I apologize for the amount of time it has taken for us to get our butts in gear and do another blog post outlining the completion of the kitchen. With our demanding school and work schedules, it can be difficult to find the desire to sit down and compose a couple hundred words. Cara gives me a hard time for being too verbose, but it’s hard to really get my sense of humor out in small snippets of text.

So, where were we when we last spoke? The cabinets were just about completed, and most of the big jobs were done. While it was not a really complex job, the cabinets did pose some issues. The ceiling is very straight in one direction, and very very wavy in another direction. With cabinets that go just about to the ceiling, and molding that does go to the ceiling some work was needed. Butch, our contractor, went to town with a sander, and hand shaped the top of the molding to fit the ceiling. The piece over the fridge has over half an inch differential in width from one side to the other, with the bottom line remaining level.

The little nitpicky stuff took more time than expected, and work was finished on Monday afternoon instead of the originally estimated Friday. So that threw a bit of a monkey wrench in our plans. The floors were scheduled to start Monday morning, and Alex from the Floor Store (creative name, eh?) had been out of the office, and apparently his voicemail didn’t work. I decided it would be prudent to call him on Monday morning to make sure that he had gotten my message. Apparently the guy to install the floor was already en route, so he quickly called him off, and he showed up ready to go on Tuesday. I had expected the floors to take several days, but it turns out that they are really easy, and being essentially a pair of boxes, the kitchen and laundry room were straight forward. He was even cool and fixed a couple areas where the boards were a bit squeaky.

As the floor guy got to work, the electrician also came back to finish up on a few things. He put switches and plugs in, and so we were back to having lights overhead. He also installed our pendants over the peninsula, and a new laundry room light. So for the first time since we’ve lived here, we have light in the laundry room. That is so much better than you can imagine.

The floor took most of Tuesday, and just a few hours in the morning on Wednesday. I really wish I had gotten the floor guy’s name, because he was very entertaining. He was Salvadorian and could speak English well, but you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Despite this, he entertained me with stories, more specifically ghost stories. He told me first of how his co-workers snapped a picture in the ballroom in Hermann Hall (the building formerly known as the Del Monte Hotel) at NPS, which they had just finished renovating the floor of, and managed to get a picture of a ghost. That building is supposed to be one of the most haunted structures in California, so I could buy it. The he started telling me all of the times he saw ghosts as a child in San Salvador, including seeing the devil in a tree. Very amusing, but it almost made me late for class. He finished on Wednesday before I got home from my morning classes, and it looked awesome.

Thursday was supposed to bring the countertops, but due to some delays in fabrication, it got pushed off until Friday. They came at lunch time, and went about the surprisingly quick process of installing the huge chunks of granite. The granite is an amazing piece of nature’s beauty. We were taken by it when we first saw the slab, and it really was the icing on the cake of the kitchen. It was a bit expensive, (but still one of the cheapest things in the kitchen), but it was worth every penny. There is no way you can look at it and think that it was picked up at Home Depot or something. Very beautiful grain, some complex organic patterns, and the colors really brought everything together. It’s really the one element that links the cabinets, the flooring in the kitchen and the hardwood in rest of the house, and all of the paint colors. And most surprisingly, it was the very last thing we picked out. Pictures really don’t do it justice.

The final piece of the puzzle was the appliances. These came the following Tuesday. We got GE Profile appliances. Matching set of stove, fridge (with ice maker), an over the range microwave that doubles as a convection oven, and the best part, a dishwasher. They are very nice, although we are still figuring them all out.

So with these, the kitchen is essentially complete. What’s left? We still have to get the under cabinet lighting installed, it was back ordered, and we only just received the fixtures. These will be hard wired and switch controlled (that’s the wires hanging down you can see in some of the pics). We will be installing a tile back splash, probably using those cool trendy glass tiles, and eventually will have the ceiling textured to match the rest of the house. We also still need to buy and install stainless switch and plug plates. We have bought some new stuff for the counter, including a new stainless Cuisinart 4 slot toaster, and a new utensil holder for alongside the stove.  

It is a dream to cook in. Probably the best kitchen I have worked in, and I’ve worked in a lot. There is a huge amount of room, one of the advantages of devoting about a 6^th of the house to kitchen. There is ample counter space, a function of effectively quadrupling the counter space, and enough room for each of us to have cutting boards and not interfere with each other, and not block sink or stove. We celebrated the completion by cooking a big meal of duck, fennel salad and roasted carrots (cooked in the microwave).

All in all, a well done kitchen, we have cooked a huge amount. And the best part is that we can now cook together, which we actually like to do. It was so difficult in the old kitchen. We will now be spoiled, and hate every kitchen we have in the future I suspect. Look at the difference. 

Kitchen progress: cat's-eye view

During the days when work is going on in the kitchen, our cat, Bettie, has been closed up in the bedroom so that people can go in and out without worrying about letting her out (as she is an indoor-only kitty). When the moment of liberation arrives at quitting time, Bettie rushes out to inspect the day's accomplishments. The few days represented below will probably be covered soon in greater detail, but for now, Bettie gives her own guided tour.

"Smells like progress."

"Lots of nooks and dark corners to check out."


"Quite a fine kitty cave."


"Have to make sure all the screws are tight!"


"Nice depth to this sink."


"Looks like everything's following the plan nicely."

"Looks level from here."

"On the floor, on the wall, with shelves - any cabinet is good to me."

"I give it the Feline Seal of Approval."

***If B were posting, he would probably give Bettie a lolcat vocabulary. Brendon underestimates her cognitive genius.***

Update on Days 2 and 3

Tuesday started with a flurry of chaos. There was the arrival of the plumbers and the electrician, along with the General contractor and his assistant. As things were getting very frenetic, the big truck with the cabinets arrived just to make it worse. There was really no good spot for the cabinets. Lots of very large and heavy boxes, and have I mentioned that this is a small house. The garage seemed like the best place, but it was packed full of our old kitchen cabinets and appliances. The next logical place was the yard, but Cara vetoed that, and she wasn’t even there. So the garage had to do. With some clever packing in, and the complete denial of our access to the fridge which still has stuff in it, everything fit in, although there was some stacking, and lots of cramming. As this was all going on, I said ‘I’m out!’ and headed to class.

As I left, everybody was working in the few square feet of the kitchen and laundry room. Although by my return 2 hours later, the plumbers were taking turns slithering underneath the house, and the electrician was climbing alternately through the attic and under the house.

The plumber’s task for the day was the installation of a tankless water heater in the place where the old one was. I had initially been under the impression that it was a direct replacement. Pull the old one out, re-route the piping already there, and put the new one on. Unfortunately I was wrong. Instead they had to run completely new and larger gas lines, and install a completely new chimney. Our old one was a shared exhaust system for the furnace, water heater and vent hoot for the stove, and to top it off, it is an asbestos tube. They were not very keen on working with the asbestos, so they just routed a new one up through the attic and roof. Since they were already under the house, the also relocated the gas line for the stove to come up and out of the new wall where the door was, and also moved the gas line for the water heater so as to be against the wall. That did quite a number to free up floor space under the new water heater, and so now we have to determine what we can store in that position. We are thinking recycle bin.

So it was all rather chaotic, but on that one day, we had a new water heater fully functional, many new outlets, although they were wired and didn’t have their plugs or switches in them. Additionally, this day saw the demise of the chandelier. The hideous, god forsaken chandelier. Gone. But there was something that smelled funny about the whole ordeal….

That evening we surveyed the work, and noticed a strange smell. It almost smelled like gas, but lacked the utter nastiness of the straight natural gas smell. I thought it may just be the water heater getting broken in, and the chemicals that are used in the production process burning off in its first bit of usage. The following morning the smell had not dissipated and when Butch arrived, he decided he would check the fittings he could see for gas leaks. A little trick if you are ever confronted with this situation. It is something we do in the military, and it is done by engineers to check for leaks on different systems. Take some soapy water in a spray bottle, or even some cleaning spray, and spray it on the joints or any place where you think there may be a leak. If there is, it will bubble up and show you exactly where it is leaking. We spent about 15 minutes going over every fitting we could see, but there weren’t any leaks.

At this point I headed off for school, only to get a call in the middle of a class saying that they discovered that the furnace’s pilot light had gone out when they cut the gas the day before, and it doesn’t have an automatic relight mechanism. And apparently it was kicking the plumber’s ass trying to relight it. He spent about 2 hours fighting with it, and only got it lit after I got home.

While all of this was going on, the house had its first inspection. Since we are trying to do everything on the up and up, we had a permit taken out, which requires inspections by the city. This makes it all legal, but also provides an avenue for more expenses and more time wasted fixing piddly stuff that the inspector decides needs to be fixed. Luckily he was happy and there wasn’t a whole lot that needed to be done. The lighting, which is a point of contention in California, ended up being perfectly satisfactory. The only real big thing to do wasn’t kitchen related at all. It was a pressure relief valve on the side of the house that needed a check valve and a secondary relief valve installed. So I got my shovel out, and got to digging. 3 feet later I reached the pipe, and that was fixed later.

By the end of day 3, the cabinets were about to start going in. The first shims had been put on the floor, and two cabinets were in place. Or they would have been, had I not asked them to be moved for painting. When Cara got home from work we went to work on the kitchen, running a bead of latex caulk over all of the gaps in the new walls put up, or the old wall panels put back up, and then Cara ran the roller over them with a fresh layer of our terra cotta paint. Everything’s coming together very well.