Finally found a door for my kitchen....

I've been stalking Craigslist in order to find a good 10-lite or full view door for my kitchen - I needed one 30" wide.  The door we had in there, was 32" wide, and just barely cleared the island.  I wanted someting that would let a lot of light into the kitchen, give me a view to the backyard, and fit into my budget (as cheap as possible).  I've seen a couple on Craigslist free, but I've always missed out on them. But finally I struck it lucky and we picked one up yesterday.








It had a few dings in it, but  nothing I couldn't fix with a little bondo and filler, lots of sanding and general all-around touchups.  For my favorite price (free!), I don't mind at all putting a little work into it.

All we had to buy was a 2 x 6 to cut for the hinge side.  I removed all the trim carefully, and we reused the hinges from the old door.  Other than leveling the door, it went pretty quickly. 




It looks really great, even though I still have to paint it and patch the wall on the right side.

Just that extra 2" of space, a quick coat of plaster and a new coat of paint and it'll be good as new.

On the outside, Dale will have to fill the stucco and blend it in to the existing wall.  This would normally be a big deal for me, but since that's what he does, it's nice to know it'll look just fine.  He still has the bump out for the pantry to stucco, so it's good he can get this all done at the same time.











The cats, of course, were very interested.  They can now spy on things in the backyard and when we go out to do something, they have more choices of where to sit and meow at us.

So this week, I will get the inside patched, painted and get the door all painted.  I want to get my little curtain rehung as well.

I do have a great post that I'm working on with my adorable grandson - we had 5 great days playing with him.  Spring break was a success around here!

Closing off the pocket door

Remember that cool pocket door that I loved, and carefully refinished and painted as part of my front entry makeover?  You can check that out here.  Well, it's gone, and now it seems like it was never there!

 Not a good photo at all, but essentially, I just primed and then painted over the wall patch with the same blue paint I had used before. I didn't put the base molding on because we are going to be creating some built-ins here, and so I'll add that in after I get the cabinetry built.

Like all the other drywall/plaster projects, this had tons of steps and seems like it takes forever.  First, we had to build out a wall with 2 x 4s, then cover that with drywall.

and then add a second layer of drywall, because the old walls are button board and a layer of old-fashioned plaster on top, for a thickness of 1".  Which means we have to put in two layers of 1/2" drywall, and then Dale does a layer of veneer plaster over it all to tie it together.

 

This is what it looks like from the kitchen side.  This wall looks monumental to me right now, but I think I'll get used to it as we move along.

 

This is the first coat of plaster to tie it all together.  I don't think I have any pics until I painted it all blue at the end.

So -- this is what it looked like with a pocket door.  Very cute, and I really liked it, but the door no longer made any sense --








And this is what it looks like now.  I do have big plans for the near future, however.





Meanwhile.....I also got the walls in the kitchen painted, and crown molding hung in most of the kitchen, but we still have a few small spots that need touchups along the beam, so I am in the middle of a few things.  Here's a little preview of some of the detail work I've been doing:

Trim around the beam and the ceiling in the kitchen where the wall has been smoothed out --















We continued to add the additional band 5" down from the ceiling to make the molding appear deeper.  This picture above is the first color I bought but I was  not happy with it -- too minty, so the new color is a more celery green.


So - there is a little more done, but right now we're in Indiana visiting our cute little grandson (oh, and the rest of the kids, too!).  We drove this time, and had a fun time, so I'll add that post later this week.  In the meantime, here's a picture of Parker J to tide you over:

The little drummer boy!

Backsplash/Tile wall

We've been consistently working on getting this kitchen remodel into the final stages, and this past weekend we got the tile and installed it on the back wall.  Shopping for tile was one of those tough decisions - we wanted travertine to match the sink, so those would tie together, but so many choices!  The tile we'd looked at in the past were sheets of mosaic in a nice linear pattern that we'd thought of putting in vertically instead of horizontally. 

(Notice the broken tiles in the sheet above)

 We also considered this tile for texture, but all the installation pieces showed how visible the individual seams appeared.  And the texture could have been a problem considering that this would also be behind the stove.  We don't want to keep dust and airborne grease specks trapped in this -- so we rejected this one.

We ended up getting the tiles in the first photo - but as we went through, so many of the tiles were broken.  We had to pick through all the boxes to find sheets in good shape - and since we were buying around 500 dollars worth of tile, we wanted them perfect, of course.  After got them all loaded on the cart, an employee came by and told us if we wanted to buy the sheets that had broken pieces, they'd give them to us half price.  Ohhhh, tempting -- we could pull out the broken ones and buy a couple extra sheets and fit them in......but, from past experience I know that fitting in individual pieces on mosaic sheets is a lot of hassle, and often it's difficult to get everything to lie flat.  So we decided to just make it easier on ourselves and buy the nicest tiles available.

The wall needed a bit of touch up sanding in spots, but we got going quickly enough.  These things always take longer than we think, so I didn't want to delay.







 I worked from the flat outer wall, left to right, so I could have a perfect edge to start.  I got one vertical row done, nice spacers all placed, but this tile is SO heavy that it was just sagging so much -- so instead of using spacers, I used finish nails and propped each tile up on several rows.  This worked great, and held the tiles right where I wanted them.  This way, I could maintain nice horizontal lines.











Dale had to get an action shot of me getting the tiles in place!

We love how it came out!  This is before grout (which I finished last night), and you can see the apparently random support tiles I added in where the vent is going.  The vent was the other project we thought we'd have all done this weekend -- we got it all put up, and when we hooked up the electrical -- nothing.  We tried multiple connections, used our testing tools, and it appears that the switch is bad.  We called all the help lines, and we were told to just take it down and bring it back to IKEA.  Which was WRONG.  We brought it back, and the returns employee was sympathetic, but said they do not take returns on installed items, we had to call the Whirlpool (who makes IKEA appliances) repair and have them come out and fix it.  So they will be here tomorrow.  But in the meantime, we thought it would be good to get the tile in and I placed a few pieces to support some of the brackets so they don't bend when we tighten the hanging screws.  So hopefully, today we get the vent installed AGAIN, and Dale is going to get the venting in place as well.  We opted to go out the wall instead of the roof, since our roof is in such bad condition and it would be easy to go straight out here on this outside wall. 

Kind of hard to see in the early morning light!

I also have a couple of shelves to put up here to the right of the vent, but I want to wait on getting those put up until I decide how long to make them -- I don't want the wall to look crowded now that we can see how pretty the tile wall looks!

(can't get the image turned vertically, blogger is giving me some grief this morning)

Finally -- now that we are done tiling, we can sell our trusty tile saw.  We got it for a hundred dollars, and have saved a fortune on rentals.  We'd like to sell it for a bit of a profit -- we did put a new blade on it (which cost 50 dollars), so it'd be nice to get that back, too.