Category: The ongoing saga of the house

We’re in the fourth week of kitchen renovations, and I think it’s safe to say we’re in the home stretch. I think it’s also safe to say that the build phase was fraught with more peril than I expected. (Note, I wrote this a week ago – it’s been THAT kind of week!)

In our last update, we had torn out the entire original kitchen to the drywall and beyond. Over the course of the next week and a half, the kitchen was gradually rebuilt on the same footprint. First, walls and paint and the upper cabinet boxes:

Then, new floors. Have I mentioned the new floors? We’re replacing cheap and boring ceramic tile with lovely warm wood-coloured tile that looks like knotty pine boards.

Willie approves of the new cabinets.

I have to admit to being fairly ambivalent about a lot of the choices we had to make. I knew we wanted light coloured cabinets, for example, and warm accent colours. I knew we were maintaining the same basic footprint. I loved the idea of an oversized farmhouse sink and butcher block counters, both of which were incorporated into the design. The one thing I coveted above all other things, though, were pot drawers. And now we have them – everywhere!

Along the way, there have been a few mistakes, miscommunications and mis-steps. The wrong sink, for example, and the wrong drawer pulls ordered. Hidden drawers overlooked. I have to say, though, with each and every one of these things, whether the miscommunication was on our side or not, the construction and design team have immediately rectified or rebuilt or otherwise worked really hard to ensure that we had exactly the kitchen we wanted. I really can’t say enough nice things about Justin Linden and his team – they have been beyond awesome at every bend in the road.

When we got home from a few days out of town to find that the new microwave had been installed much higher than I had expected, I was worried about safety. The kids use the microwave regularly, and the idea of them reaching up over their heads to pull hot food out of it made my stomach clench up. All I had to do was mention it, and they pulled out the installed cupboard to insert one that fit the space better and brought the microwave down to a safer height.

I’m wretchedly behind in my bloggy updates, and truth be told, the kitchen is actually already done. Stay tuned and maybe I’ll get photos of the whole thing in the next couple of days. Spoiler alert: it’s AWESOME! I also have a post or two to write about things we learned about executing and surviving a kitchen remodel.

Bonus question: Anybody recognize the quote in the headline? It has absolutely nothing to do with kitchens, and there was no extraordinary technology involved in the renovation – but suddenly, out of the 1970s, that quote was in my head as I wrote this post.

One of the boys has a peculiar but charming personality quirk: he abhors making decisions. Not only is he stressed by big decisions, but he actively avoids making even such minor decisions as milk or water with dinner. In general, he would prefer to be served with a decision made than to take an active role in decision-making.

I am beginning to think this might be a latent personality quirk he inherited from me as I die a death of a thousand paper cuts in the endless number of decisions involved in our pending kitchen renovation. From the fundamental “should we or should we not renovate the kitchen” to the minutiae of 3/8″ difference in sink depth, I am feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of options at every turn.

We’ve narrowed down the options somewhat. We’re going with Ikea’s SEKTION design (it’s specified in some sort of international treaty that we need to capitalize Ikea product names, right?) sitting in pretty much the exact footprint of the existing kitchen, minimizing both cost and trauma to the change-averse members of the family. We’ve had a kitchen reno in our sights since we moved in almost six years ago, if for no other reason than to replace the spectacular bio-hazard that is the 1960s vintage faux brick backsplash wall behind the oven, and to do something with the gaping hole left when we had to tear out the over-fridge cabinets to accommodate our monstrosity of a fridge. (I have never in six years regretted investing in the biggest fridge we could afford at the time.) And over the years we’ve lost three full cupboard doors, with two more hanging at drunken angles, the brace holding the sink up has snapped, and the laminate on the counter has started to peel up. I’m pretty sure the previous homeowner invested just enough in upgrading the kitchen to last the length of the building inspection and not much more. TL;DR: we have some maintenance issues to address.

And, I have a wildly covetous desire for pot drawers. I swear, the real reason we are spending tens of thousands of dollars on this kitchen renovation is so I no longer have to lose my ever-loving mind every time I shift my way through eight nested stacks of pots and colanders because I am reaching for a pot lid or I send a precariously stacked Jenga game of plastic sandwich containers crashing across the kitchen floor in my search for the salad spinner.

So, a record of decisions made to this point: yes, we will renovate the kitchen. We will renovate the kitchen this year. We talked to the bank and worked out a budget, over which I choked and balked and raged and finally made an uneasy sort of peace. (Seriously, people spend HOW MUCH on kitchen renovations?! I spoke to more than one company that wouldn’t take on our project because it was just too small.) We decided on a white-on-white colour scheme in a country-modern, clean and simple style. We decided to build Ikea components into the existing footprint and to retain our original appliances. And we decided to put in a pot drawer every time the option became available.

Phew, that was a LOT of decisions. So, we’re done now, right? Someone will come over and wave a magic wand and we can has kitchen?

Sigh.

I think I’m probably nearing 20 hours invested on the Ikea website and with the Kitchen Planner, alternately known as The Most Aggravating Piece of Software on the Internet(TM). (Oops, there goes the potential Ikea sponsorship.) It actually works beautifully in store, and is a fascinating tool — if you can get it to load. The Ikea associate to whom I kvetched said it may have been because I was trying to run it on a MacBook, but I find it just as cantankerous and difficult to load on the boys’ PC. Every now and then I hit my kitchen-designing stride and started to have delusions about actually executing at least the design portion of the project ourselves, and then we hit a snag like a 38″ footprint for a 36″ cabinet, or confusion over MAXIMARA versus FORVARA, or the idea of not just finding and engaging but managing multiple subcontractors comes up, and we realize that we are in way, WAY over our depth. And also, I remember that I am pretty much completely lacking in mechanical aptitude, and the ability to assemble an Ikea wall unit over 16 hours does not make me a master cabinetmaker.

So, we’ve thrown in the (FRÄJEN) towel and have contracted the job out. Oh joy, there are MOAR DECISIONS. Finding someone to do the job has been painful. You don’t need to know the details, but suffice to say the story is long. We’ve decided to go all in, with a company that will design, purchase, manage and install the entire kitchen from start to finish. It will be four times the price than if we did it ourselves, but we will have an actual kitchen at the end of the process, which is a dubious outcome if we took on the project ourselves. And neither Beloved nor I will be facing felony charges for assault on a FINTORP.

All this to say, strap yourselves in and get ready for the next great bloggy series, “Remember that time DaniGirl lost her everloving shit over the kitchen reno?” Good times indeed.

Today’s question, my bloggy pretties, is about exhaust hoods. (There is a delicious irony in me reaching the breaking “exhaust” point and finally moving to crowdsource over an “exhaust” hood, yes?) We are not currently equipped to vent our kitchen exhaust outside, and while I don’t see it as being an insurmountable task, I am leery about punching a hole in the building envelope for any reason. Also, truthfully? I’d love to trim that item from the budget. I’m quite sure that our existing microwave/exhaust hood combo does nothing more than coat my forehead in aerosolized food particulate, but I am still leaning on investing in a recirculating new hood rather than upgrading to a ducted venting one. (And eep, did you know you were supposed to clean those filters? Did I mention six years? *cringe*)

Share your vast knowledge on the subject of range hoods, will you? Save me at least this one decision from the otherwise random and capricious impulses that have governed most of the key decisions to date!

I like cutting the grass. It’s a reasonably mindless chore that takes physical but not mental effort, and you can do it outside. When you’re cutting the grass, it’s just you and the lawnmower and the great outdoors, and nobody is yanking on your leg asking for a cookie or to wipe their bum.

We moved in to the new house in mid-October last year. I’d ordinarily mow the lawn up until November on a every-week-or-three basis, but with the move craziness and 400 metric tonnes of leaves to rake up, cutting the grass was simply not much of a priority. Through the winter, I’d ponder the lawn, wondering how long it might take to cut it (the guy we bought from said an hour for the front and an hour for the back, but he’s deceived us on enough things that I wasn’t willing to take his word for it) and looking forward to it with a bit of a sense of adventure. Don’t laugh now, it only gets worse from here.

As it rained and rained and rained through April and May, the grass grew unfettered, and I played with my computer researching cordless versus electric versus gas mowers. I started out thinking we would invest in a cordless, but the more I read about them the more they seemed designed for the postage-stamp-sized suburban lawn we’d left behind in Barrhaven, not the 1/2 acre of wilderness that comprises the lot in Manotick.

By the time we had a three-hour interval with no rain, I still hadn’t made up my mind about which kind of lawnmower we needed to acquire (and was still balking at the $500+ price tag for a cordless mower) so I hauled out our old electric. The 50 foot cord wasn’t going to come close to giving us full coverage, but my dad scrounged up a manky old cord from his collection and brought it over for us. It had only a few places where the insulation had been worn through to expose the wires inside, and since it was a good 100′ or more, I deemed it only moderately unsafe and thus entirely good enough.

Remember last Thursday, that day when right around 4 pm Mother Nature said, “Oh, you want summer? Here you go!” and turned up the heat and the sunshine? Yeah, that day got me all excited, so right after work/school I hauled out the manky cord and the electric mower with blades that hadn’t been sharpened since we got it five years ago and set to work. Except the manky cord had this weird coupling that didn’t fit into the protected end of the lawnmower cord, so I had to get out the 50 foot cord and attach it to the lawnmower, but then attach the other end to the manky cord so I could mow beyond two rows in front of the porch, and while there was a feather of concern about the elevated risk of electrocution it was quashed by the anvil of stubborn determination to mow the goddamn lawn before it reached the height of my knees.

And so, abused lawnmower tethered to the house by not one but two manky cords, I gripped the dead man switch and pressed the button and off I rumbled down the first row. Little did I know that my right hand would eventually atrophy into a hideous claw around that dead man switch. But I’m getting ahead of myself and really, we’ve only barely begun. (Wait, don’t go, there’s more!)

So the first row went okay, and the second, but as I moved away from the garden in front of the porch and toward the road, the grass got thicker, and thicker, and thicker, and the lawnmower started complaining. Despite the fact that my rows had narrowed from nearly the width of the lawnmower to half the width of the lawnmower to the width of the inside wheel of the lawnmower, its little engine chuffed said, “Please, could you go a little slower? I’m having a spot of difficulty in keeping up.” So I slowed my pace a bit, and a bit more, and a bit more, until I was moving at a pace that was only a little bit slower than continental drift, but I still had to stop every row or so when the lawnmower choked up completely.

The first time it happened, I carefully unplugged the cord (Elmer the Safety Elephant says ‘Safety First!’), turned the lawnmower over, and disgorged three bales’ worth of grass from its guts, then carefully uprighted it and plugged it back in. With each subsequent time it happened, I took less and less care, until I was flipping the damn thing over like a coin, cramming a stick into its inner workings before the blades had even come to rest.

Did I mention the broken handle on the mower? We lost a bolt maybe a year or so ago, and so while the handle holds together mostly pretty well, it has the alarming habit of collapsing randomly, just when you’re not expecting it to.

And so it went, for about half an hour, until I got to *insert ominous music here* — the culvert.

I’m such a suburbanite, I’m not even entirely sure that culvert is the right word. I suppose “drainage ditch” is another good term for it. In the winter months, I thought it was grand when it provided the boys with our own private tobogganing hill:

In summer months, however, it turns into a yawing green canyon of death. I tried running the mower the length of it, but came precariously close to tumbling over sideways when the slope approached a near vertical. Eventually I had to resort to hunkering down a few steps down from the apex and easing the lawnmower down to the bottom of the ditch, then yanking it back up again as I scrambled to keep my footing and clamber back to the top of the slope, all while maintaining a death-grip on the dead man switch with one hand and frantically swiping the manky cord out of my way with the other. I only slipped and fell once, but I did let the mower tumble into the ditch a few times when gravity had the upper hand and I needed to sacrifice the mower’s momentum to save my own. And there’s a slight chance that I may have flung it into the ditch in exasperation, just once or twice.

It was, to say the least, not pretty. What had seemed like a glorious early summer day had quickly deteriorated into a humid inferno. The only thing thicker than the grass were the mosquito swarms, but the grass was SO thick at the bottom of the ditch that I had to contort the (shifty) handle down flat to the ground beneath my feet (while trying not to lose my balance on the slope and fall ass-over-teakettle into the ditch) so I could give the blades a bit of air so they’d keep turning. And I worked my way methodically up and down that godforsaken ditch that way, cursing lawns and lawnmowers and manky cords and broken handles and mosquito and the sweat running into my eyes in increasingly colourful language. What knocking a tree into the neighbour’s pool during a windstorm did for my introduction to the back neighbours was nothing to the impression I must have made on the front neighbours during the debacle that was my first attempt to cut the lawn.

Eventually, I had to stop as I had a meeting scheduled with a new caregiver (a story to be told another day) but Beloved had wisely ordered pizza and fed the kids as I’d cut and cursed the grass. After two hours of sweaty labour, I’d mowed only two-thirds of the front lawn. Jesus wept, and so did I.

I won’t bore you with the sweaty details of the subsequent session of lawnmowing that weekend. Here’s the highlights: I started cutting just after lunch on Saturday afternoon, picking up where I left off (and falling into a wretched heap when I realized that the grass had grown enough to need recutting in just TWO DAYS) and finishing just before dinner. By the time I was rolling through the last few rows in the back yard, I felt like a marathoner crossing the finish line. I was shaky and weepy and clean out of curses. It had taken me FIVE hours over two days to cut the whole lawn.

I spent the evening on Saturday nursing my aching biceps and back and trying to massage some feeling into the hand that had permanently taken on the shape of the dead man switch on the lawnmower handle, and researching new electric lawnmowers. I’m still afraid of gas mowers and we can’t afford a lawn tractor. I read that a cordless mower holds a charge for 30 – 45 minutes at a go and guffawed; surely the environmental and financial impact of a shredded cord or two each year is considerably better than that of the five or six lawnmower batteries we’d need to get the job done.

Personally, I’m thinking the best solution is a goat. Beloved expressly forbade me from raising chickens, but he never once said I couldn’t buy a goat…