Kitchen Backsplash - CHECK!

Kel took the beginning of this week to finish putting in an extra outlet on the right side of the stove, as well as finish our kitchen backsplash!  For those who've been to our house, you'd know that our kitchen is already STACKED with outlets and I'm not joking.  We've got a pair of outlets on the left side of the stove, a pair on the island pillar on top of the counter, a pair on the pillar under the counter, three on the other end of the island, and another pair on the wall by the patio doors... so how many are we up to now? I've lost count... :) Anyhow, they've proven quite useful since we tend to have two laptops on the counter at all times, not to mention possible phone charging as well.  So why is it that we decided to put another two on the other side of the stove?  It's not for symmetry!  More because the pair on the left is accompanied with the light switch to the deck, which means my Snoopy toaster oven would block it, and when in operation could possibly become a safety hazard!


Below, you can see the views of our kitchen with the backsplash in place.  Isn't it gorgeous?  It's a mix of glass and stone in a tinge of blue.  By the way, Eeyore's in one of the pics below. Can you spot him? :)

Please don't mind our laptops, speakers, and wires.. it's getting late, so I didn't bother staging the counter for this picture. :P

Details details... Its slowly coming together!

Yes, I must admit, after Kel's moved in, we've slacked on the blog.  Or should I say I've slacked on the blog. :)  Since my last blog, we've lost connection to "Joe's Home" internet.  It seems like he's been having issues with his router.  I've told Kel to just go knock on his door and offer his assistance.  I mean, it's the least we could do for Joe, no?  Between that, and we've got nothing to lose!  Anyhow, we didn't end up doing any of that.  Instead, Kel's been diligently finishing up minor details around the house. (The optimistic side is that, without access to the Internet and no TV, all his "home time" translates into "housework time". Yayy for me!)  So the past little while, he's managed to:

• - stain and fit the trims transitioning from hardwood to tile,
• - build a platform for the laundry pair,
• - refit some of the outlet plating,
• - install the racks in the linen closet,
• - install poles in the walk in closet,
• - and of course, research our Internet options, lay the wiring, and get the guy in to install the modem.

We also had Erica in for dinner last week, and after dinner, we got her to touch up some silicon in the bathroom, do some paint touch ups, and re-cut some lines in the master bedroom. :)

On the right is the side of the kitchen island I haven't taken before. You can see the silver outlet plate and air register Kel's refitted. As well, the trim on the floor he's stained and varnished to match the hardwood.

Oh, and I must say, we've put our little Dyson to good use!  I just love how small and lightweight, yet powerful it is!  Also to fill our void of furniture, we've got Eeyore in the house!  You can see his relative size to our Dyson.  He's 60" tall and 36" wide!  (Kel spent all night pumping him up with a faulty foot pump.)

Moving Day!

For Kel that is! With the help of his parents, brother, and friends, we've cleaned up most of the place and ripped off the last bits of protective tape and styrofoam. First up, our kitchen side of the island.  We've finally taken off the protective blue film and styrofoam.  We've even boiled a pot of water (as per chinese traditions on move-in day).  Can't wait to start baking in our convection oven and try out the induction range!

The other side of our island aka the dining room.  Please excuse the bare window frames (I promise we'll get to them soon!).   You can see our temporary all purpose table and plastic stools. They've helped us out a lot throughout our renovations!  Kel's put together our two bar stools and finally, our new shiny hardwood floors are ready for pictures!

Our living room with temporary curtains and random knick knacks.  And no, its not hot or stuffy in the house, the fan is another chinese tradition for move-in days.  Our steps and rails aren't quite finished yet, so you can see our shoes on a piece of cardboard at the top of the stairs.  That's the new border of our no shoes zone!







Below left is our office. Kel's moved in and assembled his desk.  We've moved his dresser drawer in here for now, but as you can see, the drawers are still lying on the ground.. :P
Below centre is our master bedroom.  Apparently, today's a good day to move in the lunar calendar, but not a good day to assemble the bed?!  Go figure.  Kel's going to sleep with the mattress on the ground tonight, and assemble the bed frames tomorrow.  We still need to go look for curtains, too.
And below right is our walk-in closet.  We haven't set up the shelves, racks, and all the goodies yet.  But then it's not like Kel's unpacked yet either.

As you can see, we still have a lot of shopping to do for the house and I've started last week with the Droppar jar sale at IKEA. :)

And I'll end this post off with our Quatchi chilling at the house.

Another finishing touch completed

If you remember, the last picture we had of our kitchen island from four posts ago, was still missing the toe boards and the microwave shelf was unfinished.  Thanks to Erica's dad, its now all done.  Below, you can see his handywork.  He's also put up all the window and door frames around the house.

Photos as promised!

Our shower with the glass up, faucets, and rainshower installed.

Our vanity; overhang sink with plumbing and faucets installed; Just missing the cabinet doors now.

Our first window frame is up! Courtesy of Erica's dad over the weekend :P

Shot of our island in the kitchen, from the other side where you can actually see the apron sink.

We've got kitchen counters!

The counters we ordered came in this Saturday.  Our island counter was so big, they had to send three guys to carry it and still they had to ask Kel for his help!  Out kitchen definitely looks a lot more complete now, and we realize how much more space we've got!

On the other hand, Sears called to say the timer part for our range hasn't come in yet and they'll let us know when they do get it and can schedule a repairman.

William Ashley Warehouse Sale

Kel and I went to the William Ashley Warehouse Sale last Friday, along with Ceci, Irene, Coral, and Erica.  The sales as usual are awesome.  (Maybe not all were 90% off, but most were at least 50% off.)  The only difference this year, was that we actually have a house to put things in. :)  We scored 2 bar stools, a floor lamp, an espresso machine, and other things for the kitchen for cheap.  I think the highlight of the night had to be when Ceci and Irene decided to purchase the Gund Bear.  It was gi-normous!  The bear itself was like 70" in height.  Everybody walking by had an inquisitive smile on their face.  It took 2 ladies, Ceci, and Irene to bag the bear at the cashier. Each limb took a bag, and plastic bags had to be taped to protect it's body.  The bear was so tall, it had to go in sideways in the backseat of Ceci's sedan, with the front passenger seat shifted up!

We've found our painter! Now we just need her onboard...

Ceci proved to be an awesome primer!  The best we have thus far!  We're trying to convince her she should use her talent on the colour layers, too.  We'll let you know how that goes...

Ceci primed our main bathroom and most of the office.  Erica's dad came over and put in most of our kitchen cabinet doors and drawers.  The kitchen is really coming together!  We should be scheduling someone to come in to give us estimates on those granite countertops this week.  Kel's dad and Erica started putting in the first layer of insulation foam boards in the basement. Kel's finished tiling the ensuite tonight. :)

Below, you can see the kitchen with all the doors, and our hallway finally has the door to our master ensuite built.

Update

It has been a while since I wrote for the blog. I have keep myself busy with the house =D Here are some updates to the various projects in the house:

Kitchen – We got the water hooked up! I just have to finalize the sink placement and hook up the drains and we will have a working kitchen sink. Just have to make a minor modification to the sink cabinet and they island should be done.

Ensuite – I started to tile last night. Took me close to 4 hours to lay down 9 pieces of tiles. It’s a real pain but the tiles look great! Hopefully I can get the entire ensuite done by this weekend. Ken helped me to pour the base for the shower kit over the weekend and have to say it looks great. Now the shower is sitting nice and flat on the floor.

Basement – Got the materials needed to start insulating and framing. This will be an interesting project as Erica and Co. will be handling this one =D

Hopefully Patsy will have some nice photos of the ensuite by the end of the week!

We've assembled all the kitchen cabinets today!

All the cabinets are done, some of the doors are up. We're leaving the rest of the doors (mostly for the island) for Ceci to do us the honour! Kel's also made the necessary cutting to fit the apron sink in.  We still need to get the hood and get that installed, and of course the counter top.  Ken will be coming by tomorrow to help Kel with the ensuite bathroom floor. If we're on track, we should have tiles in by the end of this weekend.

Hot off the press!

I know I said I wanted the next picture to be of the kitchen with all the cabinets installed, but there's been requests to see how things are. That, and Kel had to switch it up and work on the air ducts first. It's really starting to get cold these days, so it'll be nice to get that working. Most of the ducts were connected by the end of the night and we've got the heat going now!

Left: Our kitchen's current status. You can see Erica sanding the exterior. :)
Right: Kel working on fitting ducts into the openings.

Oh, and I've had feedback that the pictures of the kitchen after tiling didn't really show our tiles, so below is a picture of *just* the tiles.

As you can see, we still need to assemble a few more cabinets and put the doors in, and apparently Kel says we need to exchange one of them because they gave us the wrong one. The one we have now doesn't have the slot for our apron sink so I guess another trip to IKEA is inevitable.

Our lesson in painting (aka Why the kitchen took an extra week)

Last week after much plaster and sanding, we were finally happy with how smooth the kitchen walls were. We figured we needed to wipe the walls down a bit before we put on the primer, but we also knew that we couldn't wipe it with a wet cloth since water would dissolve the compound on the walls. So... we ended up just brushing the surface over with a broom. What we didn't realize was how MUCH dust was actually on the walls. Apparently, there were still random clusters of dimples and small cracks in various places, which we could not see because the dust had filled in everything. Well, the primer revealed all of that to us. We ended up having to patch some places that were more obvious after the primer dried and then do a little re-priming. After that, we painted the walls with our shade of "Justice", and then taped the corners to proceed with painting the ceiling. Our second issue came when we went to peel off the tape... parts of the paint came off with it! And it wasn't just the paint, it was primer, too! I guess there really was too much dust left on the walls and the primer couldn't cling on as well as it should. :( So we're sort of done, but with some touch up spots which we will do when we proceed with further painting. For now, it's back to working on the cabinets.

The kitchen's coming along!

Didn't make an updates last week, I was hoping our next pictures will have our kitchen almost completely done, but of course things always end up taking a little longer than you'd think. By now, we've finish priming and painting the kitchen walls and ceiling. There's still a bit of touch up to do around the edges, but that'll come later on. Our range and fridge arrived on Saturday! :) The cabinets on that wall are almost all up (no doors yet though). And Ceci came over on Sunday and put together most of the remaining cabinets.

What sucks though is our washer and dryer didn't come in on Saturday the way they're supposed to. I called the store and the girl said they seemed to have been cancelled. OMG... The girl managed to re-order our washer and have it come in next Saturday, but since the dryer was from the warehouse sale, she says I need to call them to get it changed. So, I called them today, and they said I need to call this other number. Calling that 1-800 number, they told me to call a different 1-800 number. That new number disconnected me after going through their automated system, so I had to call them again.. and got put on hold for 25 minutes. (It's a good thing I have a headset at work.) After explaining my situation with customer service, they said they'll investigate into the matter, and either reschedule the delivery or give me my money back and I should expect a call within 24-48 hours. So now I just wait... if I don't hear back in 2 days.. someone's getting an earful.

Our Kitchen Tiles

Kel finished laying the last couple of tiles on Friday, while Erica and I continued to work on the walls. On Saturday, Erica and her dad came over to help. Erica's dad worked on patching the walls and ceiling in the ensuite, while Erica and I worked on the kitchen walls and ceiling. Sanding the ceiling has got to be the hardest thing ever. It's not only repetitive, but we also had to stand on chairs, and stretching ourselves to the fullest. What sucks is that the procedure of plastering and sanding takes quite a bit of time and cannot be expedited since we have to wait for the plaster to dry, so every layer takes at least a day. Kel sealed up the last of our supporting beam with dry wall and hooked up the outlet on it, and I plastered the first layer on afterwards. The last task for Saturday was to grout the kitchen tiles. That look a lot longer than we thought since we weren't quick enough to clean up the floor, which meant we ended up scrubbing til midnight. :( That's okay though, at least it turned out pretty well! Erica and her dad came over to help again on Sunday. Cecilia also came over by mid-afternoon, brought us tea, and took a lesson on plastering 101!

Below: Our kitchen tiles!


Our hallway after demo, and now:


Our Kitchen last week, and now:

(You can see Erica standing back admiring her days work!)
Seeing the before/after pics of the kitchen makes this weekend's work all worthwhile!

Progress

Last Saturday, Erica came over and this time she brought her dad over to help. Her sisters came after a while to pick him up for lunch and they ended up helping a bit, too. By now, we've managed to plaster most of the kitchen walls, ceiling, and parts of the ensuite. (Erica brought Flora over to help for a few hours on Sunday after lunch :) Andrew and Kalee dropped by for a tour, too! It's been a busy weekend!



Ken came over yesterday to help tile the kitchen floor. We would've finished if we were not a box short on tiles.. :( Kel's picked up another box this morning, so we'll finish that tonight. Stay tuned for pics on the completed floor!

Kitchen

We been prepping the kitchen for the tiles this past week. While patching up all the holes we put in the wall and ceiling and getting new drywall up on the new frame, there seems to be one common theme; nothing is straight. Certain sections of the wall/ceiling would be thicker than other sections and this has make my job very unpleasant. It is taking me twice as long to shim everything so they are nice and straight.

It took us almost a week but we have completed 90% of hte drywalling, taped and mudded of the kitchen walls and ceiling. Hopefully we will have some cabinets up but the end of this week!

Photo update!

Below Left: The shower in the main bathroom has been installed!
Below Right: Erica helping plaster the bathroom walls.


Below: The kitchen walls are sealed; the floor prepped for tiles.


Below Left: Kel peeking from the attic to the kitchen (through the hole he fell through last month).
Below Right: The kitchen ceiling aka the hole Kel fell through, all patched up.

Our new doors!

Our new front door looks awesome :) So do our new patio doors from the kitchen to the deck. However, what we realized afterwards was that our house no longer had the house number on it. As well, our old door had a mail slot in it, so we lost that, too. Next thing on the to-do list: Buy new house numbers and mailbox!

Below: The front of our house before the new windows and door.


Below: The front of our house now, in daylight, and at night.


Below: The old door and window from the kitchen to the deck and now the patio doors.

Trip to Ikea

We went to IKEA last week to hit their Kitchen Sale. Kel had previously drawn out what we needed on their online planner so as to get a head start. We grabbed a bite to eat and got to the IKEA in Vaughan at about 7:30pm. For those who aren't familiar with their process, we had to put our names down on their list and wait for their sales representative. So there we were, sitting at one of their computers with our plan loaded on screen with random Backstreet Boys playing in the background, fine-tuning the details of our cabinets. (Seriously, who looks at the kick board at the bottom?! It never even occurred to me that we can get different colors, but I guess the "option" is always a plus.) Anyhow, the IKEA lady finally approached us at about five after eight. We told her our plan was ready and we needed her to go over it and print out a purchase order for us. She confirmed that we wanted to buy it today and then proceed to say it was too late and we should order it from Montreal. You can imagine the look on our faces!

"What do you mean order from Montreal?! There's a warehouse downstairs!"

"Yes, but it's too late today. You don't want to rush this. You should get it from Montreal. We can place the order for you and it'll ship over in 2-3 weeks."

"Why Montreal?! We don't want to wait 2-3 weeks! It's 8 right now, don't you close at 9?!"

"Yes, but you really don't want to rush this. After we print it, you still have to go downstairs and get everything and go to the cashier and then go to the delivery department. Or you can come back tomorrow and we can do it then."

"What?! Come back here tomorrow and wait in line again?! We were just here waiting for 45 minutes!" (Of course that's an exaggeration, but close enough.)

At this point, she looks over to the girl with the clipboard to confirm that we've been here for that long. The girl nods, smart to not get involved, and walks off. I swear we were there arguing with her for like a good 5-10 minutes before she finally decides to look at our plan. After she confirms the drawings and answers our questions, she tells us there's an issue with the printer and the only way was to write things out manually (while looking at her watch). You can imagine the look on Kel's face by then. I swear he had smoke coming out of his ears. As miffed as I was, I had to pull him for a walk to look at the counter tops.

In the end, she did write out down the parts numbers from our plan to paper, and then enter it back into another computer to print the parts list and so forth. By the time she was done it was close to 9 and we just took the papers and left. I've got to say it was the worse experience at IKEA ever, and we are going to hit the IKEA at North York this week to see about buying those parts. If I find her name anywhere on those papers, I might just file an angry grievance to their customer department.

Below is a 3-D rendering of what our kitchen will look like alongside the existing picture just for perspective.

Day 7

Had a couple of visitors at around lunch time today. Ken and Elaine swing by to grab some tools back, they saw the garbage bin outside and said they loaded their bin even higher than the one at my house. Taking that as a guideline, my dad and I did some more demo in the basement.

After that, we started to do some electrical work. We spend about 2 hours in the basement trying to figure out which breaker is for which room. It seems like the old owner ran the entire house's lights and receptacles on one breaker. Took us a while to untangle everything and sort things out in the basement. After we have that sorted out, I went up into the attic and installed 4 pot lights in the kitchen. I looks pretty nice and I hope it's bright enough.

Once again, I forgot the camera =| Will bring it tomorrow and take some photos of the new pot lights!