door to the small bathroom visible. B never liked looking into the bathroom from the kitchen, so we moved that door around to another wall. The old window was four feet wide.


The new window is eight feet wide.


Last weekend we ended up putting in all the new cabinets, I’ll post photos of those later.

Spring fixup

It’s springtime, which leads to work around the house. The weather is warming up and it will be time to swim soon, so the pool has been opened from its winter sleep and cleaned up. We think the pool was installed around 1990, we’ve been in the house ten years and found some blueprints with that date and are assuming the pool was put in at the same time. The equipment is starting to wear out, last summer I replaced the pump and yesterday I replaced the filter. Used to have a diatomaceous earth filter but I never could get the hang of how much stuff to put in and the correct cleaning cycle so I went with a cartridge filter. Of course the new filter is a different size than the old, so it took some time to cut out the old pipes and put in new piping, but everything is working now.


The water temp is only 21c, but today it was sunny and 30c, working its way up there. With the pool cover on we should have the water up to the 32c (90f) temperature I like for swimming by the end of May. So if you are in the area come on over for a dip.

B also wanted to change around the front room. We got a new carpet (I put in hardwood floors out there about seven years ago) for the sitting area, and are doing new drapes, so B picked out some new wall colors to go with the carpet and has been painting. I finally got the crown molding she wanted and put it up today.


It looks pretty good out there. Now to see what else she wants to change.

Air repair

Last month the air conditioner at our house that cools the bedrooms died. Our house has three air conditioning units and two evaporative coolers (commonly called swamp coolers) up on the roof, a lot of stuff up there where most new houses only have a single air unit. It was making noise, and blowing air, but it was hot outside air not cool refreshing breezes. Since it was 42c (108f) outside with another few months of that predicted we tried just using the front air unit and setting up a fan to blow into the bedroom, but that just wasn't designed to keep up with the summer temperatures. We ended up calling a repair company, the one that replaced the units when we moved in nine years ago. The result:




Doesn't look like $426, does it?


On a different topic, here is the Elvis store at Aria. I don't know if this will be closing when the show closes, or if the show will be renamed. But for now it's here, upstairs in a quiet area.

Bathroom's done

A while back we remodeled our hall bath. No knocking down walls and making it bigger, just new tile all around, new fixtures, new cabinets and counter and sink and lighting and floor tiles. Just minor things (that for some reason took weeks to do). Did it all ourselves, and found out it’s hard to lay tiles with consistent grout lines if the tile saws that you rent from Home Depot don’t cut a straight line. Anyway . .

B wanted to go for big tile, so we found some 24” x 24” things that looked pretty. Then decided that they looked good on the floor but too big for a small bathroom wall, so they were cut down to 12” x 24” and stuck on vertically. That was boring so we came up with an accent stripe in a different shade. And of course I had to figure out how to do niches for soap and stuff in both the shower and tub areas. All of those home improvement shows we watch on cable aided us, and I was able to order some fancy waterproofing for the shower stall (pulled out a plastic one we put in when we moved and made it all tile) and figured out the right way to do tile. We can see the imperfections, but our visitors think it looks pretty good.

Here’s B working on grouting the tub area


And this is what the shower ended up like. Tile color is the same all around but the lights are different, so the camera auto color correct didn’t make them match in the two photos. To my eye they are more beige like the below photo

Bathroom done - finally

It’s a bright sunny day here in Vegas. On Monday we had a record high for that date, a whole 23c (74f), and it’s been up around there all week. At night the temp drops down to around 6c (42f) but the weather report for the next week shows sunshine every day. It’s why I’m here, but I still like the summer highs better. Sorry about you guys back in the next storm path.

We finally finished our bathroom remodel, just in time for our holiday guests. This all started because of rust in the water: when our granddaughter came she takes baths, and in filling the tub the water was rusty for the first few seconds. In order to look at the pipes I had to take off some tiles to get into the wall, this is the original tiles put up when the house was built in the ‘70s.

I had installed a small plastic shower stall when we first moved in, there was only a shower head over the tub, and my mother couldn’t lift her legs up to get into the tub so a walk in shower was a requirement. The original bath redo was only supposed to be new tile around the bath, but then in a phone conversation my wife had with our daughter she suggested we dump the plain white shower and tile it all. Well, lots of work later:


The area around the tub is what was supposed to be done. The only thing original left in here now is the tub; it’s an old cast iron one, and still looks fine so it’s still here. For a break B thought we should put some decorations, so we went with the small colored stripes around eye level, and also put them on the shower floor. The field tiles were 24” x 24”, left that size on the floor but cut in half to 12” x 24” and put on the walls vertically. That was a lot of work, especially with the rental saws not cutting nice straight lines. Oh well, next time we buy the right size (they weren’t available for this tile, which B really liked)


Yup, I figured out how to put in those niches to hold shampoo and stuff; another pain to do. We were going to leave in the sink cabinet, and when starting on the floor B asked if I had enough extra tile to go under the cabinet if we ever tore it out and went with a hanging one. Well, that lead to ‘might as well do that now too’ and so a cabinet was ordered, another wall torn out to put in supports for the hanging cabinet, and a fancy sink and faucet also on the order list. That all showed up and after the floor went in was installed. We finally found a countertop that B liked, which showed up just before Christmas, so here is the end result on that side.


It’s a small bath, just 2m wide by about 5m long (6’ x 16’), fairly normal for a ‘60s bathroom. New energy efficient fluorescent spots over the shower and tub, and a fancy fixture over the sink to light it all up, and there we are. Next project will probably be the kitchen. But that will come after I recover from the no job for a year salary hit, so don’t hold your breath.