Kitchen Remodel: Cabinet Installation Part III

Well, the cabinets are all in now. The installers returned with the doors to the white cabinets facing into our dining room. The top of the cabinets will get a Silestone top in Verde Agua (to add some color to the mix). The cabinets are painted a bright white to match our woodwork in the dining room.

We have to get kidde-locks for these...

Kitchen Remodel: New Refrigerator Arrives

Now that the electrical is mostly done, we had the refrigerator delivered (the local store was kind enough to hold it in their warehouse for a month or so). It was a bit pricey to get a cabinet-depth refrigerator (to replace a perfectly good one) just to have a clean line of wall cabinets, but we think it was worth it--the wall on the side only barely comes out past the face of the cabinets and the old fridge it would have stuck out an additional 6 inches.

Little Sammy got a kick out of the appliance cardboard box he gets to play with now.

The fridge arrives...

The electricians previously installed the wall oven...
...here is one wall that is pretty much complete now...

Our Seventeen Pound Bundle of Fur

Veto taking a cat nap yesterday. Enough said.

Veto the wonder cat...

Conversations with Sammy...

It's something to see our son Sammy grow and start making connections between concepts. Today we went to the Olive Garden for a late lunch. On the way home the following conversation occurred between Sammy and Michele. It took us a moment or two to pickup on what he was doing (conversation below is verbatim):

[We drive past the 2nd Street McDonalds]
Sammy: Eat?
Michele: Yes Sammy, I see McDonalds. But we already ate.
Sammy: EIEIO.

Sammy then went on about trans fat oils, but we can't recall exactly what he said.

Kitchen Remodel: You Light Up My Life

Yesterday (a Saturday) the electricians showed up to finish most of the electrical work. The put in the furnishings on the recessed lights, installed the wall oven, put in the outlets, and the under-cabinet lights. We went with the Kichler Series II Xenon under-cabinet lights. The electricians are a father and son operation, both very friendly, did excellent work, and we'd highly recommend them.

What was once lighted by a single 100 watt light bulb is now this...
...a "pot light"ed room that Candice Olson would (hopefully) approve of...

Kitchen Remodel: Counter Template

This past Wednesday the Corian guy came to make the counter template so they could accurately fabricate our counter top. He put tape with patterns of dots on the wall and edges of the cabinets. Then he laid down some tiles on the top with more dots on them. Finally he took digital pictures from various angles. He said that he puts the photographs into some sort of software which then can calculate the counter top dimensions (based on how he joins up the dots in the photographs). In about two weeks we should have our counter tops installed!

Polka-dot tape and polka-dot panels...

What one of the polka-dot tiles looked like...

Maintenance...

How does Sammy maintain his million dollar smile and glamorous looks? One way is a Saturday night bubble bath followed by a thorough brushing of his teeth. If your wondering, yes that is salmon colored bathroom tile behind him (not pink!).

Sammy brushing his teeth...
...just before brushing his hair...
...and applying his Axe for the ladies...er...girls...

Autumn Descends...

Autumn descends on our neighborhood. Surprisingly, there is a stretch of road a few blocks from our house which looks like a country road...

Earlier today...

Nothing Says I Love you...

Nothing says I love you, like a new chandelier....or...diamonds are forever but a chandelier lasts long enough. Since we've now opened the wall up between the kitchen and dining room, Michele wanted a new chandelier to echo our choices in the kitchen. Since it will soon be the 25th anniversary of our first date (high school sweethearts) we decided to celebrate by geting her choice. Once we get it installed we'll post a photo.

Restoration Hardware's
Chrystal Ball 6-arm Chandelier Antique Silver Plate

Here's a pic of our current chandelier...
...in the house when we first moved in...
...we tore off the wallpaper soon after we moved in...
...oh, and the wall to the where the kitchen on the left has now been opened up...

Kitchen Remodel: Cabinet Installation Part II

The second day of kitchen cabinet installation went well. For the most part the cabinets are installed (the have to return one more time for some minor finish details). The installers really had to work on a couple of spots to get the cabinets to look right (as it would seem, most houses do not have perfectly square and straight walls). Here's some photos of the kitchen now. Note the crown molding is installed too.

From the living room looking into the kitchen...

From the dining room looking into the kitchen...

From the dining room, again looking into the kitchen...

Veto inspects the new recycle center...

Sammy the fixit man...

A company called Melissa & Doug make electronic puzzles for children -- for example you put the cow puzzle piece in, it makes a "mooing" sound. This past weekend we picked up another such electronic puzzle for Sammy and noticed that he's learning things very quickly...

Michele puts the batteries in...
...as Sammy carefully watches...

Sammy solves the puzzle, enjoying the sounds...

Then shows what quick study he is...
...quickly rewiring the electronic puzzle into a hand-held parallel processor...
...move over Roy Hinkley!

Kitchen Remodel: Cabinet Installation Part I

Today the long awaited event began -- the installation of our red oak quarter-sawn Shaker style kitchen cabinets. Paul put on a quick coat of Sherwin Williams Porcelain (SW 0053) before they came (they arrived at 7:30am). We were really impressed with the two installers, really nice guys who seemed to know what they are doing. They didn't finish today, so they will be back at 7:30 come this Monday morning. The Corian guy who will make the counter top template can't come until Wednesday. But so it goes...progress!

The cabinet maker's installers arrive!

Work begins!

Piecing it all together...

Our 17lb cat Veto inspects the work...
...from where he shouldn't be...
...where the counter top will be!

The refrigerator will go in the middle...
...we feel that we made the right decision to buy a cabinet depth refrigerator...
...so all the cabinets on this wall will be the same depth...

Another view of the cabinets on this wall...

Kitchen Remodel: Floor tile is now in....

Today the tile man put in the floor tile grout. Tomorrow they start installing the cabinets. Monday the Corian guy comes to make a template for the counter top fabrication. We're getting there...slowly...but we're getting there.

The tiled floor...

There's a place for us...

Yesterday on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) they had a show about the 50th anniversary (on Sept 26th) of "West Side Story." It was very well done, and we highly recommend you listen to it on the archive. An interesting part is about 29 minutes (and 26 seconds) into it:

If you think about the melody of "Cool," it goes [melody played] and it's not just this with the chords [music with chords] its more than that. He's written a counter melody that goes like this [yet more music with a lot more going on]. You've got all that going on underneath and it's like a drum solo going on at the same time. Also it's real composition -- he's developing small ideas. He's got the same type of "motivic" development going on in the melody, in the accompaniment.

As a matter of fact...the musical building blocks of "Cool" are actually the building blocks for much of the score. Something pretty interesting about West Side Story is that he's using that tri-tone--that is the octave split directly in half [music with tri-tones] -- a very violent interval. He uses the fifth too [more music]. Well, if we listen to this we have that very violent motive from the opening prologue which goes [three very violent notes]. If you invert that you get [three notes inverted]. Pretty interesting. That's real composition and of course he makes the tender ballad "Maria". And if you invert that you get [three more inverted notes] and the seventh and you get [more notes] and so you have "Somethings Coming"

Speaking of musicals, and in the spirit of our up-and-coming 25th anniversary of our first date, here are some photos of Paul (fair is fair...if he puts old photos of Michele online....) in his high school's 1984 musical presentation of "Guys and Dolls." This actually was a big deal at the time (believe it or not), his high school would rent the Rome Capital Theatre for the muscials and routinely fill it to capacity. Paul never got a lead in a musical, he was always in the chorus or had small speaking parts. For the Guys and Dolls musical, he was a member of the much envied super-cool "gamblers." For the productions, the high school would actually rent costumes and backdrops from Broadway production rental companies.

Bill R., Paul, Dirk R, and Ken M...
in the "Fugue For Tinhorns" opening scene...
...no, Paul was not Nicely, Benny, nor Rusty...
...we suspect the baseball cap worn by the guy on the right was not rented...

"Luck be a Lady"

"Luck be a Lady Tonight"...
...shuffle-ball step, shuffle-ball step,
...front, cross, back, step...
...front , cross, back, step...

Kitchen Remodel: Tile Progress

The tile man continues his progress. The floor has now been leveled and he is laying tiles...

You can see the portion of "cement" he last put down in the lower left hand corner...

Tiling commences (note we started painting the walls)...

The tile guy is kind of neat, he seems to take his time to be accurate...
...which we like...

Kitchen Remodel: How To Cope

We're a few weeks now into our kitchen remodel. So our current "kitchen" consists of a utility tub we had installed in our basement and a 20+ year old Kenmore microwave Paul bought back in college. Surprisingly, we get by pretty well...eating a lot of hot dogs, microwavable mac-and-cheese, and Pizza Hut.

When we were emptying out our old cabinets before the tear out, we found that Paul has more than a few bottles of Yukon Jack in there. It would be interesting to figure out how we ended up with so many bottles of it. Maybe we should just say we use the Yukon Jack as paint thinner.

All the bottles we found in the kitchen cabinets...

Flashback: Almost 25 Years...

Come this October, we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of our first date. Yes, we were high school sweethearts. A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. The years have really flown by, and we are enjoying each year more than the previous, especially since we now have our son Samuel.

So in celebration (the third time we've used the word here) of the upcoming anniversary, here are some flashback photos of Michele (if your wondering...yes Michele is at work right now, that's how Paul got these photos on the blog!):

Circa February 1975...
...Michele in the center with her famous glasses...
...with her brother Paul and sister Stephanie...

A mere two months (8/82) before our first date...
...Michele working at our church festival...
...from left to right...
...cousin Haley, Tracey, Michele, and cousin Kristine...
(dressed as clowns)
...we have no idea who cigarette man is...

Kitchen Remodel: The Final Plan

Next week the cabinet maker installs the cabinets. Here is the final layout plan. Note that on the upper right hand corner, we had to see what ducts went through the wall...it affected how large the opening was. We did relocate one duct. Also note that on the bottom, where the refrigerator goes the cabinets are all now counter depth. It was a bit pricey to buy a counter depth refrigerator just to accomplish it, but we think it will look better in such a small kitchen.

The final plan....

Kitchen Remodel: The Tileman Cometh

The the drywall guy finished two days ago (Paul still needs to prime and paint the walls). Yesterday the tileman came, put in screws to remove floorboard squeaks, laid a steel mesh, and today started leveling the floor. If you look at the picture below, he's putting on a about 1/2 inch to level off all irregularities in our floor (he's almost finished). After the tileman is finished the cabinets get installed. Woo-hoo!

Imagine tile, cabinets, countertops, etc here...

Faith in Numbers...

One of our favorite TV shows is one called "Connections." Wikipedia describes it as taking "an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrates how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology." Our favorite episode is "Faith in Numbers" (we highly recommend watching how the Jacquard loom was a contributor to Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine).

By no means are we inventors of any type, but we are always amazed at the increasingly small interconnected world we live in (think of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon...or what is really called the "Small world experiment").

Since we are always in the process of renovations of our house, we pay attention to things such as the real estate bubble. Similar to the dot-com bubble, you knew the downside was coming, you just hoped it never would. There always is the risk of putting too much money into our house. So as we engage in our ongoing kitchen remodel, Paul pours over the daily reports of real estate prices coming back down to earth. We have no immediate plans to sell or move, but Paul likes to keep an eye on things. This past week he came across a Wall Street Journal front page article, "Size of New Homes Starts Shrinking As Builders Battle Housing Slump" (Evans, Kelly, WSJ, Sept. 12, 2007). The following portions of the article caught his attention:

More recently, turmoil in the mortgage market has made it harder for buyers to qualify for bigger loans... this is causing builders to redraw their blueprints. After reducing prices on their current inventories of unsold homes, the next step is to "start building to a new market. That new market is a lower price point at a smaller size"... Some welcome the downsizing trend, including author Sarah Susanka. Since 1997 Ms. Susanka has written several best-selling books extolling the virtues of "The Not-So-Big House," and she says she has recently been attracting more interest from home builders. "I used to be asked all the time why would anybody want to downsize? People thought I was crazy," she said. "Now it's becoming much more mainstream."

A day later, Paul was perusing through the March 2007 issue of "This Old House" which had a list of "10 must-own tomes for any serious homeowner." On it he noticed #3 and promptly ordered it from Amazon.com:

1. Renovating Old Houses by George Nash (Taunton)
2. The New Color Book, (Chronical Books)
3. The Not So Big House, by Sarah Susanka (Taunton)
   
4. Period Details, by Martin and Judith Miller (Crown)
5. House, by Tracy Kidder (Mariner Books)
6. A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia and Lee McAlester (Knopf)
7. Home Improvement 1-2-3, (Meredith Books) Note: we already own this one.
8. Haley's Hints, by Graham and Rosemary Haley, (New American Library)
9. Interiors by Design, by Ros Byam Shaw (Ryland, Peters, and Small)
10. New Illustrated Guide to Gardening, (Readers Digest) Note: we already own this one.
    

Days passed and the book arrived. We browsed through it and were impressed with the author's focus on quality over quantity. Later, Paul was reading the acknowledgments to "The Not So Big House" and was struck by the following:

First, I wish to acknowledge the debt I owe to Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. Their remarkable book, "A Pattern Language," published in 1977, struck me early in my education as the most appropriate way to think about architectural design, buildings, and the people who inhabit them. It is largely as a result of their work, which has provided inspiration for a generation of architects , that I came to write this book.

It was like a lightning bolt hit him as he remembered a bit of trivia. He dusted off a software development book called "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" which had had a substantive effect on software development ever since it was published back in 1994. In the introduction it reads:

Christopher Alexander says, "Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, whithout ever doing it the same way twice." Even though Alexander was talking about patterns in buildings and towns, what he says is true about object-oriented design patterns. Our solutions are expressed in terms of objects and interfaces instead of walls and doors, but at the core of both kinds of patterns is a solution to a problem in a context.

It was fun to see how a core piece of Paul's daily work actually was linked into one of our favorite pastimes...houses/architecture...and in particular a book that might give us some ideas for our modest (translate: small) home. So of course, we had to order Alexander's book (not in yet).

So in this sequence of related pieces, what might we link to next? Try Uraguay.

You see, a close friend of Michele's -- Johanna -- is from Uraguay. She came to the states as an exchange student and stayed with a local physician's family here in Rochester. After she graduated, she stayed in Rochester and remained close to here "adopted" family. Not to long ago, our Uraguyan(?) friend had a milepost birthday, which was celebrated at her "American family's" house (built near the Zumbro River in Rochester). So we had the opportunity to see their lovely house up close. While quite larger than our house, it does not seem like a big house. The rooms are cozy and functional.

You can imagine our surprise last night when one of us was reading the September 14, 2007 edition of the local newspaper's "Real Estate Marketplace" and saw on page 3 an article profiling the physician's house. On the fourth paragraph...

Susanka designed a Rochester House overlooking downtown on the Zumbro River for [the owners]...who rave about the finished product. Incorporating people's lifestyles into their house is an important Susanka missive, because it results in a house that is well used.

So there you have it...an interconnected world. Our work interests are linked to our recreational interests. And through our friend we had the opportunity to see the author/architect's work up close instead of through just a handful of photographs.

..................

When we purchased our home in Rochester, Michele insisted on buying a home that had "character" as opposed to much of the cookie-cutter split levels so common in this area. Paul's desire for the ability to live off one income (if we needed to) limited us on how much we could spend. As a result, we bought a house built in 1960. It would have been nice to buy a much older home, but then the cost of maintaining it would probably have been higher.

But it is kind of cool to see that we avoided (based on our constraints) what Susanka describes:

When most people contemplate building a new house or remodeling an existing one, they tend to spend time focusing on floorplan options and square footage. But in a completed home, these are only a very small portion of what makes an impression. What also defines the character of a house are the details, such as a beautiful stair railing, well-crafted moldings around windows and doors, and useful, finely tailored built-ins. These details are what attract us to older homes. New homes should be no different. However, such details cost money. And unless people are working with an architect, it is unusual to spend such time thinking about the aspects of the design. Because most people start with a desire for more space than their budgets allow, anything more than basic space, minimally detailed, will exceed the budget.

The Not So Big House book...
...on the floor of our not so big home...