The Kitchen Remodel: Finished!

Hurray, our kitchen is back to normal and better than ever!  I finished the paint yesterday and Kaylee made a curtain for the window today.

Click here for Kitchen Remodel: Part 1   Click here for Kitchen Remodel: Part 2

Here it is:

Of course, now I'm self conscious about how the ceiling looks.  It's not nearly so noticeable in person (the flash highlights the patches).  We want to get new lighting, with better placement, which means that I'll have to re-do some of the ceiling anyway and will finish it then.

As an added bonus to the way we cut the cabinets, this upper cabinet now looks like it belongs there!  It was so strange before.

Here are the before and after photos:

The Kitchen Remodel, Part 2

I was hoping that by this date I would have been posting final photos of the progress, but here we are and it hasn't changed much.  The small amount it has changed is significant, though.

We have been waiting, spinning our wheels for almost 2 weeks, waiting for the techs to come move our gas line so we could continue tiling the backsplash.  I have fussed over the plaster and paint a lot, but we were at a standstill on everything else. 

In the mean time, we did finish a project that I've been meaning to do for some time: plumbing hot water into the laundry room.  Kaylee now has hot water for washing for the first time in 4 years!  So it wasn't a complete waste.

This machine had never known the joy of a hot bath, but that has all been made right, now. ;)

Anyhow, the gas guys came last night to drop off their tools, then spent all day today (8:30am-6:30 pm, minus a 2 hour lunch break) changing the gas line.  Now we no longer have an ugly yellow-orange pipe in our kitchen!

Unfortunately, my dad and mom leave on Friday, so we only have two days left to work together.  I was hoping we could finish it and have a week to sit around or find something fun to do.  Oh well, it's good to work, too.

Here's how it looks tonight:

It's almost there!

The silver handle above the stove is the required shut off

Kitchen Remodel, Part 1

The house we live in is the oldest one on the Etnos property and through the years it has been updated, remodeled, fixed, and modified by whomever happened to be living here at the time.  After leaving it pretty well alone for over a year, we've decided to dirty our hands on it as well.

It started with finishing the guest bedroom upstairs, a project I did in December and January during the summer break.  We have been tossing around ideas to remodel the kitchen for a year now and decided to take advantage of my dad being here.

The biggest problem with the kitchen was that the cabinets were not built for this space.  They came from somewhere else and were just made to work.  It wasn't terrible, but there were several things about it that were annoying and made it feel like it was half-done.

The fridge was in front of the window at the left

The biggest problem was the placement of the fridge:  in front of the window, blocking the door (visually), and about 12 feet from the oven.  Also, our fridge has the hinge on the right and cannot be swapped, so it opens into the doorway instead of into the kitchen.

In reality, it needed updating anyway:  the Formica was stained and had holes in it and the sink wasn't sealed well and was starting to rot the cabinet.

We contemplated pulling everything out and having new cabinets built, but decided that it would be best to make the most of what we had.  We threw some ideas around, had some fun with my design software, and decided to go with Kaylee's idea of splitting the corner cabinet and moving everything over.  This is what it should look like, more or less:

The corner cabinet gets split, everything moves left to the doorway, bringing the sink under the window.  The oven moves into the hole created, and the fridge moves over to where the oven was.  It's not perfect, but it puts everything within reach and makes the space look more "finished."

We started on February 26 by getting the counter tops off and having a look at the cabinets, then splitting the corner.

Because I have to juggle my class and academic responsibilities, my dad is actually doing most of the work.  He put backs on the cabinets, rebuilt the corner where we cut it, and made tops for them all.  We looked into installing granite, but it was going to be $1000 and a lot of hassle, so we went the cheaper, easier route of Formica.  We made the tops 4 inches wider than they were, so there's more counter space, leaving a gap in the back.

Corner cab with new side and back

Thankfully, he has lots of Formica experience!

So, here we are a month later, with only 2 weeks left to work!  At this point, we need to set the tile backsplash, paint, and get the gas line moved.  I have been dedicating myself to plastering the walls in between class work and we have taken some time off to do some gardening and make some changes to the girls' room.

Here's where we're at!

We made the island wider as well, for more work space and so the bar stools fit better

Project: Baby Wheelbarrow

Before I tell about this project, I have a confession to make.  It's something I'm not proud of and is an area I want to actively improve in:

I grind my welds.

I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but  the fact is that I know people that strike an arc and leave beautiful little rivulets of newly-formed metal in their wake.  I'm a fair hand with a MIG welder, but when I stick weld, it looks more like what my chickens leave all over their roost.  Most of the problem is just inexperience, but it doesn't help that I have terribly unsteady hands.  I've noticed that my technique is 100% better when I'm working with the back half of the stick.

So I grind them.  I'm sorry.

Now then, about the project.  Almost a year ago, Kaylee noticed a tiny little wheelbarrow hanging out near the house of our friends Willy and Eli, just a stone's throw away, here on campus.  It looked rusty and beat up and the wheel was broken.  She thought it would be fun for the girls to use, since they were making a little cash (from me) by picking up fallen mangoes, and encouraged me to talk to them about it.

As it was, after I cut off the broken wheel and axle

I asked Willy about it and he said that he had found it out and about and had grabbed it to fix up for the kids.  He said that I could take it.  Well, with the busyness of the school year and the other projects that I've had to do, combined with the quality of my welding, I kept putting it off until this week.  It's mango season again and it would be the last opportunity for Lydia to use it, because it is so small!

I found a new wheel in the hardware market a couple weeks ago and finally got to work on it this week. 

It's actually in better shape than I originally thought.  As I gave it the wire wheel treatment, I realized 2 things:  that it actually had very little rust (just funky paint) and that it was obviously made locally.

The biggest problem is that I wanted it to sit level, so I decided to cut the struts off the front and weld the axle directly to the frame.  However, the frame is a very thin-walled pipe and the axle is a piece of 5/8" bolt. Not an easy job!

My awesome welding station.  The key is to not drop molten steel into your boots. ;)

See, I told ya.  I grind my welds.

I made a terrible mess of the first side and ended up patching up quite a bit of the pipe that I burned out.  I learned my lesson, though, and the other side went lickety-split!

I painted it green and black and turned it over to the 4-year old:

Junior Tinkers: Pink Paint!

Our organization has been going through some changes here that involved sorting through a lot of old tools and supplies to downsize.  In the process, I came across about a quart of pink paint!

The girls' school table is a rough beast that I bought down in the Cancha and then whacked the legs off of, over a year ago.  Over the past year it has cracked and twisted and gotten colored on.  We decided it was the perfect place to put pink paint!

While Kaylee was at the church's ladies' retreat, I had 3 days by myself with the girls.  I thought a special father-daughter activity would be a good highlight to the weekend, so while the girls napped, I pulled out my angle grinder (from the same place as the paint!) and put its sanding disc to work on the top.  It's too fast for a really good finish, but it got the job done.

Then, when the girls were up from their rest, it was time to get the paint out!

They wore some of my work shirts

I had to clip their shirts at the shoulders, so they would stay on!

On Sunday, the four of us were getting ready to go to church without Kaylee, but while I had all three girls in the shower, the power went out.  Remember, our shower is an instant-hot electric "widow maker" (I wrote about that here), so it went cold fast!  I had to rinse them off with cold, which didn't go well.  Then, while they dried and got warm in front of the propane heater, I hunted for, found, and fixed the short circuit that caused the problem.

By that time, it was too late to make it to church, so we did church at home, with the new table!  Because of the situation we're in with our landlord and moving, we talked about and colored the story of Paul and Silas and their response to hard times in the Philippian jail, and the blessing that came from it.