Final pictures

Somehow, moving back into the kitchen, music room, and dining room; enjoying home-cooked meals; and cleaning up the entire first floor post-construction has been even more time-consuming than camping in the construction zone was. But I finally found a free hour or so to put together a final set of Before and After pictures for the kitchen project, which is now complete! See the top link in the Photo Collections at the right.

The remains of the project

This week, Jon's been hiking somewhere, and George put in a few half days doing some little stuff. He sealed the backsplash, put a second coat of sealer on the floor, installed oak trim around the hearth, and did some cleanup.

Jon'll be back on the job on Monday. I leave tomorrow for another week in North Carolina, and I hope that when I get back, the place will be, as Jon promises, unrecognizable.

The big things that remain are to install the hardwood flooring in the music room, sand and refinish the hardwood in the dining room, tile the entry way, and install baseboards in all of the above. Jon ought to be able to get a big jump on these while I'm gone.

There's also a jillion little things. Here's another of those "Honey-Do" lists, this time written by me and Jon, for Jon and George. George has already knocked some of his off.

George

• install glass in cabinets
• seal backsplash
• outlet plates
• outlet plate for junction box at old subpanel
• run speaker cables from living room to music and dining rooms (which will involve running conduit outside the house under the part of the living room that's cantilevered over my carport, into the crawlspace, and up through the floors)
• finish outlets including switch in upstairs bedroom that's wired backwards (or screwed in upside-down, whichever)
• clean back deck
• rest of handles
• trim around hearth, under sill
• install knife racks (I had an 18" rack and a 12" rack, and we decided two 18" racks would look better, so I had to order a second rack--it has just arrived)
• dining, music room ceiling lights
• trim piece at threshold
• phone jack
• pot rack
• glass shelves-->bar
• finish ceiling @ hood
• paint
• seal floor 2d coat

Jon

• hardwood
• tile
• scribe
• dishwasher door squeak
• get a shelf for under lazy susan garbage?

A kitchen is born

Last week, Jon and George got my kitchen working at last. George finished up the undercabinet light valances, most of the other misc. bits of trim, outlets, and switches, and Jon hooked up my faucets, disposal, drains, dishwasher, and refrigerator. On Friday, the two last big things remained: the range and the hood. These were big in more ways than one.

First, the range presented a surprise. Oakland code requires that gas hookups be made in an adjacent cabinet, so that you can switch off the gas without pulling out the range. Wolf design requires that gas hookups be made behind the range. So Jon had to replumb the gas line--argh!

Next, the range is huge and heavy. It has legs in front but giant casters in the back, so that somewhat normal humans can move the thing, but it's 36" wide (just under a meter) and therefore had to enter the kitchen sideways. That meant that Jon and George had to roll it as close as possible on a dolly, then ease it onto cardboard sheets, then sort of slide it over the cardboard sheets until it was far enough in that they could finish the job on the rear casters. It's a good thing it didn't have to go very far.

The hood presented some challenges of its own. I'll spare you the details of how complicated it was to install the inner duct into the ceiling duct inside the chimney while attached to the fan-and-damper mechanism and while attached to the underside of the hood (the part you see when gazing up into it while cooking), because I'm only vaguely aware of all the little gotchas, but it involved lots of things that all had to be done first, so that what they ended up with was a large, clumsy, intricate contraption that one person had to raise up into the ceiling ductwork while the other tried to find access to the screws that would secure them.

I stayed in my office most of the time.

The hood is supposed to extend to 30-36" (just under a meter) from the cooking surface, and it was right at 30". The problem is that 30" off the stovetop (even given my higher-than-usual 37" counter and stove height) is about 6" below the top of my head. We all agreed that it was way too low--it looked monstrous, dominated the line of sight, and was perfectly positioned to do skull damage to anyone of Vangian height.

Jon and George suggested taking out the 12" chimney section and hang it directly from the ceiling, at 42".

I called Vent-A-Hood and explained my predicament to their rep. He said that, especially over a grill, it really did need to be in that 30-36" range for a 100% capture of all the smoke, vapor, and grease. He suggested that I could order a custom-fabricated shorter chimney extension, but he didn't know how much that would cost (presumably a lot more than the $280 standard 12"er) and did know it would be at least 6-8 weeks to get it. I asked how bad he really thought it would be to move it up to 42". He said that, off the record, he thought it would be fine, so I gave Jon and George the go-ahead to take out the chimney section.

An hour or so later, it was done. I wish I had pictures of George holding the whole thing from below, both arms overhead, looking a lot like Atlas, while Jon maneuvered around him to screw the thing into the ceiling, but I'm pretty sure they both would have killed me if I'd gotten out my camera at that moment. Instead I took a turn at holding one side of the hood so George could shake some circulation back into one arm. About the time I should have moved to the other side, Jon had finished up overhead, and George dropped his arms in relief.

At this point, Jon had to rush off--he was already late getting home to leave on a week's vacation hiking in the Sierras--and while George did some clean-up, I made my first meal in the kitchen. I was rushing off to an emergency opera gig--my friend Alicia had gotten flu, so I was sight-reading Gounod's Romeo and Juliet in Walnut Creek--so I didn't have time for much, but I did get out a skillet, some butter, and some eggs, and I made me and George the best darned plates of scrambled eggs I've had in a long time.

I spent most of last weekend moving into the kitchen. Only one size of drawer/door handles had arrived in time to be installed last week, so most of my doors and drawers have blue masking tape handles for now, but the kitchen was fully functional at last.

In a later post, I'll wax ecstatic about how nice it is to cook in this gorgeous kitchen. For now, I leave it to your imagination. Place yourself in these pictures:

Moved in!

Let's cut to the chase

I love my contractor.

I almost can't believe Jon's fastidiousness. It has really come out in his tilework for the backsplash. Every time he comes to an outlet or switch, he makes incredibly fussy, perfect cuts around it, even though the edges of the tiling will be covered by plates. Each time the backsplash turns a corner, he does beautiful mitred cuts to match the tile edges up, and then he picks up the pattern on the new plane by repeating the fractional tiles at the edge of the previous plane. Look at pictures to see what I mean: whatever part of the diamond is on the left, he repeats on the right, so that each corner has perfect symmetry. He also lays the pattern out such that it's perfectly centered on whatever is logically the centerpoint of the wall. See the picture over the sink: there is a column of whole tiles perfectly centered in the frame created by the cabinetry, and the pattern goes out from that center.

Yesterday I came home from work to find that he'd almost finished the backsplash along the back (sink) wall. He had one tile with a curved corner cut-out to wrap around the higher bar-top, and the margin between the tile and the granite was maybe half again bigger than the usual grout margin. He said to me, "I might have cut that one corner a little wide. It's a little bit too far off the granite. I'll redo that if you want me to."

He was right about it being a smidgin too wide, but in the context--a backsplash tile that is under a cabinet and will probably be blocked from view by a telephone or something in real life--it didn't seem like a problem. I said, "I'll leave it up to you to decide, Jon; I'm okay with it either way."

He walked in, looked at it one more time, and said, "Aaagghh--it's too wide. I'm going to fix it!" With that, he ripped the offending tile off the wall and scraped off the thinset. The man is fussier than I am!

The last activity yesterday was for George to put the first layer of lacquer on the kitchen floor. I've chosen a lacquer called "Wet Look," which gives the richest, brightest, shiniest color, to maximize the color and texture of the slate. The floor looks amazing.

I came home today to find Jon's beautiful, completed backsplash, with all but the newest section grouted. The intricacy of it is already a thing of beauty, but I can't wait to see it fully grouted and lacquered. See it yourself in the:

Newest pictures!

Almost there!

Old pictures

Two and a half months
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!

George has installed about half of the switches and outlets and the rest of the light valances are now in place. A few more scribe bits need to go in around the edges, and the glass (now resting in the living room) needs to be put in, and then the cabinets will be done, except for the handles, which should come in Thursday or Friday.

George is off tomorrow, but Russell is coming in, and Jon plans for them to get the big old hood installed, along with the range, refrigerator, faucets, and if time the dishwasher. His goal is to have the kitchen functional before he leaves for a week hiking in the Sierras. It's hard to believe that by this weekend I might actually be moving back into the kitchen. What a luxury to have a full, functioning kitchen again after all this time!

I wonder if I'll remember how to buy normal groceries?

Cutting to that promised chase, my point is this: I am fortunate indeed. Most people hate their contractors by this time. I was a little worried that I would, too--at the very least, I worried that I would be at wit's end handling delays and stupid little mixups. I worried more about how I would deal with Jon if he did something awful or seemed to be cheating me in some way. I did not want to have to yell at a friend or, even worse, start playing legal games (which is part of why I went to the trouble of having my lawyer friends next door vet the contract).

Jon himself warned me that by this point in the project I would be so sick of seeing him, his mess, and all the delays that I would want to strangle him, and he would probably want to strangle me. I'm a project manager. I know that he was right: odds were that we'd be good and sick of each other by now. But the truth is, his work is so good, meticulous, and tasteful, I just want to hug him most days. Several times we've sat down with a glass of wine at the end of the day and enjoyed a good talk about music, or life, or whatever. He's a total sweetheart, he's doing a beautiful job, and I'm a ridiculously lucky remodeling client and friend.

Self-medicating

David, my violinist, has been incredibly patient about this whole ordeal. (Doesn't everybody have a violinist?) (Just kidding. He's my housemate who plays violin, and he's the cats' beloved uncle.) He has some of the same incentive I do--that we'll have an amazing kitchen (and dining room and music room) when it's all done--but as my tenant, he shouldn't really have to put up with this kind of crap. He pays rent for a livable living space, and that's not exactly what it's been around here lately. Before the work started, we agreed on a reduction in rent to acknowledge his higher costs for eating out, buying ready-to-eat groceries, and so on, but still, it's a pain, and he's been a saint about it.

Recently, though, David commented that it's been getting harder. He'd expected it to get easier as we start to see it looking more like a kitchen, but he's found that it just gets harder.

I, on the other hand, am finding that it's getting easier as the end draws nearer. I suppose it's partly because now I can see that it will end some day--see it, not just know it--and partly because it's exciting to see how beautifully it's all turning out.

I think I'm also getting more used to camping in the house, and I've drastically lowered my culinary expectations for the time being. My main gourmet effort these days is to make many, many pots of coffee for Jon, George, and me. I eat lots of salads (assembled in the loo-kitchenette) and cold leftover grilled meats, and on weekends for a special treat I scramble eggs on the campstove. I've gotten in a habit of hard-boiling a batch of eggs for the rest of the week's breakfasts, and lunches I just sort of scrounge from cheese, cold-cuts, and so on. If I do eat out or pick up take-out, I make sure to order too much food so that I'll have leftovers, and believe me, that's pretty exciting.

The real difference, though, might be alcohol.

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H whose conceit was that a MovieTone News reporter was filming a slice of life at the 4077th. He asked Hawkeye (or was it the Padre?) whether the MASHers drank too much. The response was something like, "You should be asking, do we drink enough?" His quip makes sense to me now.

As I wrote a while back, my colleague Katrina in Boston suggested that I should infuse vodka with some of those berries.

(Raspberries? blackberries? Turns out there's a zillion indistinguishable [to me] species of the genus whateverus, and while mine look more like raspberries than many of the other choices, supposedly raspberries don't grow in this half of the country. I'm ready to throw in the towel. I'm calling them Montclairberries until somebody else figures it out. Calling all botanists!)

After a few weeks, I had a rich, dark purplish stuff that I strained off into a different bottle and threw in the freezer. So now it's a hard purple slush, and every so often I urge a few inches of it into a glass and enjoy some kind of Montclairberry Cosmo Slurpee which tastes so good I then have to urge a few more inches of it into my glass...

And when you're "cooking" in a half bathroom and salads with leftover grilled meat or reheated Thai are fine dining, you need a glass of wine, that's all there is to it. When I bought the plastic-jug vodka to make the Montclairberry stuff, a new brand of... wait for it... wine in a box caught my eye, and I thought, "Why not?" It seemed about right--camping wine for camping cooking in my construction zone. I'm eating weird things off paper plates, when I'm lucky. This is a time for alcohol on tap, not wine snobbery. I bought three boxes--a Black Box Chardonnay, a Black Box Merlot, and a Handy (white box) Shiraz. I put the Chardonnay in the fridge, and the other two I put upstairs on my bathroom counter. I know--wine ten feet from my bed doesn't sound like such a healthy thing, but this is temporarily The Apartment.

It's not bad stuff. Really, it's not.

So last week, after David and I had been commiserating about the situation, I pointed out to him that he wasn't drinking enough. With that, I drew him a glass of box wine, and we toasted the much-awaited day that we have a real kitchen again.

As for the rest of you, you really ought to plan a visit to come taste Frozen Montclairberry Cosmos soon, while the bottle lasts. Bring take-out for extra credit.

Granite and ranges and tiles, oh my!

Jon was right when he said things would start seeming fast--they sure have. I've been a bad blogger again/still, so I have some catching up to do.

Wednesday two of the Granite Guys came back to finish up the granite work, cutting out the bar sink, drilling faucet, airgap, and soap dispenser holes, fitting the other slabs, fitting the window sill, and gluing all of them down. Jon, meanwhile, was scraping, sanding, and staining the side pieces of the wooden fireplace frame, since the granite would be placed right over the top of them, replacing the front wooden pieces but not completely covering the messed-up side pieces. (This is too hard to explain without a martini and a lot more effort, so just look closely at the before and after pictures if you really care.)

Speaking of pictures...

New pictures!

Two and a half months

Old pictures

Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!

A few hours later, while Granite Guys were getting started on the fireplace, Delivery Guys rolled up in an eighteen-wheeler to deliver the range, hood, and microwave. Of course, I couldn't be happy with a range normal humans could lift; I had to get the massive 36" Wolf complete with grill, which weighs approximately a gazillion pounds (about a jillion kilos, for my European readership) and is awkward as hell. Somehow, through, three guys and a handtruck had rolled that sucker down the street and up my steep driveway and humped it up twenty-five steps and around four corners to my frontdoor. It wasn't as awkward a shape as the massive fridge Jon and Manuel had struggled with several months ago, and they'd removed every last removable part to get the weight down, but we were still impressed at how handily Delivery Guys handled it. A dozen trips later, they'd also carried up the massive hood, the little teeny microwave, and all the miscellaneous range parts they'd set aside.

In a few more hours, Granite Guys finished up with the fireplace, and Jon sent them on their way. While they were clumping down the front stairs, though, I thought to double-check that the cover for the natural gas log starter valve doohickey (just look at the pictures, please) would fit in the hole they'd drilled in the hearth, and it didn't. I suppose it wouldn't be tragic just to leave that doohickey out of the picture, but Gjetost enjoys lifting it with her little paws and tossing it around. Jon called Granite Guy the Blonder back up. He said he'd already his largest hole-saw drill bit, but after about 15 minutes of going at it from slightly different crooked angles, he'd managed to widen it just enough to get the doohickey to fit. I'm sure Gjetost will appreciate it. The fireplace looks spectacular in granite--a tremendous improvement over the icky 1970s tile that seemed to cry out for avocado appliances and a harvest gold Princess telephone.

George didn't come in at all Wednesday; his car had crapped out despite the measures taken Tuesday. It turned out to be recall work, no charge. He hadn't gotten the recall notices, since he's moved too much. Having lived at five addresses in the last ten years (and eight home phone numbers in the last eleven), I know how that feels. There are still some orchestras sending W-2 forms to my previous address in San Francisco. I bought this project (I mean house) five years ago!

Meanwhile Wednesday, Jon finished up the kitchen floor tilework and a few other odds and ends.

Thursday I worked at the office, so I can't do blow-by-blow, but when I got home, I found a painted kitchen, a grouted floor, and some wicked impressive tile-cuts.

Oh, yes: grout. Remember my mentioning the countless details that I wouldn't have even thought of, much less gotten right? On Wednesday, Jon had brought in some grout color samples to look at, and he was recommending that we go with a dark, muddyish green. At first I was appalled. I figure the goal for grout is that it disappear in neutralness, providing just enough border to neutralize color changes from tile to tile but not to call any attention to its own color. Green grout, even the muddyish green of the sample, seemed way too colorful. I thought we should do a dark grey, like the one I'd used upstairs between the Indian Peacock slate tiles. But when we put the grout-color sample stick thingy between a couple of the Brazilian slate tiles, I could see what Jon meant: in this context, that muddy green is what disappeared. The grey I would have chosen was way too bright and colorful. I went with Jon's advice.

I was both pleased and chagrined to find upon my return home Thursday night that Jon was right. The muddy green looks great--it disappears and becomes the greyesque noncolor I wanted. Actual grey wouldn't have worked. It's really annoying, though, that Jon is right so often.

About those tilecuts: Slate tile is stone. You can only cut it with a diamond-blade in a wetsaw and a lot of patience. These suckers look like table-saws with big old cutting wheels. They're no jigsaw. So if you need weird-shaped cuts, you've got some figuring to do. I've done it, to get those funny little cutouts to go around toilets and faucets and so forth, and it ain't easy. So imagine my delight at getting to watch Jon figure out how to cut beautiful arcs to go around the curved base under the curved corner shelves. Basically you have to cut out the rough shape as well as you can, and then make little radial cuts to the edge as well as you can, break off the little chunklets, and then sort of rub the edge against the spinning blade to smooth it out as well as you can. Pain in the neck!

So Jon did several of those, and I was pretty much ready to bow down as it was. Then I come home last night and find a little stack of tiles that have rectangular cut-outs to go around the outlets, and I'm done for. I have no idea how he could fiddle around to get those right and not wanted to slash his wrists or at least mine. Look closely at those pictures of the backsplash, folks. There's some might impressive saw-work. Oh, and you can't see it, but where the tiles meet at the corners, he's mitred them, freehand, just holding the tiles at the right angle to the blade. He eye-balled bloody mitre-cuts! I can't do a decent mitre cut on a wooden baseboard with a mitre box! This man knows what he's doing.

Today, Jon did the backsplash behind the bar and along the pantry wall. Look closely at those pictures; he came up with a clever way to create a border where the backsplash stops (and figured out a priori where to stop the backsplash).

Meanwhile George installed under-cabinet lights, then put in little baseboards behind the refrigerator, dishwasher, and range. Next he started putting in the light valances (the trim bits that go under the cabinets to cover the under-cabinet lights). They're installed at a little gap from the doors for a cool floating effect.

Jon had an odd idea to install the upper trim bits (essentially these act like baseboards between the cabinets and ceiling) at a similar gap from the ceiling as from the tops of the doors for a subtle but nifty effect where all the upper cabinets seem to float near the ceiling instead of looking attached, instead of installing them flush against the ceiling, which is more normal. It's a funky little detail that I wouldn't have thought of or expected to like, and Kyla (his wife, who was over to do some computer stuff with me) didn't like it, but when we looked at it both ways, I decided to go for it. I got up on the step ladder and held the trim bits each way for Jon to look at from a distance, too, and he also preferred the gappy way. So, gaps it is. You'll have to wait a few days to see the pictures of that, because by now it was quitting time, and here I am at 8:30 finishing up on the blog and getting ready to take some reheated leftover takeout Thai up to the apartment.

Negative delay

Project managers usually keep track of pessimistic things like delay, critical paths, and occasionally in an optimistic (usually fleeting) moment might contemplate "slack," which is how much freedom a given task has to start early or late without affecting the overall outcome of the project. Something so rare that its name is stupid actually happened to the kitchen project today: negative delay. Negative delay is when something fails so badly to be late that it happens early.

(Which reminds me of a witty violist's comment that our particularly bad conductor was so confused he was liable to start telling us we were rushing too slow and dragging too fast. [Yes, there are some witty violists. At least two, maybe three. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.])

Yes, that's right, something started early.

Granite Guys were supposed to come tomorrow (Wednesday), as were Range Delivery Guys, which as it was already had Jon and George hustling yesterday (Monday) to prep the way, but they had a cancellation, so they were coming this morning at 9:30. George and I learned this at 9, when we returned from dropping George's ailing car at the garage down the hill. George and Jon then whipped into a flurry of activity to clear the decks for Granite Guys. I tried to help, but after hauling some cardboard down to the recycling bin, it became clear to me that the best way to help was to get out of the way and go back in my office to work.

Granite Guys didn't actually show up until noon. Were they lost? Doing some emergency quick installation somewhere? Taking a long morning coffee break? Who knows. We don't ask these things.

Anyway, once Granite Guys set to work hauling obscenely heavy slabs of granite (so heavy that the bar-top, which is not glued down yet, feels glued down) up the stairs and fitting them into place, George took up a position at the diamond wetsaw outside, cutting 16 inch slate tiles into quarters and diagonally-cut half quarters (for the backsplash), Jon ran off to buy the under-cabinet flourescent lights, and I ordered pizza and got back to work at my day job as a project manager. At 1:30, George, Jon, Tara (George's Airedale), and I took our pizza break. By 4pm, Granite Guys (three Romanian boys who barely looked old enough to drive the truck, much less do a multi-thousand-dollar granite installation) had put all the kitchen slabs in place, done the cutout for the kitchen sink, and glued those two slabs down. The bar, sill, and other slabs are just sitting in position. Tomorrow they're coming back around 9am ("Or later. Depends," said Blonde Granite Guy) to do the bar sink cutout, fit the sill slab cutout, glue everything down, and then affix the fireplace slabs. It turns out there's enough to do the hearth and face (yay!).

Petty little yucky picky picky picky problems

My friend Deirdre once described a list of "petty little yucky picky picky picky problems" she'd gotten back from French localizers, and the phrase promptly entered my repertoire.

Last week we dealt with several of them, most notably with phone lines.

There was a phone line in my kitchen's ceiling, and it had an amateurish-looking splice job about in the middle of the ceiling: a black electrical-tape job that was yet another of myriad bush-league details Jon et al. have uncovered since starting the job. Black-tape splice jobs are not looked upon with favor by phone guys. George had to add another splice when rewiring the phone jack over the bar, and this he did with Scotch caps, which it turns out are also not looked upon with favor by phone guys.

Enter phone static on Sunday.

Why Sunday? When nothing new was happening? Who knows. But on Sunday I started hearing all kinds of static on my phone line. It got bad enough that it completely disrupted a meeting I was having while working from home on Monday, so I put in a problem ticket with Comcast. Thursday afternoon, Comcast Guy (Brian) came out to look at the problem. Long, long, long, expensive (three hours of labor!) short, there was some kind of problem in the hunk of wiring in the kitchen. Who knows which splice is to blame, or maybe a rat got industrious somewhere between the kitchen and my office, but the solution Jon came up with was to chop that hunk out of the loop, send a new feed to my office (which in turn feeds the upstairs jacks), and try again on the kitchen jack, rewiring it down through the floor (and that peninsula wall) to the feed that Comcast Guy left.

Last two times Comcast came out to service either my phone or ISP service, they either forgot to billl me or service was included. Brian was pretty sure I was going to get billed for that one.

Argh.

“It'll all start feeling faster now”

Jon said that it would all start feeling faster now, and he's right.

The cabinets are now all installed, so Granite Guy came on Friday to measure for the granite. As feared, the job oozed over two slabs into three, so in a twist of the usual "As long as we're at it" syndrome, Jon asked if there was anything else I wanted to do with the extra rock. So we also had Granite Guy measure to put granite on the wide new-dining-room window sill where I've been stacking my mug collection, and to replace the hearth and facing of the fireplace's ugly tile with granite. If there's not enough for the whole fireplace, we'll do just the hearth and then redo the facing in slate. Either way it'll be a big improvement on the baby-shit tan blotchy tile that's there now.

Jon says granite-fabrication will take about a week. He's planning to start in on the tile work, and he's bought a huge pile of slate tile, now resting in my driveway. George has the underlayment work all done, including the front closet and the mouth of the hallway. The hardwood will come next.

You can see all the gorgeous cabinetry in the latest new pictures:
Progress!

Old pictures:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in

George has the puck lights installed. Under-cabinet lights are next.

The glass I'd originally picked out for the upper cabinet door-fronts didn't come tall enough, so I went back to the Stained Glass Garden in Berkeley to pick out glass all over again. This time they had a pattern I liked even better: Rivuletta, with a subtle vertical reeding. Jon ordered the pieces we need and it came out, of course, several hundred more than the allowance in our contract. Yet another change order--ouch. Damned good taste of mine!

It turned out that we just couldn't get the Golden Butterfly granite (at least without an indefinitely long wait for a slow boat to bring it from Brazil), so we're back to uba tuba.

What a difference a kilo makes

Last August I had to have a massive red oak tree behind my house taken out because it was

• starting to lean over the house,
• showing signs of some kind of illness or root problem, and
• likely to keel over and die.

Six hours, a swarm of laborers with chainsaws, and two thousand dollars later, I had a massive pile of red oak chunks (most between 12 and 18 inches in length) next to my driveway.

I remember when I was six, Grampa and Gramma Vang (don't quibble with me about my spelling, the were my grandparents) came to take care of Kevin and me (or torment us, as it felt at the time) while Mom was in the hospital having her gallbladder out. One fine day when I supposed to be napping, I watched Grampa split what seemed like most of the cord of firewood we had out back. It was wintertime and cold enough out that Gramma wouldn't let us go outdoors without our "overshoes" (as she called them, in only one instance of the language barrier we encountered that week--I'd always thought of them as boots), but before long, Grampa was down to his longjohns and dripping with sweat. It was pretty impressive how he usually needed only two or three strokes of the axe to split a log. If I recall accurately, and who knows if I do, these were probably some kind of pine logs about 16 inches long and four to six inches in diameter. Somehow I remember his longjohns being red, too, but that might be a flight of memory's fancy.

Another fine day when I was supposed to be napping, I sneaked out to watch Gramma make lefse, and a vague memory of her kneading the dough turned into a burst of lefse-recipe-interpreting insight three decades later, but that's another story. Ask me at Smørgåsbord V (ack! Sweden!).

Anyway, I figured I was my Grampa's daughter and could split wood if he could, so when Tree Guy and his crew finished up, I googled "wood splitting" and learned that

• red oak is easiest split when green, unlike most species, and
• women are best off with a three-pound axe, a six-pound maul, a wedge or two, and a six-pound sledge-hammer.

I bought some tools, wired myself up to my iPod, and tried to emulate Grampa. I went at it for all I was worth for several weeks, and my housemate David also gave it a try, but neither of us were much good at it. As you saw earlier in the "Two Months In" kitchen photo-spread, my confessional photo of a pathetically-small pile of split wood a year later showed that I was nothing for him to be proud of. Splitting wood is ridiculously hard work.

Almost a year later, I've resumed my splitting efforts and learned that most of the advice I googled up was wrong. Red oak is easier to split when drier. It's got a swirly grain that knots fibers together against all axe-logic, but drying and the action of rot and termites do help. Today I broke my first sledge-hammer (a six-pounder) (I have to admit, I'm feeling a little macho about breaking a sledge-hammer) and went to buy an eight-pound replacement, along with an eight-pound maul, and I've also found that eight pounds is a much better-weighted tool for me.

Women's clothes and bikes don't fit me, either, so why did I think women's axes would?

While I certainly don't want anyone to think it's child's play to throw these eight-pound implements around (the stiff muscles I have everywhere are witness that it's not), that extra two pounds (almost one kilo) make a huge difference. Where before it took four or five strokes, in which I threw the sledge with all my might, to get a splitting wedge visibly further into a log, now a single stroke with the heavier sledge does the job--and I now understand why that googled article recommended a technique where you initially lift with dominant hand gripping at the end of the handle and other hand gripping near the business end, raise the tool overhead, slipping the other hand down toward the dominant hand, and then hurl with all your body's might, eyes focused on the target (either the spot you want the axe or maul to hit or at the splitting wedge in progress). With the six-pound tools, I found it wasn't worth the trouble (damn the backache) to do that whole hand-sliding thing, but then I needed to throw all of myself into each hurl. With the eight-pound tools, the hand-sliding thing helps a lot to stave off exhaustion, and the extra two pounds makes throwing myself into the hurlage more optional.

What a difference a kilo makes! Today I split a log that had frustrated me so much I'd set it aside into three hunks, and I got through several more intimidating hunks before I'd finished my litre of water and hour of iTunes.

I've still got nothing on Grampa, but I like to think all the same that he might be grinning a little curmudgeonly grin from the grave now at the sight of me dripping sweat and throwing myself for all I'm worth at stubborn hunks of red oak, even if I'm not wearing red longjohns while I do it.

Things that are better

Norton seems to be out of the woods. He kept me on pins and needles all weekend, acting normal and seeming to be comfortable, but not pooping from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning. Then he didn't poop again until yesterday. Fortunately his poop Sunday looked normal, and pooping didn't seem to strain him, which was an excellent sign. I talked to the vet late Monday afternoon, and she said if he hadn't passed it or shown distress by now, he must have digested it. So, let's hear it for Norton's digestive system, and for the good digestive thoughts of my readership! Norton and I thank you!

The cabinets are nearly all installed now, and it's starting to look like it'll be a nice kitchen. When the sheetrock was put in, suddenly the space seemed too small for everything that was going to go in, but Jon said the cabinets would make it look roomier again. How this could be defies reason, but he was right. Now that most of them are in, the kitchen actually feels spacious, and the vast expense of alder is gorgeous.

George has finished installing the underlayment in the closet and at the mouth of the hallway.

The old dining room is no longer a chaotic crowd of cabinets, and it too feels more spacious. (The new dining room is full of saws and so on, so it feels far from spacious.)

Cabinets

Political: how much you want to bet Wes Clark ends up on Kerry's?

Kitchen: installation is proceeding. Russell spent all day and Jon spent about half the day working on the bases and base cabinets. About a third of those seem to be sitting in place and presumably are leveled. Nothing's bolted into place yet.

We've discovered the first two noticeable mistakes in the kitchen job:

1. Herrell got the cabinet over the refrigerator backwards. It was supposed to be vertical storage (for cookie sheets, cutting boards, etc.) on the right and regular shelves on the left, but he built them the other way around. Oh, well!
2. Jon and/or George mismeasured where to put one pair of outlets, so I now have two pairs of outlets behind the refrigerator, where I only need one. The other will end up as a junction box with a plain face plate. It's no big deal, though, because there is another pair of outlets a few feet away, and I don't see myself needing four. That corner's going to be pretty cramped and unusable anyway. The base cabinet in that corner has a door only ten inches wide, it's such a screwy corner. Ten inches sounds like a good-sized cabinet door, but it looks pretty puny. I have no idea what kind of stuff will end up in that cabinet, but it will have to be narrow, whatever it is.

Caligari: (let's hope not) the other day Norton (my grey cat) gobbled a chicken bone off my plate before I could stop him. It was about a two-inch piece of wishbone--which is to say, longer and pokier than I can envision finding a harmless path through his cat-sized digestive system. The vet recommended:

• giving him a 3 inch serving of petromalt (I decided that meant daily, so he's had 6 inches) to help bind up the bone in other stuff and move it through as an innocuous, blunt mass


• watching him closely for signs of depressed appetite, crankiness, trouble pooping or peeing, futile attempts to barf, bloody stool, or bloody barf


• bringing him in immediately in case of any of the above


• watching for the bone in his poop or barf

She said most stuff passes within a day or two, so I'm starting to worry, but I've been watching him for about 48 hours now, and there's no sign of anything wrong with him. He's cheerful, up and about, and eating and drinking normally. On the other hand, there's been no Norton poop in the box since I got home from work yesterday, and none of the poop that was there at the time was long enough to hold the bone.

Please think good digestive thoughts for my number one son.

In which George tries to find a right angle somewhere... anywhere!

Jon hauled away a truckload of crap to the dump.

George filled in the cute little missing notches of underlayment in the kitchen, installed the cover to the subpanel, finished peeling back carpet from the foyer closet and the mouth of the hallway, started marking and measuring the foyer for its underlayment, and got himself hung up on the horns of a dilemma: where to draw the border between tile for the foyer and hardwood for the music room.

Jon's idea was to run tile halfway into the pony wall that divides the foyer from the rest of the room and start the hardwood from there. While working on measuring out that line, George discovered that the pony wall is slightly concave and not parallel to anything else, so he couldn't figure out from what to measure or to what to be perpendicular or parallel. The foyer closet's plane is offset a few inches from the door's plane, and opposite the pony wall is a perpendicular wall, so they're no help, either. He thought about dropping a plumb bob from the wall/ceiling corners overhead, but those didn't appear to be on square with anything, either.

Despite the lacked of reference points, we both thought the line he'd drawn (extrapolating the plane of the pony wall, such as it was) looked a bit off square, so I suggested checking it against the foyer closet wall at both ends, and there was in fact a 1/4" difference. Of course, who knews if that wall is square with anything, either. George also wondered if putting the boundary at the halfway point of the pony wall would look silly.

He decided to clean up for the day and let Jon figure it out tomorrow. That seemed like a good choice to me.

How about that Theresa Heinz Kerry?

Lay me not under underlayment

So I was right: the sheetrock work is done. It's time for underlayment, so George came and spent a vigorous half-day installing underlayment in the kitchen. It doesn't sound like much, but having underlaid several bathrooms, I have vigorous respect for that accomplishment.

Allow me to explain.

Tile--even stone--is fragile stuff, because it's thin. Say, 3/8 to 5/8 of an inch (roughly a centimeter, for my European readership--hi, Giovanna!). Look at it wrong, it breaks. Therefore, you have to install it in a cozy layer of slightly boingy thinset (mortar with a latex additive), surrounded by determined grout, on a perfectly flat, absolutely solid, staff base, which is affixed within an inch (c. 2cm) of life to the subfloor, which had better be even and bumpless.

Affixing that base is the subject of our tale.

The preferred base is a stiff sheet of concrete backer-board (such as Hardibacker). First you have to schlepp it to the site, which is up 25 steps from the driveway, and it's heavier than you can imagine, because it is, after all, concrete. Then you have to measure and cut the sheets. You have to stagger all the seams, so that adds a layer of indirection to the measuring and marking task. Cutting it is a royal pain in the ass, wrists, lungs, and goggles, because it is, after all, concrete, which is hard, feisty, and dusty. Next, you have to spread a perfect layer of thinset, which by the way needed to be mixed, set up, and get de-bubbled. Now, you lay down your first sheet of underlayment (which is big, unwieldy, and heavy, because it is, after all, concrete) all at once, so that you don't scooch all the gook to one end. Now you walk it down, but evenly, so that again you don't scooch all the gook to one end. Now spread more gook and fit another sheet, and kick, shove, and otherwise persuade it into a nice, tight, square fit. Spread, lay, shove. Spread, lay, shove. Spread, lay, shove.

Got it all in? Squared up? Staggered? Snug? Gooshed down evenly and level? Full coverage? You deserve a beer!

Wait, no! You're not done yet!

Now you have to fasten it to the subfloor. You have to screw it down, or at least nail it down. I screwed it down, because that's what Tile Store Guy told me to do, and it's a pain in the ass (especially when you're installing it right up under the toekicks of existing cabinetry and don't have room for both a screwdriver and your hand--yet another argument for ripping out cabinetry and starting over, if you ask me). Even with a cordless screwdriver or even a high-torque drill with screwdriver bit, it's harder than you can imagine to get the screws through, because it is, after all, say it with me: concrete. Jon has declared nails sufficient. But not so fast, cowboy: you've got to put those puppies every six inches in every direction. We're talking four screws or nails per square foot. Even when you're nailing, it isn't trivial. I had no trouble sympathizing with George's whimper about the nailer being broken and having to pound them in by hand.

It took me a whole day (or was it two?) to underlay a bathroom. George underlaid the whole kitchen, except for two funny-shaped notches, in half a day.

I'm impressed.

Reason #834 I love Montclair

About those black raspberries: They grow like weeds in my neighborhood (and some of my more idiotic neighbors actually consider them to be weeds). They serve as my bait to get me out jogging regularly at least one month out of the year.
This year, they're ripe about a month early, and they're plumper, juicier, and sweeter than ever before.

Today I happened upon a particularly thick thicket of them, so I decided to sacrifice my shirt, doing the hold-up-your-t-shirt-like-a-bucket trick to bring home a load of them. My shirt will probably never be quite the same; I'm hoping that purple berry stains aren't wildly noticeable on a dark maroon t-shirt. At my friend Katrina's suggestion, I'm infusing them in a big old bottle of vodka (the kind you get in a plastic bottle at the grocery store for $9). Come visit in about a month (I guess I am an optimist!) and help me toast the kitchen's completion with blackberry cosmos!

Yet another day of shockingly little progress

Today Chris the Taper Mudder Guy finished up (I think) the sheetrock work. I think all he did was skip-trowel the music room walls. The kitchen and dining room will be untextured. After 3-4 hours he packed up and left. That would be about it for today. New pictures for today show the winter-like effect in my dining room from all the sheetrock work's dust. This dust is everywhere in the house. I haven't found kitty respirator masks anywhere, but nobody has white lung disease yet.

Two months in

Old pictures:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later

White lung disease

Thursday and Friday were all about sheetrock. Chris the Taper Mudder Guy has pounded up the last hunks of sheetrock around the subpanel, patched the holes upstairs, and patched the big hole in the closet where the subpanel used to be, and taped, corner-thingied, and mudded everything everywhere. He's also gotten little globs of compound on the cabinets in the dining room, but the stuff is ridiculously fragile and easy to remove (from walls as well as cabinets, I learned ruefully when I mudded my bathroom a few years ago), so I'm not worried about it. Coming up are sanding and remudding and resanding and remudding, and white lung disease for all us inhabitants, and then a round of topping and skip-trowel work, so that the new walls and ceiling match all the old walls and ceilings.

The holes upstairs were from where Jon and George had to pull a new circuit when they were putting in the arc fault circuits that are now required in bedrooms, which they had to bring up to code because they had moved the subpanel to bring it up to code, which they had to do because they'd done anything electrical at all, which they had to do because I didn't like my old kitchen in the house that Jack built.

Meanwhile, somebody has peeled back more of the carpet to the base of the stairs, since the tiled portion of the foyer is going to reach back to the first step. However, nobody has peeled carpet out of the closet, which will also be tiled, nor the first bit of the hallway. So once again I ask myself, what is efficient about the way these people juggle the jobs, doing bits and snatches of work in one place before running off to the next? Why would you come all the way up to Montclair to peel three square feet of carpet but not peel the other six? I don't get it.

Thursday afternoon Jon and I took a field trip to see the Granite Guy and the Slate Guy. We started with the Granite Guy, wandering around among the slabs and holding up an alder shelf from my pile of cabinetry to see which went best together. I was pleased that my original choice, uba tuba, looked quite nice with the alder. (Uba tuba, for those of you who nodded off in the previous expositions) is basically a tight-grained granite with little flecks of gray, quartzy-looking stuff, and brassy bits. Granite Guy calls them "gold veins." Whatever.

Dakota mahogany also caught my eye. That's a salmony-pink number with swirls of gray and quartzy bits stuff that I have always associated with boulders in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, so even though it's wildly colorful, it appeals to me. Somewhat disconcertingly, it looked really nice with the alder also, throwing me into doubt. Should I overcome my fear of color and branch out from Basic Black? Granite Guy thought so. He said both are beautiful, but Dakota mahogany would bring out all the colors in the Indian peacock slate I've been leaning toward.

From there we went to see Slate Guy, who turns out to be Slate Woman. (I hate "gal," sorry.) There we gathered up a few representative tiles of Brazilian slate, the stuff Jon's been recommending, and Multi-Raja, which is what this shop calls the Indian peacock I've been wanting. We schlepped these along with the shelf around among THEIR slabs of granite, stopping first at the uba tuba, which went nicely with the Brazilian. Then I noticed a similar but flashier slab a few slabs away: Golden Butterfly, which is basically uba tuba with a lot more gold, and which struck another blow against certainty. The alder and the golden butterfly brought out the gold in each other, and the Brazilian slate and the butterfly brought out the flash in each other. Although I wasn't so fond of the Brazilian slate's palette (it's beautiful, but all those golds and rusts and brownish tones aren't so much my colors, and the bold contrasts of its colors are definitely outside my stark Scandinavian modern comfort zone), I couldn't argue with how beautifully the three materials went together.

We wandered around a bit more, searching for Dakota mahogany to no avail. I finally found something similar, and I thought it looked pleasant enough with the Multi-Raja and the alder, but it just didn't jump out at me the way the other combination had. We wandered back to the uba tuba and agreed it looked great, and then back to the golden butterfly.

I stared at it. Jon stared at it.

I said, "I don't know, Jon, it just speaks to me somehow."

"Yeah, it's kind of speaking to me, too."

Somehow we both found this puzzling.

Anyway, we've more or less decided on the golden butterfly and the Brazilian, even though I like the Multi-Raja slate better and love the Dakota, because the Brazilian, the alder, and butterfly are positively stunning together. So what if Brazilian's not in my preferred palette? They're gorgeous together and the others are merely nice. I'm going to have to assume that this is a case where I'm supposed to override my Scandinavian instincts in favor of more color to warm up all the rest of my Scandinavian instincts.

The catch is that Slate Woman only has four slabs (my job needs two for sure, maybe three), and at least two of them are on hold. However, they've been on hold since April, so I don't think they'll stay on hold past actual money being waved around. Jon would rather buy his granite from Granite Guy, who already bid the job, but Granite Guy doesn't think he has any of this stuff on hand. He's going to check his other store in Reno. Presumably Jon is now backing and forthing with Granite Guy and Slate Woman to put a plan together.

My fallback is uba tuba and Brazilian. Dakota mahogany and Multi-Raja are third choice. Come on, you can't really picture me working at a pink counter, can you?

So get this: in a rare departure from my usual expensive taste, which I swear is unintentional, I have fallen in love with what is considered a lower grade of what is already one of the cheapest granites around.

And get this: I thought this was going to be a short post.

More juggling than doing

Today Jon arrived at 2, sanded down the rough spots on the subfloor in preparation for putting down tile underlayment, and left for a 3 o'clock appointment.

The sheetrock guys postponed starting until tomorrow.

Who wants more pictures?

Old pictures:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
New pictures:
Still later

Argh! New neighbors!

Real Estate Guy just called back. The lot next door was listed at $139K and sold recently for $150K. Bad news, good news. Bad news, it's sold, and I suppose somebody's going to be building soon. Good news, I couldn't have afforded it anyway (way not), so no use torturing myself over it. Argh.

Inspections, payments, and piles

Jon was right--it's starting to feel like things are moving fast now. I was in North Carolina all last week for work, so I've gotten behind again. A lot has happened:

• All the odds and ends to get ready for rough inspection.
• Rough inspection. Jon was worried about some of the plumbing changes for the widened opening, and the inspector did make some noise about it but ultimately approved it. That plumbing work, by the way, was a $600 change order to me.
• What Jon didn't expect was that code requirements for the location of the subpanel (the circuit breaker box) have changed, and since he did work in the subpanel, that meant he had to bring its location up to code. So Jon and Russell worked furiously the whole next day moving the subpanel from the hallway closet to the new wall where the pocket door used to be. $700 change order.
• Jon bought the kitchen and bar faucets. Both are single-handle European design and non-shiny silver (one is stainless steel, the other is "satin," and there is a visible difference that I hope goes away when they're fifteen feet apart. The key, as far as I'm concerned, is that my kitchen has all stainless and nonshiny details, not chrome. $100 change order for the finish pushing the faucets beyond the allowance.
• (Speaking of change orders, there was another $300 one for three extra ceiling lights that we realized would be needed over the bar.)
• We passed rough inspection--yay! I owed Jon another gazillion dollars--not so yay!
• Sheetrock has been installed everywhere except where the subpanel was moved, so that was available for reinspection.
• Bruce's laborers delivered the cabinets from finishing. They're gorgeous! I didn't remember the look of the alder wook very accurately; it's more pinkish than I remembered, with an even prettier grain. It looks like it's about halfway to cherry from maple in both color and grain. As I wrote, they're gorgeous, and they're all over the place. The old dining room is now one massive stack of cabinets, the kitchen has a tarped-over stack of bases (the jobbers that lift them off the floor), the back-of-peninsula wall is behind my sofa, the refrigerator cabinet is down in my carport hoping we don't have severe weather in the next week or so, the various trim bits are leaned up in the corner at the end of the hallway. Sinks and faucets have been displaced to my front deck, where they're keeping my campstove company.
• Jon has primed the old walls where wallpaper once lurked so that it will accept the mud that Eddie's sheetrock-taping-and-mudding gang will be hurling the rest of this week.
• Sheetrock inspection passed, and subpanel reinspection passed--yay! I owe Jon another half gazillion dollars--not so yay!
• Jon has brought in the underlayment and thinset latex additive for the floor that will be tiled.
• We've decided the boundaries for the areas to be tiled (foyer to first stair, into closet, hallway to wall; kitchen to peninsula/bar entry, diagonal transition to hardwood).
• I've chosen black for the puck lights on the cabinets over the sink and bar.

The rest of this week is all about sheetrock: taping, mudding, sanding, skip-troweling, and all that. No doubt the cats, David, and I will all have white lung disease by Monday. Next Monday Jon wants to start installing the cabinets and then get the granite guy out to measure for the countertops, and then he'll start working on the tiles and hardwood while we're waiting for granite fabrication.

I still need to pick the exact slate and granite choices. Jon's leaning toward Brazilian slate, especially because it's gauged really well, which means tiny grout seams and really level surfaces. I'm leaning toward Indian peacock slate, which I've already got in both upstairs bathrooms. It's got a much rougher-hewn surface, so it needs wider grout seams and won't look as even, but I like the colors and the river-bed look, which seem to bring the forest into the house. I think I need to see the choices together with the wood and the granite before I can decide for sure. We'll probably take a cabinet shelf or something to the stone shops on Thursday after work. Use that comments link to weigh in before it's too late!

I also need to decide how to lay out the tile. I like plain square-on, which is what I did upstairs, and diagonal is nice, too. Jon's suggesting running-bond, which is the pattern a brick wall usually takes. For the backsplashes he's suggesting doing third- or half-tiles in running bond. I'm mulling. You know what to do with the Comments link!

More change orders under consideration:

• Run speaker cabling from living room to dining room and music room (through the crawlspace and holes in the floor). $who knows?
• Replace the back door with something with a window and less ugly. $200ish plus labor.

That Comments link is sitting right there!

It turns out I know the inspector already! He was the same guy who inspected my water heater replacement a few years ago. That's a long nightmare of a story all in itself, which some of you may have had the misfortune to hear in excruciating detail, but I remember thinking he was nice. I was pretty relieved when he signed off on the conversion from electric to gas, which I had to have done under the table for an extra $300 cash, a burrito, two Cokes, some tequila, and more undesired attention than I care to remember. I'd been worried that if he screwed anything up, it was going to be another whole nightmare getting it resolved. Anyway, the inspector (Joe) is a friendly guy, and he seems to like Jon and his work--yay.

I just noticed in my contract that the final payment milestone is after final inspection. The catch is that final inspection happens before all the work is finished. Jon said he didn't plan to charge me before the work is done, and I'm not worried about him being a jerk about it (after all, we both know I could sic his wife on him), but I did think it was odd it was phrased that way.

The pot rack (just one long bar in hammered steel) arrived a few weeks ago, and the ceiling hooks for mounting it are so long that pots would be banging into my head while I cook, so I'm playing phone tag with the restaurant supply store from whom I ordered it to switch those hooks out for a mystery part ("UCP set and pins") and smaller hooks ("C hooks"). These parts are so obscure that Enclume doesn't even show on their website or price sheets, so it's not too surprising that the store and I didn't know to order them, but I'm bracing myself for a fight all the same. Curiously, the 18 pot hooks at $86 ended up costing more than the rack, which was only $46. Shipping and so on brings the total pot rack cost to $208. It never stops! Cheaper than a cabinet and way cheaper than adding square footage, right?

Meanwhile, the lot next door seems like it may have been sold finally. Surveyors have been tromping around, and there's bits of orange spray paint here and there now. I've got a call in to the real estate agent to find out what's up. My fear is that someone's going to be building a big ugly house there and making lots of noise at ungodly hours for years. My uphill neighbors bought the lot uphill from them as a preemptive maneuver and have encouraged me to try to do the same thing. I doubt that the lot is anywhere close to something I could afford to buy myself, but I'll ask.

A lot of clunking and banging is a good thing

In things electrical, George seems to have most of the circuit box put back together, and Russell has temporarily reconnected the motion detector and glass break connector to the security system so we could make sure that's all working before the walls get hidden behind sheetrock.

The small rathole where the old vent duct exited is now filled in, but now there's a big raccoon hole where the new vent duct will exit, but Russell kindly put a wire mesh screen over that one, so the raccoons will have to work at getting in. Russell's also filled in the various holes in the subfloor, and he says we're about a day away from the rough inspection. Place those bets now.

The cats have really made the apartment theirs. Here was the scene I found last night: we're standing over the recliner, Gjetost is on the seat, and Norton is on the ottoman. I took this with my cell phone, so it's not the greatest photo in the world.

Another one of those days

So Russell and George were both supposed to start around 10 and work together all day to tie up all the loose ends and get ready for rough inspection by, say, Tuesday. What really happened is that George came around shortly before 11, pulled all the spiffy new circuits into the circuit box and hooked some of them up to breakers, and left shortly after 1. George asked me to have Russell call his mobile phone when he showed up. Russell never showed up.

Coffee was served.

In other culinary news, I hardboiled some eggs outside on the camp stove for breakfast today and tomorrow, finished the last of the grilled pork chops for lunch, and wonder what I'm going to call dinner. So far it's looking like pistachios and some Two Buck Chuck.

I leave Friday night for another week on the East coast (company headquarters in North Carolina). If the rough inspection really happens while I'm gone, and it passes, then I owe Jon the next big chunk of money. Since I won't be here to hand him the check, I guess I'll write the check, hide it somewhere, and after receiving the good news, tell Jon where he can find it.

However, I'll bet a pint of fine microbrew upon our next meeting(s) that rough inspection doesn't happen while I'm gone. Any takers? Hit that "Comments" link. This wager is open to any and all who think they'll get a chance to drink the beer with me. Paul D: does your pump like {whirr click click burp!} beer, or would I have to try the dreaded Osmolite?

Better than bupkes

What I thought would get accomplished today, as of 3pm: bupkes.

What has actually gotten accomplished today, as of 5:40pm:

• Jon delivered the custom duct
• We chatted about various details
• We agreed on change orders for the extra plumbing work and three extra lights
• George (who still feels crappy) arrived around 4pm and started working on his list

George is still banging away at stuff, and I'm on my way out the door to go have dinner with kind friends who have taken pity on me in my kitchenlessness: Jon (the very) and Kyla.

Prodigal blog children

My blog-heros Kimberly and Paul of http://gopaul.blogspot.com fame have described me and Kimberly's sister as their blog children, since we were both inspired to start our blogs after becoming addicted to theirs. Yesterday, as Kimberly describes in her blog, Paul accused us both of misbehaving, since neither of us have come anywhere close to adhering to Kimberly's post-a-day rule.

Guilty as charged.

I have two main excuses: one, I'm too darned busy just surviving here in the construction zone, and two, not that much seems to be happening sometimes. Oh, sure, George and Jon and sundry others are here most days at least for parts of the day, and they bang and clunk and run loud power tools, and they certainly look busy, but unless I look closely it's hard to see a lot of the progress. Compared to the initial shock of demolition and some of the more dramatic changes like the sudden disappearances and reappearances of walls, the transition from empty gangboxes (or whatever they call those sites of future switches and outlets) to wired gangboxes or the disappearance of a hood duct is pretty subtle.

I suppose I really ought to try harder to post every single day, though, since the agonizingly slow pace of things from the homeowner's perspective is a huge part of the gestalt.

You, gentle reader, play a part in this drama. Knowing that I have an audience helps me make time to write updates. Papa Paul of Little Faith has already reprimanded me for not keeping my promise (logged in a comment on their blog earlier today) of posting tonight. I find this strangely gratifying, if hasty. At least as gratifying was receiving a greeting comment from a crossover reader. And here I am, posting away!

So, here are the changes I've been able to discern since 27 June:

George has wires running everywhere. There are going to be outlets in pairs and foursies all over the place (be still my beating heart!), including a pair at the bar in case the blender or somesuch beast decides to live there, and we came up with a very sensible plan for switches:

• Just inside the bar wall (at the opening into the kitchen/dining room) will be switches for the overhead lights in the kitchen (recessed, aimable low voltage halogen floods), the under-counter flourescent lights (they're flourescent because code requires flourescent lights in kitchens, and Jon sagely points out this is the least aesthetically-offensive way to meet the letter if not spirit of that law), and the suspended fixture over the dining room table (the one I installed in the old dining room shortly after moving in and deciding that even a hole in the ceiling was better than the atrocious plastic faux-Tiffany chandelier that came with the house).
• On the right side of the bar will be a switch for puck lights inside the cabinet over the bar, which will have glass doors and shelves and be full of glassware.
• On the backsplash to the right of the stove will be a switch for the recessed floods over the breakfast bar/buffet. To the right of the sink will be the disposal switch, and to the left of the sink, the switch for the puck lights in the cabinets over the sink. (George suggested having them on opposite sides so that I hit the wrong one less often.)

It's a whole lot of wiring, and getting all the boxes and cans nicely spaced, aligned, attached, and wired seems to take forever. All these wires run through holes that had to be drilled through studs and joists and are affixed with plastic staples that had to be driven all over the place.

Jon has redone the water supply lines for both sinks and raised the main sink's drainpipe's cleanout so that it will be inside the cabinetry and not underneath in the toe-kick zone. I suppose this is another sneaky detail caused by my not being satisfied with the world standard counter height of 30-36" and instead wanting nice, high 37" countertops--it means that my toekicks need to be that much taller. (Actually I wanted 38-39" countertops, but Jon talked me down to 37" by pointing out a million fussy ramifications of getting the counters up to the ergonomically-ideal several inches below elbow height. I had no truck with arguments about ADA requirements, though: nobody in a wheelchair has any business buying a house in the hills with a steep driveway and a front door that's 25 steps up.)

George has ripped out the old vent's duct (leaving, temporarily) another nice entrance for curious raccoons and rats, and he's ripped out the blocking between the joists where the cabinets over the peninsula used to hang from the ceiling.

A kitchen sink and bar sink are now loitering in the old dining room. I've picked out faucets (I think) and Jon is going to order them. (Single-handle, single-hole Euro style, of course. I'd prefer a brushed/satin finish, but that adds a ridiculous amount to the sticker price, so unless his supplier adds a less ridiculous amount, I might settle for ordinary chrome.)

I've ordered and received the pot rack (a 54" bar that will hang from the ceiling in front of the vent, so that pots can dwell in the otherwise-wasted space over the skirt of the vent), and I've spent a long time on the phone with the pot rack company trying to find out which special shortest-possible mounting hooks I need to order to replace the standard 8" long hooks that would perfectly position my omelet pans to bruise my forehead. I thought eight-foot ceilings were pretty standard, but I guess they're considered "low" to the makers of pot racks.

A sheetrock guy came over, eyeballed the place, and gave Jon a price.

Jon and George managed to convey to me how nontrivial that wall is. You'd think that some studs, some wires, a pipe, the stove-side's slate tile, and the bar side's cabinetry panel would be about it, but no! Enter those pesky building codes. Both sides also need a layer of sheetrock (under the tile or wood panel) for fire-safety purposes. There's all kinds of hoorah to support the granite bar countertop, too: a plywood base of this, a lip of that, some brackety framey things, and the whole mess should either nail down into the studs or bolt up through the studs (not sure who won that argument and glad I don't need to care).

I think that's about it. Didn't seem like much until I started writing it all out.

Meanwhile, I'm getting a little more accustomed to camping in my house. It's a lot like Dubya being President--both benefit from low expectations.

Last Monday I grilled a giant package of pork chops, chopped some vegetables into a five pound bag of prewashed salad greens, and dug through my plastic crates until I'd found enough ingredients for a passable vinaigrette. Most of my dinners since then have consisted of a giant salad with some cold, sliced grilled pork and a glass of wine. This has been satisfying, if boring, and passably convenient.

This weekend, I went all out and made scrambled eggs on the campstove for both me and David (my housemate and the cats' doting uncle). It doesn't sound like much, but we both commented on how civilized it felt to be eating a hot, homemade breakfast.

I'm not sure what my next big culinary project will be. I leave for another weeklong business trip on Friday, so maybe I'll just scrape by with leftovers, one or two dinners out, and some PowerBar-shaped objects.

Washing dishes in the tiny bathroom sink and trying not to start a draining-rack avalanche continues to be a huge drag. I'm getting more used to dumping coffee grounds in the toilet but am looking forward to having a disposal again someday.

Paper plates are for the birds. I'm just about ready to dig through my boxes for a few real plates, even though I'll have to wash them.

I'm not sure what it says about me that the dishrack's census on Sunday morning included one fork and five wine glasses, but I'm pretty sure that nobody who's been through a kitchen project like this would judge me.

Bolt sister

I have no idea what that means, but it heads a list hanging from a nail in a stud in a wall-like structure in my would-be kitchen. This seems to be a "Honey Do" list from Jon of all the loose ends he wants George to tie up so he can schedule the "rough inspection," which is a payment milestone for me and a hoop to jump through for Jon. Passing rough inspection seems to require that the studs, joists, beams, pipes, wires, straps, and basic structural stuff are all kosher and the bureaucrat du jour is properly placated, bribed, or bored.

Jon seems to think this inspection is about a week away. Jon says all he needs to do is run a copper pipe for the gas line to the new stove location and install ductwork [May I interrupt myself here to comment that it's really hard to type on a laptop while you have a cat snuggling against your hands and preening herself over your trackpad?] for the hood. You wouldn't think running a duct would be any big deal, but because I can't be satisfied with a normal stove and insist on getting the giant commercial-style 36" stove with burners like rocket-engines and a grill that will incinerate steaks indoors in mere minutes, I also need the giant commercial-style hood vent (Vent-A-Hood of course!), which requires a minimum 10" round duct to the great outdoors. However, while my joists are the necessary 12" apart, they are not the necessary 10" deep, so Jon had to have a custom duct made that has the largest rectangular profile that will fit the joist bays.

In there's that list for George. I reproduce that list here verbatim, in all its lovely mysteriousness:

• Bolt sister
• Block ABS
• Strap copper
• Ext wall blocking
• Patch exterior wall
• Telephone
• Block corner of skirt/DR
• Nailers to DR transition (cut rock)
• Header straps
• Extend blocking in front of header
• Toekick plate in header wall
• Hookup CB BX
• Wirestrip/mudrings
• (R) old nails throughout
• Patch subfloor
• Wire DR cans
• Staple wire

George also thinks this is about a week's worth of work, but he didn't come in today (he's fighting off some awful chest/cold thing, too), so I guess that one week of contractor time turns into about two weeks of calendar time.

More miscellaneous than most posts

Blog-hero Kimberly had an unwritten rule about posting to the blog every day. I say "had" because she wrote about the rule, so I don't think we can consider it unwritten anymore. This rule sets the bar way too high for me, but tonight I'm making a valiant effort to overcompensate for past negligence.

Today I made a special effort to be a better home camper. I made myself a nice double espresso this afternoon, and in my caffeinated state I managed to cook an actual supper, sort of: I heated some instant Swiss cheese fondue (the real thing would have been better, but let's be real--my nutmeg is two crates down in the hallway, I have no idea where my fresh garlic would be, if I have any, and I think my cheese grater is three boxes down in my guest room) on one burner of my camp stove and hard-boiled some eggs on the other for upcoming breakfasts. Meanwhile, I hacked up a crown of broccoli to use as dippers (cubes of sourdough bread would have been better, but I'm doing the Atkins thing, so broccoli it is) and poured a nice glass of tepid Two Buck Chuck chardonnay (chilling it would have taken forethought).

Pause to reflect on the irony of how acquiring a "gourmet kitchen" has reduced my concept of fine dining to a pot of lukewarm instant fondue and a 40¢ glass of wine.

Cynicism aside, construction is proceeding apace. The widening of the doorway between old and new dining rooms is done, the wiring seems to be mostly done, the wall between bar and kitchen is gone, and the stud wall for the back of my peninsula is done.

Some comments on the recent batch of pictures (One month in):

That back wall is, as George puts it, "strange." The black part that goes about to chest-height is the foundation (my house is built into a steep hill). Above the foundation you'll see two ex-windows. The windows were above eye-level, let in approximately a hundredth of a candela of light and looked out onto dead leaves, dirt, and the occasional napping deer, so it's no great loss that they've since been walled in and will end up behind cabinets. Why they were there in the first place is anybody's guess. Notice also the two-by-fours bolted to the foundation. Why are they there? To make room for pipes and wires behind the sheetrock. George wonders why they didn't just build a normal stud wall in front of the foundation. I wonder why the studs are in arbitrary, uneven, seemingly haphazard locations. The newer wood you see is where George has finished the strange job the original contractor started, and where he has extended the wall to the new edge of the kitchen.

Widening the opening between rooms turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than we originally thought, so that's just now getting finished up. There are still some holes in the floor where the old pipes and supports were, so currently I can see into my crawl space and must hope that the rats who live down there don't think to come up for a visit.

No, I'm not sending my cats down to hunt the rats. Neither of them has any experience with rodents, one of them lacks front claws, and I don't care to risk either of them getting bubonic plague, rabies, hanta virus, slivers, into the fresh supplies of rat poison, or lost. They're sequestered upstairs in my master bedroom/bathroom suite, which for the time being I'm calling their apartment. They seem to be adjusting fairly well, no longer expressing themselves on my bedding, and merely burrowing under the duvet when the banging and power tools get too loud. We've had beautiful weather lately (sorry, Dad, but I'm not going to go into any further detail--weather here is just not that interesting), so a lot of the time, I've been able to leave both deck doors open. They enjoy napping by the screen doors and smelling the great outdoors, and I enjoy not smelling their two litter boxes.

Today while hanging out with the cats in their apartment, I let them wander out onto the front deck for their afternoon naps, which they seemed to think was a wonderful treat. Gjetost also enjoyed a vigorous spider-hunting expedition. She loves hunting bugs. Occasionally when her quarry escapes to too high a spot on the wall, I'll help out by hoisting her up, and invariably she finishes off the bug before realizing that she needs to wriggle out of my hands and get back in control of her locomotion.

Yes, my bedroom has two decks. It's a strange house--probably not the house for everyone, but I love it. For those of you who haven't been here yet, (a) what are you waiting for?, and (b) there's a roomy deck off the bedroom on the front side of the house with a Meyer lemon tree that I'm trying not to kill through excessive benign neglect, and there's a smallish deck off the bathroom on the backside of the house. That funny little deck is one of the reasons I had to buy the house--haven't you always wanted a bathroom with a deck? It's crazy but wonderful. The big sliding glass doors make it feel a little like showering outdoors (without the weather). My bedroom has a slanted ceiling that's ten feet high in front and something like twenty-six feet high in back, with high windows in back and tall, high windows on the side wall behind my bed, so that when I lie in bed, what I see through all these windows are trees, stars, and sometimes the moon. It's pretty spectacular when there's a full moon shining through one of the high windows. When I moved in, I was one of those people who couldn't sleep in anything less than complete darkness. It's a good thing I've gotten over that.

Anyway, this house is up in the woodsy, canyony Oakland hills, and the design of the house is all about bringing the outside in. Long ago I decided to play up this concept by replacing the FUBAR flooring in both upstairs bathrooms with Indian peacock slate: rough-hewn stone of many muddy, watery, swirly, ex-river-bed-ish colors. I plan to have Jon use the same tile for my foyer floor, kitchen floor, and backsplashes. He wants me to take a look at Brazilian slate. I like that, too. I think I like the Indian peacock (and continuity) better, but I'm waiting to decide until I can set both out alongside samples of the flooring (white oak, just barely stained), cabinetry (alder with a clear finish), and countertop granite (verde uba tuba).

Click that "Comments" link if you'd like to weigh in! The alder and white oak are done deals, but it's not too late to talk me out of the uba tuba or the slate.

Cast of characters

Yes, Kimberly, Jon my contractor is Kyla's Jon. (Kyla and Jon are both on Bufflehead, the dance team of which I'm a non-dancing, tuba-playing member.) It is nice to work with a friend, especially when that friend is a sweetheart with really good taste, and better yet, taste that is remarkably similar to my own. Jon's own kitchen is, in my opinion, beautiful and creative, and aesthetically quite similar to what we've designed for mine.

Those of you reading my blog know me well enough to know that I'm a detail-oriented control freak (can you say "INTJ Virgo project manager"?), so you'll know how much I appreciate this: Jon is really good about asking about even more details than I've thought of myself, and he's really good at figuring out what I'm trying to ask for. When I don't have an immediate answer, he always has good suggestions and alternatives, and his recommendation almost always matches my own preference. It's reassuring to know that if there are any details left that we've forgotten to talk about, his assumptions are likely to be at least as good as anything I would come up with, if not better.

Jon's right hand man is a soft-spoken carpenter named George. George's work appears to be meticulous and well thought out. On days that I work at home, we often enjoy a cup of coffee and a chat together, so I've gotten a chance to learn that George is also quite an interesting guy. In prior lives, he was a set designer for the Stuttgart Ballet and Opera companies, the website designer for an orchestra I used to play with, and a paper millionaire from a software startup that didn't quite work out. One morning he mentioned that he'd been on a blind date the night before with a prominent author of a series of vegetarian cookbooks that changed my concept of food (yes, that author, but I promised George I wouldn't name her here). He said she was charming, gorgeous, and wonderful, and they had a great time, but he doubted that it would go anywhere. Sure enough, the next morning, he announced that he'd received a Dear George letter. I had suggested that he might introduce her to me, but she seems to play exclusively for his team, so I guess it's just as well that he's not in a position to do so.

Minor players in our drama include Manuel the Manual Laborer and Reid the Plumber.

Fresh, hot pictures!

Kimberly and Paul are my blogging heros, and Kimberly requests pictures. Who am I to refuse my hero?

The earlier entry, "A picture is worth a thousand gasps," had pictures of the before, demolition, and early during photo albums, but to save you some scrolling, here are the links again:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos

A fresh batch of pictures is available here: One month in

In all these photo albums, you can click any thumbnail to switch to a one-larger-picture-per-page view. Both views have the same captions.

I suppose it would be more reader-friendly of me to integrate the photos right into my blog entries, but I just can't deal with doing that much html markup. Apple's iPhoto makes it easy for me to crank out photo albums with thumbnails, big pictures, and comments. If Blogger has an easy way for me to integrate them into my entries, I haven't figured it out, so this is just how it's going to be for a while.

Why brassholes shouldn't be lyricists

Jon, my contractor, is also a member of Bufflehead Northwest Morris, and I got to serenade him with a parody of "Oh Danny Boy" (aka "Londonderry Air") this weekend.

It all started at the Robert Mondavi winery, in the bathroom. Somehow that tune had found its way into my head and had become a bit of an earworm (that's what you call those tunes that get in your head and refuse to leave). Like most instrumentalists, I'm hopeless with words and not a lot better at remembering melodies, but I did vaguely recall that the song begins, "Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling..." Before you know it, I was singing to myself, "Oh Jonny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling..." and a parody idea was born. Unfortunately those and a few other fragments were about all I could remember.

Not to worry, though--if there's one thing a busful of morris dancers is good for, it's singing British folk music, so it didn't take long to find a few dancers (Laura and Genevieve from Sheperdstown Northwest Morris of West Virginia) who could help me with the rest of the words and set me straight on the rest of the tune. Best they could recall, and best I can now make out my bus-bumped handwriting, the words are:

Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen and down the mountainside
The summer's come and all the flowers are dying
Oh Danny Boy, 'tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide

But come ye back when springtime's in the meadow
And all the valley's hushed and white with snow
It's I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny Boy, Oh Danny Boy, I love you so

But if ye come when all the flowers are dying
and I am dead, for dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
and kneel and say an Ave for me

And I shall hear though soft you tread above me
and all my grave shall warmer sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
and I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

It does seem as though there must be some errors in there--springtime white with snow?--but let's not be tedious and hunt down the correct words. Anyone can Google, but it takes talent to dredge words out of memory on a bus. Let's hear it for Laura and Genevieve and leave it at that.

Later that night, I got my chance to sing my version of it for Jon, complete with a backup humming chorus. Thanks to Laura, Genevieve, Kyla, Victoria, and Wendy for being my Pips, providing moral support, and most importantly, keeping me clear on the tune all the way through. (We hornists tend to take left turns into harmonic variations and segues so on learned from too many orchestrated medleys.) Since I'm still battling off the bronchitis, it was a good octave lower than you might normally expect.

Oh Jonny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
So bring your torch and silver solder by
The walls are studs and all the ceiling's falling
Oh Jonny Boy, 'tis you, 'tis you must work and I must bide

So come ye back when Herrel's got the cabinets done
And all the wiring's wired and lights are lit
It's you'll be here to put it all together
Oh Jonny Boy, Oh Jonny Boy, I'll owe you so

And if ye come when my foundation's sinking
and we are screwed, for screwed we well may be
You'll come and bribe the inspector till his signing
and clear tghe way so that we may go on

And I shall cook, though broke your bill will leave me
And then my stove shall warmer, Wolf-er be
For you shall come and join me and we will dine
And I shall stir the peas until you open wine.

Bad blogger!

Sorry it's taken me forever to post an update. It turns out that camping in your own house takes up a certain amount of energy and time...

Since last I blogged, a bunch has happened in life:

• I got a hideous cold, fever, sinus infection, bronchitis crud thing that I'm still fighting off.


• While still sick, I visited my folks in Montana. Flying while congested is never fun, and I'd have preferred not to be sick for my vacation, but if you're going to be sick, there is at least something to be said for being in a house with a kitchen--especially one in which someone else is doing the cooking.


• Bufflehead (the Northwest morris clog team for which I play tuba and trumpet) hosted a weekend dance tour of Napa and San Francisco. I even ended up with one heck of a good sport of a houseguest!


• Last week I finally used the camp stove for the first time to scramble some eggs. Working with the camp stove was the easy part; schlepping the tools, paper plate, ingredients, and so on from the kitchen, loo, and hallway out to the deck and back was a royal pain. The eggs were yummy and I felt terribly proud of myself for making the effort.

...and in the kitchen:

• Two ex-windows which are going to be behind cabinets in the new kitchen have been walled in inside and reshingled outside.


• The opening between my music room and dining room is going to be about three feet wider. This turns out to be a bit involved. So far Jon has ripped out the drywall, cut some studs, and moved two water pipes and two waste pipes (the latter was PVC and is now cast iron, to reduce flushing noise), which involved doubling up two joists and some studs in order to meet code requirements for drilling pipe holes through same. He's also built stud walls on either side of the opening to provide temporary support, and it looks like now he's just about ready to start framing out the header. In the meantime, we have to pass through a maze of stud walls to get to the fridge.


• George and Jon have rewired the kitchen, sorting out some screwy circuit-sharing so that it has its own dedicated circuits, and installed umpteen junction boxes where outlets and light-switches are going to be.


• The other opening to the kitchen is going away, to become a shallow pantry/bookshelf, and so far Jon's got a stud wall started there.


• Herrell is well along in cabinet-making and is actually now ahead of schedule.


• The carpet is gone from the dining room, and hardwood is stacked up and acclimating.

There are piles of wood and tools everywhere. I mean everywhere. I'll take some pictures tomorrow when there's daylight.

Expected expenses and sneaky expenses

My contractor got married on Saturday and took Sunday and Monday off to honeymoon, so there's been no change on the destruction/construction front.

When you start a project like this, you know about the big expenses--remodeling projects cost way more than you would ever think reasonable, but you sort of expect that and you rearrange your financial life to accommodate. You even expect budget increases due to the infamous "while we're at it, we might as well..." syndrome, and then there's the extra costs of eating out, eating prepared foods, and so on. What you DON'T expect are the sneaky little incidental expenses, viz.:

Plastic crates for the kitchen stuff that needs to remain quasi-accessible for basic survival. $36.

Moving boxes for everything else. Got lucky there: borrowed boxes from friend and office. $0.

New mattress pad and water vinyl mattress case, after cat expresses displeasure at household upheaval. $54.

Dual-burner Coleman camping stove and gallon of white fuel for cooking outside for the next three months. $72.

Having found rat scat all over the insulation where Jon opened up the walls, I now know my rat situation is as bad as I'd feared it was. Jon commented that on a recent job he encountered a foot-long (plus tail) rat so dead and dessicated it had "the consistency of a Cheeto." His colorful description evoked giggles, shudders, and the memory of having to evict several somethings similar from my crawlspace a few months ago. Ugh. I plan to buy more rat poison refills. $25.

A picture is worth a thousand gasps?

In these photo albums, you can click any thumbnail for a larger view.
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos

Chaos reigneth

The last few weeks have been a nightmare, only partly due to the kitchen remodel.

Three weeks ago, we agreed on the various contract revisions and I signed my life away. Meanwhile, Akhnaten opened at Oakland Opera Theatre (http://www.oaklandoperatheatre.org), and I was spending much of my life in the pit. The week before last I spent in North Carolina taking a class for work, and I returned home for five nightmarish days of catching up on the work that had piled up while I was gone, three more operas, and packing up my kitchen, music room, and dining room. Then I packed myself and left on a mini-vacation to New England with Bufflehead (http://www.bufflehead.org), the Northwest morris clog dance team for which I play trumpet and tuba. We were performing in the 29th annual Marlboro Morris Ale, which was great fun, and I spent a few extra days touring New England afterward.

While I was gone, demolition began. The kitchen is now down to the studs, and a few forlorn appliances are lurking in the corner of what was the music room and will become the dining room. The dining room is a messy pile of whatever I couldn't quite get to packing away, the hallway is the pantry, and the half bath's sink, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a tea kettle are now all I have to call my kitchenette. It feels like I'm camping in my house. This morning I attempted to scramble eggs in the microwave (something I used to know how to do) and produced a grayish puck that was only barely edible.

The cats have been sequestered upstairs in the master suite, which I'm thinking of as their apartment. They're fairly comfortable, and both David and I are making a point of hanging out with them in their apartment, but understandably, they're unhappy about all the chaos. Norton expressed his displeasure on my bed. Argh. Can't say I blame him, but washing all the bedding is not how I planned to celebrate my return home.

Jon came over today with Cabinet Guy's drawings, and we went through them and compulsively double-checked every possible detail, since these are the drawings he'll be building from. Checking cabinetry measurements seems easy on the face of it, but you always have to add half an inch for sheetrock here, 3/4in for underlayment and tile there, and so on, until you don't trust your instincts on anything anymore and you need to draw everything onto the studs and the subfloor just to make it concrete enough to understand.

First water all the lawyers

I'm currently mired in the paperwork stage. My next door neighbors are lawyers who kindly agreed to review the contracts for cocktails, so after three rounds of sidecars, I had a short list of action items to take up with my contractor, who is now updating his contract and also negotiating some changes with the cabinetry subcontractor. The latter is the only particularly interesting point.

Cabinets are by far the biggest line item in the whole project's budget, and among the least dispensable--I have relatively little space to work with, and custom cabinets are the key both to maximizing the usability of the kitchen and to making a shoe-horned design look like soemthing. The plan is Euro-style frameless construction with flush doors (vertical grain) and drawer fronts (horizontal grain), with four-panel-and-glass upper cabinets on one end of the kitchen. Key features are some bookshelves and a shallow pantry taking the place of the current main entry, with round shelves to make the transition from the wall. The round-shelf transitional motif is repeated on either side of the cabinets over the sink and over the bar.

So about that contract... Cabinet Guy says he'll make my custom cabinets in about four weeks. Cabinet Guy's contract says that he'll begin work in 2 weeks and complete work 5 weeks later. He wants 30% on signing, 30% after one week, 30% after the second week, and the remainder upon completion. Yes, that's right--he has 90% of his money before he says he'll even have the work underway, and he has 100% of the money when they go to the refinisher, who makes delivery god knows when. I don't think so!

My lawyer friend suggests two remedies: changing the payment milestones so that they're tied to performance, or paying the installments by credit card (mine, not my contractor's), so that the purchase is protected by my credit card's residential/consumer purchase protection rules (or whatever they're called). The catch is that Cabinet Guy wants a 3% upcharge for payments by credit card. Once again, I don't think so! I'm asking for one of two changes: payments tied to performance, or remove the 3% upcharge and I pay for the cabinets directly on my credit card rather than writing checks to my contractor.