Top of the Hill.....!!!!!!! ....now with pics

Oh my gosh, I've been waiting for this day for SO long!! We got to the top of the hill in the kitchen remodel today.

It's been so long, and so very hard. I never dreamed setting an apron front / farm sink would be so difficult. (I'd never done one before, but I've done hundreds of kitchen sinks...this one was like no other) "Little Bear" said she wanted one of these, and so I said we would make it so. Oh...my...gosh...it was NOT easy! I spent nearly 8 hours grinding on the pieces to level the sink. Worse, the sink itself weighed 190 lbs! So, it wasn't easy to set.

We have worked harder than a couple of poor Mexicans over the past few days. Elbows sore, knees sore...everything sore. I feel like I've been in a fight. There was nothing easy about any of this.... BUT...

Now, I think we're on the 'down-hill'. All we have to to is install the stove/range and get the vent hood installedd

NOTE - Words of wisdom...if you ever want to completely remodel a kitchen, change everything, then crawl across big jagged rocks for about 2 months before you start! Because, honest, that will be easier than what you are about to do!!

P.S. - Fingers split, bone points hurting, toes, elbows, knees fingers...everything...HURTS!

BUT...we got it DONE!!!

YAY!!!!! YAAY!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!

Pics or it didn't happen.

a reply to: Muninn

I don't really care if people think it happened,or didn't happen. I did actually take some pictures tonight, but I'm too tired to post them (because posting pictures on ATS is hard). Mayvbe tomorrow.

I'm finding it even hard to type right now.

Yes, pics, my wife and I are soon to remove walls, change the stair direction for more floor space, build new walls and make/install cabinets, rewire and new lights/switches etc. Gunna be a nightmare but look good in the end. a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Pics or it didn't happen.

pics of flyingclaydisc wearing an apron?
i think we all need to see that.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Congratulations, a hard battle you guys won! I am so excited for you two. I still want to know the first meal you and your Chef make.

Well, we need the pictures of the completed project.

I have put in quite a few sinks, only one cast iron, with a big deep tub, a small Garbage disposal center sink, a narrow normal seven inch sink, and a formed in place drainboard. It was a kohler and it weighed lots, a two man job to pull it in and out. The whole counter had to be removed under the five foot long sink, but the dishwasher still fit under the drainboard that was over it. I don't know if I would want to put that into a marble top.

By quite a few I mean maybe twenty kitchen sinks, I only did a few kitchens a year usually.

a reply to: rickymouse

Heh, I just wish I'd have paid more attention when my wife ordered the sink. We had looked at over a hundred different varieties, and in the end I just told her to pick out the one she liked the most. She had all the dimensions down pat, so I had complete faith in her judgement. Then she just asked me to pick between two colors, so I picked the gray and went back to what I was doing.

The shipping arrival date came and we'd had a big snowstorm the night before, so when the truck showed up I offered to give the FedEx guy a hand because he couldn't get all the way up to the house. The sink was on a pallet, and I went to move the pallet closer to the back of the truck. It wouldn't budge. I actually asked the guy if he had maybe screwed the pallet down to the deck of the truck (so it wouldn't slide around)! LOL! He said he didn't think so, but they loaded him with a forklift so he checked the lading ticket. Shipping weight...250 lbs! HOLY CRAP! (no wonder it wouldn't budge when I tried to tug it a little bit with one hand!) Getting it up into the garage was 'fun' in the snow.

The wife had also ordered these heavy duty stainless adjustable sink supports. They were kind of expensive and I didn't really think we'd need them; I was just planning on using blocking in the cabinet instead. When I saw how much the sink weighed, those brackets turned out to be a solid gold idea! And then, when I got to leveling that sink in the cabinet those brackets paid for themselves 100x over! Absolutely brilliant! (Kudos to my beautiful bride!)

The kitchen still looks a complete disaster, but here's a quick pic of the sink installed. I had to make some temporary countertops out of 3/4" ACX plywood and then jerry-rig a way to mount the faucet temporarily because the quartzite fabricator couldn't come measure for the countertop until the sink was in. So, it will probably be about 3 weeks (or more) before we get the final countertop in.

Still have to finish up the corner cabinet and put the tile backsplash in. You can see where we had to remove the 1" thick full height granite backsplash because all the outlet boxes still need to have the extension rings removed and retrimmed.



And, I've posted this picture before, but I'm posting it again so you can see the color of the quartzite being used. Pictured is the island, but the same quartzite will be used where the temporary countertop is now. The picture doesn't show it well, but the quartzite is actually this green and grey color. Also in this picture you can see the old black granite and granite backsplash which has all been removed now. This is where the temp countertop is in the first picture.



ETA - And if you look carefully you may also notice the 24" cabinet to the right of hte dishwasher has also been switched out in favor of a 30" cabinet, and the area to the right of this cabinet is where the refrigerator is now.

Nice work!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Almost there....just a couple more years.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Heh, let's hope not! I can see daylight now...finally. Range, hood, gas line work and HVAC gets done this coming Wednesday. Then I've got a couple more cabinets to set, the tile work to do, some misc. electrical work and re-finishing the floor. After that, final trim out and I should be pretty close.

Probably going to redo the lighting at some point, but that will be pretty easy.

Then....it's off to tearing up the living room!

ETA - How long did yours take from start to finish?

Looking good FCD

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
ETA - How long did yours take from start to finish?

Started in April of 2018, it was up and running by the beginning of August and all the final part, the ceiling, went up in September because they screwed up the order and it should have been in long before that. So about 4 months.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Love it so far!!!
And the color of the quartzite

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

That's pretty good. How much did you do yourself vs. having a contractor do?

Ours has been closer to a year, but we're doing the majority of the work ourselves (carpentry, plumbing, electrical, cabinetry, tile, floors and finish carpentry). The only parts I contracted out were the HVAC/gas line (gas line in particular because that's a special license required by Code), and the quartzite fabrication because I don't have the tools for that.

Unfortunately, I can't dedicate full time to working on nothing but the kitchen so it's a lot slower. Plus, we needed to do the work in (3-4) phases:

1. Built-in cabinet wall / hutch / buffet.

2. Island (demo old and build new + electrical)

3. Major appliances, sink and new cabinet line-up. (all new plumbing, in-wall electrical and sheetrock work, plus make-ready work for mechanical, oh and tile)

(4.) Floors and final trim out (really more like 'phase 3a')

I think one of the big differences with yours is the heated floor. That's a nice touch, but we have a really nice full-thickness oak floor and wanted to keep that. And, we've never really had a problem with cold floors in this house. BTW...was your house heating system already hot water, or did you put in a special dedicated system for just the floor?

The two things I really dig in your kitchen are the tin ceiling and that old coal stove. We've got a vaulted area off the end of the island by the hutch/buffet. My original plan was to do a natural finish beadboard ceiling in this area, but after seeing your tin ceiling, I don't know.

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

Thanks!

Yeah, the quartzite really is cool. We were going through slabs at the stone warehouse and saw that slab and it was like...that's the one! So we bought two consecutive whole slabs just to be sure we had enough.

It was kind of funny too, they were the last slabs we looked at. We had already picked out the slab we wanted, but they only had one. It was spectacular, not like anything I've ever seen before (I'll try to post a pic of that one). They wanted $15k for the one they did have left. We had a list of ones we wanted to see, and we couldn't find one on our list. The warehouse couldn't find it either, but it showed it was in stock. So they got the slab crane out and started pulling slabs. Low and behold they had stacked one improperly and the last ones we wanted to see were behind it. They had the edges marked, but it was hard to see. As we thought about it, these would work out better overall.

This is a picture of the first one we had selected...(pretty crazy and spectacular, huh?) In the end though, we would have had a harder time with the colors of this one. Where you see the template is just an example of the average sized countertop in comparison to a whole slab. The island, for example is two of those templates high plus another foot and about a foot longer, than the full width of the template and we would have wanted to take that out of roughly the upper middle-left of this slab which would have meant we definitely would have needed two. The template is placed about where we wanted to have our countertops cut from.



ETA - One of the benefits of living in CO is it seems to be the main distribution hub for all the stone in the US, I guess because Denver is so centrally located. Once the stone gets unloaded off the ships it gets trucked directly to Denver where all the big stone warehouses are (I guess so they're not trucking the stuff all over the place). So, contractors and fabricators get first dibs on the best stone in the USA before it gets picked over as it gets further away from Denver. These warehouses are amazing, like a mile long and a half mile wide, with racks and racks with stacks of consecutive slabs. It's something few people ever get to see.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
That's pretty good. How much did you do yourself vs. having a contractor do?

I did zero. I let Home Depot handle all of it except the appliance install which PC Richard did. I wanted no part of the labor side of it.
The house came with hot water baseboards so it was no issue teeing off that for the floors. Worked out well, keeps the rooms warm where we did it and the dust from floating all over.

The tin ceiling was what really tied it all together, it makes a modern kitchen fit with the age of the house without looking too antique-ish.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

The one you pictured was $15K?!?!?!?!
It is awesome, but I can see where it would be a bit hard to work with in a kitchen.
More like a work of art LOL.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Almost there....just a couple more years.

I am a builder, it is unusual for a guy who fixes others houses to have his own home completely done. I need a couple of pieces of trim on the windows, but we have only lived in the house I built for twenty nine years. I refuse to finish them because then I would not have anything left to fix, it would lessen my incentive to stay alive and finish what I started.