painting complete

Yesterday I went over to the condo and the painting had begun.  Chris and George had painted all of the edging around the baseboards and the crown molding, but hadn’t yet filled in the rest of the walls.  Here is how the conversation went:

“Chris, do you think it’s too dark?  Are these colors too dark?” I chose the Benjamin Moore color “sail cloth” for the walls, which can best be described as sort of a light gray taupe.

“No, it’s good.”

“Does that sail cloth color really match the sample?”

“Yes.  It’s good.  I like it.”

“It’s just…it’s dark, is it too dark?” Oh my god.

They’d also started painting the Meditation color above the bookshelves.  This is sort of an olive green color, and it looked really, really dark and muddy. Granted, it was only partly done.

“Chris, did I choose bad colors?  Are these colors going to work?”

“I like – it’ll be fine.”

This is how the conversation went when I came home to Paula:

“THE PAINT IS A DISASTER.”

“It can’t be, those were nice colors.”

“THE SAIL CLOTH COLOR LOOKS LIKE DIRT. I PAINTED THE WALLS DIRT.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.”

“MAYBE IT’S NOT FINE!”

“Um….oh dear….how is the meditation color?”

“MEDITATION LOOKS LIKE POO.”

“I thought it was olive green.”

“IT’S POO.  I MADE THIS APARTMENT LOOK LIKE DIRT AND POO.”

“It can’t be that bad…..”

“LIKE DIRT AND POO, PAULA.  DIRT AND POO!”

So that was yesterday.  Today I bought a ceiling fan for the living room – Ohhhhh, allow me to digress….between comments here and comments on Facebook, it became clear, pretty quickly, that a ceiling fan was the way to go.  So ceiling fan it is!  ANYWAY, we had to bring the ceiling fan over to the apartment.  The conversation in the car went like this:

“You know, we don’t have to do this today.  Maybe it’s getting too dark.  We could go tomorrow.”

“The paint will be fine.”

“Tomorrow would be good.  There’ll be more light.  Let’s go tomorrow.”

“The paint will be fine.”

“Oh god.”

Flash forward ten minutes and it looked like this – PRETTY FANTASTIC.   Such a huge relief.  Paula played documentary photographer:

front door/hallway

hallway looking into dining room

corner of living room

other view of living room

meditation color, accent wall above bookshelves

another angle

and another angle

subway tile has been grouted, with exception of interior window tile

that shelf isn't really for toilet paper

border tile

left over tile spacers

travertine floor has gone in

bathroom color - Benjamin Moore "pale smoke" - success!

little hallway, the pink on the floor is the protective paper

VASTLY RELIEVED

moving along

No great news to report, as I’ve had my head in my work for a few days – though Paula and I did go over on Wednesday night and it looked great.  Still very much a working site, but exciting stuff going on.  The bathroom wall was fully tiled, though no grout yet and the travertine for the floor looked like it was going in next.  All walls had been primed and all the trim work sprayed with the white semi-gloss.  Chris called two nights ago from the counter at the paint store, so paint has been purchased, I’m anxious to see it up.  No other news to report yet, other than lots of lighting purchases going on – yesterday evening I finally found sconces and placed an order for two.  They won’t arrive for a couple of weeks though….now I’m wrestling with the Ceiling Fan Conundrum – I already placed one in the bedroom, should there be another one in the living room?

FYI: this is the ceiling fan in question:

Hampton Bay Stratford Ceiling Fan

A smaller version of this same fan is already in the bedroom.  The living room is a harder call, though.  Personally I don’t like ceiling fans much, but I know lots of people love them, and they are very helpful in summer for cooling things off and helpful in winter for pushing warm air downwards….and we actually have a ceiling fan in every room of the condo we live in….so I get it…I get it.  But not only do I not like them very much, they are also more expensive than a standard fixture.  I’m vaguely curious what most renters think – is a ceiling fan, or lack thereof, a deciding factor in renting a unit?

That’s it, over and out – back to my regular job for the rest of the day.  I’ll fixate on the Ceiling Fan Conundrum over the weekend.

OHHH, I almost forgot….I nixed the wallpaper, we are painting instead.  (Wallpaper Haters! I heard from you, but calm down! It would have been beautiful, I promise.)  Sadly, I’ll paper something else.  Time, money and the depressing voice of reason won out.  Very sad!

_____

update: nope, no central air conditioning.  But there are such things as standing fans, window fans and window a/c units.  But does a ceiling fan, or lack thereof, make any difference when you consider wanting to buy or rent something?

tile begins

Not much to report yet – tiling has begun, but right now it looks as odd as all tile does before it looks the way it’s supposed to – no grout yet and the wall is full of those little spacer things.  The floor isn’t in yet, but the subway tile is now half way down – and there’s a new worker on the job named Joseph, so it was nice to meet him.  He and Chris are tiling together.  Here’s a sneak peek –

no grout yet, but it will be white

temporary boards to help line the tile up

quick shot of the medicine cabinet

Coming up in the next week – the painting and remainder of tile going in, and hopefully the lighting fixtures as well.  I’m having a hard time deciding on the living room light and the dining room light and wall sconces.  Other than that all light fixtures have been purchased and are currently stacked in one of the closets, awaiting installation.  Did have a hiccup with the light over the medicine cabinet.  Bought a gorgeous one and it hangs too low – the bottom of the light hits the top of the medicine cabinet.  Back to the drawing board on that.

more about the paint

8am, we went back to the condo.  Chris was already there.  This weekend he broke out the industrial paint sprayer and got busy.  Things are taking shape.

Bookshelf shelves....getting sprayed.

Bye bye yellow living room - you were kind of cheerful but you look better with white primer

All doors are currently in bedroom, out of the way

All baseboards and crown moldings have been sprayed white semi-gloss

At the conclusion of our 8am visit I made a final decision on the paint colors.

• All closet interiors: a white of contractor’s choice.
• Bathroom: Benjamin Moore “Pale Smoke”.
• All other walls: Benjamin Moore “Sail Cloth.” This is actually an exterior color, so it will need to be mixed with interior paint.  I never would have picked it normally, except a man we know recently painted his entire apartment this color in preparation for putting it on the market and it turned out beautifully.  Very neutral and clean.

Re: the “pale smoke” – this wasn’t one of the colors we carefully painted on the walls yesterday.  I had high hopes for Benjamin Moore’s “crystalline” but wow, girlfriend, you are green green minty green and you might be kind of pretty, but it’s hard to tell and I’m not taking that risk. So after a cup of coffee and some time with Chris’ paint deck I threw a dart at “pale smoke.” (I sent an email to P once I’d made up my mind: “Pale Smoke – a new color! I just chose it! Flying by the seat of my pants! Way to take a risk! Never seen it before!”)

NOW….there’s one other major decision to make and I’m really wrestling with it, because this is an apartment for rental and I don’t want to get ridiculous about the budget, and yada yada yada, everyone has personal tastes, I know….but what I really want to do is put wallpaper above the bookshelves in the dining room.  Just a splash of visual something as you walk in the front door.  Every time I look at it I think “wallpaper.” I’ve never wallpapered anything and I have no idea how much it costs, though I need only a tiny amount.  I’m going to take a trip to Thybony one evening this week and look through some sample books.  Of course, the way my luck is running I’ll find the perfect print and it will turn out to be back ordered, or on a 6-week delivery schedule or who knows what else, but pretty much the overall theme of this renovation has pretty much been “we can certainly get that for you but NOT RIGHT NOW.”

I am thinking creatively and positively however, and we took careful measurements:

This is how the pro's do it.

paint

Time to choose paint.  Lots of paint chips:

After a lot of thinking, the current decision is to go with Benjamin Moore’s “sail cloth” on 80% of the walls (kitchen, dining room, living room, back hallway and bedroom), a slightly darker version (BM’s “hush” or possibly “meditation”) in the hallway, and a color in the bathroom.  Currently thinking of using BM’s “crystalline” but it might be too green.  I’ve had a hard time finding the right shade of pale blue-green.  I want it to look classic.  I don’t want it to look like toothpaste.  Here’s a computer generated swatch of 2 of those colors:

sail cloth

crystalline

We went over and did test patches of color late this afternoon.

The roller handle died so we rolled the paint on with just our hands and the foam round paint applicators.  Very messy!  We were losing the daylight and the only lights in the place are 60 watt working lights, so tomorrow morning at 8am we’re going back round to look at these colors in the daylight.

special walnut

Special Walnut is lovelyyyyyyy.  We went over yesterday and I was fairly nervous.  But no nerves needed.  Special walnut did the job.  The floors aren’t finished yet, but they’ve had their stain, and now Chris says he has to do some step, and then lay down some other step, and then the final step is finishing the floors with either a satin or semi-gloss finish.  George said, “satin, go with satin, absolutely.” I asked Chris what he thought, he says both look nice.  Then he said, “Melissa uses semi-gloss.” Melissa is our interior decorator friend, and she works on high end jobs, and Chris is the only contractor she uses, so he knows these things.  (Hi, Melissa.) In fact, before I started this project I called her and asked if I could use Chris and his crew, as I didn’t know what she had in the works and though I don’t think Emily Post devoted a chapter to it, I’m fairly sure friends don’t poach other friends contractors for a month long job unless said contractor has some free time coming up.

So anyway – back to the floors.  Here’s a sneak peek.  Thank you Minwax.

sneak peek, not done yet, floors not quite this orange, that's the flash

Chris also proudly showed us how the bookcases are coming along.  He should be proud.

shelves not in yet...

Chris pointed out where he added strips of wood at the ends of shelves to hide the interior plywood and then gently rounded the edges for a polished look.

...they had their edges sanded.

Chris also noted that he built them high on purpose – he measured to make sure that the sconces would be exactly in the middle, between the top of the bookcase and the bottom of the crown molding.   At one point I stepped well back until I was practically in the kitchen and took a good look – “Chris, is the top of the bookshelf slightly un-level?” Chris pulled out the level, the big industrial contractor level that is two feet long and showed me that the bookshelves were completely level.  “It’s the floor that’s slightly not level.”  Phew.  I think the guys are spreading a leveling compound before they tile the kitchen floor, so that problem should go away.

P with (very dusty!) Chris

On a different note, we’re enjoying Kona coffee this morning – thanks, parents who go to Hawaii, you rock.

Sunday morning coffee

sanding, staining

What on earth was that freak out about?  Sorry ’bout that.  I got some sleep last night and now I’m all, Cadigan, calm down.  Jeeeeeze.  It’s fine…..relax.  It’s all good.

This morning I had to make a final decision about the stain color for the floors and it’s really just as well that I had to make the decision on the fly, because if I’d had my way there would have been 75 test patches on the floor and we all would have had to talk about the relative merits of Stain A over Stain B pretty much ad nauseum and there probably would have been voting and at some point I would have just thrown up my hands and picked one, and this way I just cut straight to the please for the love of god pick one part and I did it all with just one small freak out and a shot of gin, so lesson learned.

Paula and I went over and met George at 8:30 this morning.

Paula and coffee

We stared at this for a little while:

DARK WALNUT, PROVINCIAL, ENGLISH CHESTNUT

I started doing my crazy talk about maybe it would all be perfect if George mixed in 3 parts Minwax Provincial to 1 part Minwax English Chestnut, and would that be the desired warmth in the tone without adding too much red to the floors, and could we all just talk about this for a little while?  But not for too long because I have a conference call at 9:15, ok, yeah, thanks!  But no seriously, what do you think?  George was very kind, but it was very clear that he was just happy to go with whatever the client wanted but the issue here is that the client pretty much only knows that she wants it to look good, actually more than good, like maybe the best floor ever, but really in the end will settle for it just looking nice and not sticking out and please just let it be ok, see the problem?  Maybe if we just did the test patches in the dining room.  The dining room gets more light.  So we all trouped into the dining room and stared at the samples.  Here:

And then I clearly woke up and came to my senses and just said, oh screw it – let’s just go with Special Walnut.  We didn’t have a test patch of it, but the little wood chippy thing in the deck looks nice and it appears to be slightly darker than Provincial and maybe has a hint of red in it, screw the English Chestnut, for god’s sake woman, why on earth do you need to go mixing stains?  I don’t know which of the samples above it is, but maybe Special Walnut is the second one, so we’re going to go with that.  Maybe it’s the top one, that’s ok too.   Paula was all, good choice! and George was all, whatever makes you happy! And I was all, can I go home now?

But first I took some pictures.  Welcome to the jungle, I promise I’ll vacuum before I rent it out:

view into dining room

Dining room near window

the built-in bookshelves have begun

the living room

bedroom

edge of the bedroom/George

Still Life with Paper Towel, 2010

Floor Sander, today is YOUR DAY

decisions

There are currently 3 stain colors down in test patches on the bedroom floor – Dark Walnut, Provincial and English Chestnut.  DW is too dark, Provincial is too….plain brown (?)….and English Chestnut at first got me very excited but the more I think about it, it’s just too red.  I’ll take some pictures tomorrow.  Normally when it comes to a decision this big I spend a LOT of time weighing all of my options, giving it all great thought, etc. etc.  I just don’t have the time now, which is probably a good thing.  Right now my gut is telling me to go with Provincial and have George or Chris mix in a bit of the English Chestnut to give it a warmer glow.

(Even as I type this I have an image of looking back in 3 days and thinking OH MY GOD why did I ever think that would look good???? Am I nuts?  Is mixing two stains just a recipe for disaster?)

On a different note, Chris began the bookshelves today – early on I decided to put built-in bookshelves in the dining room, which is a direct influence from the really adorable apartment upstairs.  The owner there put bookshelves in and it added a lot of charm and appeal.  The day after I purchased the downstairs unit I took Chris upstairs (friends live there) and he said no problem, he’d put in bookshelves.  WELL – these are going to be fancy bookshelves.  I popped over to check in on work late this afternoon and Chris was about 50% of the way done.  I was totally surprised at first because I had expected them to be much lower.  These will actually be about shoulder height, and I’m fairly sure they’ll be lovely once I get used to the size.  I can already see from the way he framed them that they’ll be very well made.  Pictures to come.

_______________________

Update – just got off phone with Kaysie.  She was lovely and reassuring but I’m suddenly just feeling very overwhelmed.  What if I fuck all this up and make disastrous decisions?   What if this little apartment doesn’t turn out to be the loveliest swan that ever existed?  What if it’s just a sort of a boring, average rental because I made bad choices?  Will the taller bookshelves make the room look too small?  Maybe the floors will be boring and drab because I have no guts.  What if this is all just a terrible disaster of beautifully executed work that I ruined with my “I watch HGTV, I can do this” idiot thinking?  What if I’m just the biggest moron on the planet?  IT COULD BE.

developments

The last few days have been frantically busy.  Days – work, work, work.  Evenings – shop, shop, shop.  In the last 48 hours I have bought a bathroom faucet, a kitchen faucet, a pedestal sink (YES! more on that shortly), a medicine cabinet, bathroom floor tile and bathroom wall tile.  So much tile that after Eddy at Home Carpet One swiped my credit card I kept waiting for the fraud department at Chase Bank to call.  No call!  Falling down on the job there, fraud people.  That was a lot of tile I just bought.

Update on the tile – sigh.  The beautiful marble basketweave that was on clearance for $5/sqft could not be found.  The sample was there….but the warehouse stock couldn’t be located.  I went back to the store and after half an hour of hemming and hawing I finally threw a dart at some light brown travertine that they have in stock right now.  It’s fine.  Nothing wrong with it, and I felt my little dream of a vintage-looking floor going away, but when you have to buy floor tile you have to buy floor tile and I need it now and I need it cheap.  So hello travertine.  Even better than your availability is your price – $4.79 per/sf.   The problem with having a great contractor who works FAST FAST FAST is keeping up with what needs to be done next.  He’s ready for the bathroom floor, so all systems go.

Update on bathroom sink – such good news.  I once read a children’s book where a character proclaimed Oh Scrumptious Day! I can’t remember the book or the character, but I remember the line.  This is how I feel about the pedestal sink.   SO ANYWAY.  I tried to place an order for this vanity, the one from an earlier post:

Bye Bye

Back ordered for 6 weeks.  Bye bye.  So then I called Chris.  “Chris, this deal with the pedestal…I need you to tell me again.  What is the issue?” So he explained it again, in his technical way that I only partially understood.  But the difference was this time, I did understand the bit about the water supply lines – “so you’re saying the issue is that the valves for the water supply lines are OUTSIDE the wall, so you’ll be able to see the on-off valves for the lines and also the lines themselves, unless we put in a vanity to hide them?” YES.  Ohhhhhh!  “Chris, I don’t care.” “But it won’t look perfect.”  “I totally don’t care.” My contractor cares.  My contractor is an amazing perfectionist.  That’s why he said that if I wanted a pedestal sink he was going to have to bust open the wall and move some pipes.  It turns out that this is what needs to happen if you are going to do this perfectly perfectly perfectly.  I’m trying to do a lot of this project as perfectly as I can, but valves sticking out on the underside of the sink basin?  FINE BY ME.

Hello beautiful new sink:

Toto Promenade Pedestal Sink

It was hard to find a great looking vintage-style pedestal that measures only 24 inches across, but I’m a girl who likes a challenge and Toto filled the bill.  Now we have to make a final decision about replacing the old toilet….a part of its pipe is dripping.

Final big news of the week – Chris is ready to sand and stain and wants me to pick a stain.  Here are the stain samples.  I’m leaning towards “Special Walnut” and Chris is pushing for “Dark Walnut” which he’s used before on another job.  I’m freaked out by the idea of Dark Walnut.  (We need a darker stain to cover up the new wood where the various holes in the floor were repaired.)  I love dark floors…I just hadn’t anticipated staining the floors this dark in this project and am having a hard time visualizing the potential final result.  Have put in a call to interior decorator friend to ask for her advice.

the kind of conversation we have these days

Paula and I have a pretty constant stream of conversation these days that revolves around the renovation.   For instance, yesterday we went to the tile store and spent two hours talking about marble tile v. travertine tile and budget buster subway tile v. the more economical subway tile that wasn’t quite so detailed.  This morning she brought me coffee and I spent half an hour talking about paint colors.  Actually, I might have the constant stream of conversation and she might just be a really good listener, but chat around here lately has just been renovation, renovation, renovation.

So this evening Paula and I were looking at pedestal sinks and discussing again, ad nauseum, the Pedestal Sink Issue.  She pointed at this one, this weird little sink on the American Standard website:

weird sink

“That one has an ‘oh shit’ handle.”

“A what?

“An ‘oh shit’ handle.”

“What’s an ‘oh shit’ handle?”

“For when you fall down in the bathroom.”

“Isn’t that a towel rail?”

“Hmm…oh.”

“How many drunken bathroom benders have you been on?” **

On a different note, here are the first (camera phone) shots of the bathroom tile – it hasn’t been ordered yet, I’ll do that tomorrow, and like everything else on this project it may yet be all shot to hell when they confirm the lead time for orders, but this is what we decided on yesterday.  The marble is actually on clearance, the store has 35 square feet left so they are selling it off at $5/sf.  I need 30sf so that works well.  The particular style of subway tile wasn’t my first choice, but my first choice turned out to be wicked expensive.  This one is 75% as nice and 50% less expensive, so now I am just hoping that it won’t take weeks to arrive.  Fingers crossed.

_____________

**Paula thinks that the bathroom sink makers of America are missing a very fine marketing opportunity…..”you know, what about when you’re drunk and brushing your teeth?”  GOOD POINT!

big money day

This evening I had an appointment at the big HD to “close on my kitchen.” (This is also called “the part where you pay for it.”)

I was actually ready to buy last Sunday but there was a sale that started today – buy 11 cabinets and get a free sink base.  I didn’t know what a sink base was before now, but a sink base is the cabinet that holds the kitchen sink.  If a sink slots on top of it, that’s the sink base cabinet.   By waiting till today to close on the kitchen I got the sink base for free, and I can use that extra $250 now to put towards the bathroom vanity.

That is not to say that this kitchen was cheap.   I did it just about as cheaply as one can do it, but let me illustrate this story by saying that within two minutes of charging my card for the entire cost of the kitchen cabinets the fraud department of Chase Bank called my cell phone to ask me if I knew that someone had charged a shit load of money at a home supply store, and did I have the card in my possession?  Yes, I do and I just used it to charge a shit load of money at a home supply store.  Thanks Chase Bank!  I’m incredibly impressed by your fraud division.

Once that was done I met with Linda, the bathroom designer, and I said Linda, I need a vanity and I can’t find one and I really need help and can you help me, because the 24 inch thing is killing me.  And if the 24 inch thing by some miracle doesn’t kill me, then the price of these things will.   So out comes Linda’s huge catalog and hello! I think I found a vanity.  I don’t even hate it.  I mean, I hate it in comparison to all of the beautiful pedestals, but I’m never going to get past that so let’s all just get used to it now.

This is the "maybe" vanity.

Here’s the one hitch – OH, here’s a lesson for anyone playing along at home – there is ALWAYS at least one hitch.  So Linda says to me, “do you want the 18 inch or the 22 inch?”  Ummm, I want the 24 inch.  Turns out she means the depth of the sink.  Standard vanity depths begin at either 18 inches or 22 inches.   I have no idea what depth I need.   I honestly said to her, “well, the old one was about the same depth as the toilet.”  Poor Linda.  I’ll try to measure tomorrow evening.

bathroom

I’m feeling very sad about the bathroom sink.  I had my heart set on installing a vintage pedestal sink.  It was one of the very first design decisions I made about the apartment.  The bathroom originally looked like this:

Now the bathroom looks like this:

I know. Oh my god.  I kind of need to say it again.  OH MY GOD.  And it basically can’t stop looking like that if I don’t get a move on and order some tile and a sink and a medicine cabinet.  I had a full vision for the bathroom and right in the middle of it was the pedestal sink.  However, the contractor (Chris) has now told me that due to the placement of the pipes a pedestal sink won’t work.  It has to be a vanity.  I asked Chris to explain again why it wouldn’t work and he did and then I asked him to explain it again and I still don’t get it.  The only part I did get was that if I really want a pedestal sink he needs to shut down the water supply to the building and do something very plumb-ery to the pipes, and that new pipes would be involved and it’s pretty difficult and pretty expensive.

So now I need a vanity and the bathroom is super small and the only vanity that will fit needs to be 24 inches wide and I’m finding out that these are pretty hard to come by and all of the ones I’ve found so far I don’t like one little bit.   OH and I should also mention that I had budgeted $350 for a pedestal sink and vanities that aren’t crap are at least twice that.   Shitty shit shit.  OH (I’ll say again) OH, I also want to say that in almost every instance I’ve looked at a vanity, done a double take at the price and then discovered that on top of that the price doesn’t include the counter top or the sink.  Crappity crap crap shit.

This evening I went to pick out tile and I was all ready to pick out tile and then it all kind of went to hell and I couldn’t make a decision and then I decided to go to Community Home Supply and they didn’t have any vanities that I could even begin to afford and ditto for the medicine cabinet (because at some point I decided it was mentally advisable to switch gears), so then I went to Restoration Hardware (all vanities 27″ and no medicine cabinets on display) and then I went to Pottery Barn and then I thought oh fuck it all to hell, so then I went next door to the West Elm and they didn’t even HAVE vanities and finally I decided to go to Home Depot and after 10 minutes in there I realized that lying down in the parking lot and praying to be run over was infinitely more appealing than looking at the vanities.

Did you keep up with all that? Is this project still fun?  NO IT IS NOT.

Let’s go out with one final image.  Enjoy it here, because my bathroom is not going to look like this.

Not my bathroom

kitchen cabinets

When I first started the renovation process I was determined to go with an Ikea kitchen.  I did all the research, including exhaustive reading on Apartment Therapy.  I looked at hundreds of pictures of kitchens and read every comment that had the words “Ikea” and “kitchen” in the same paragraph.  Here’s what I learned – people love their Ikea kitchen cabinets.  I was all set to love my Ikea kitchen cabinets too.

So Paula and I hauled ourselves out to Schaumburg a couple of Saturday afternoons ago and waded into Ikea*, along with every other living person in the entire Chicagoland area, and all you need to know about that experience is pretty much summed up by the ocular migraine that came on out of nowhere in the middle of the lighting department.  I had to go sit down until I could see properly again.

Sad thing is, here’s what I saw: kitchen cabinets that I only partially liked.  There were a few door styles that I thought were very nice, but nothing that felt quite right for the kitchen in this project, and while the cabinet frameworks were good, I had a harder time with the drawers.  The drawers do not have plywood or wood or even MDF sides – instead the drawer is formed by a sort of molded metal on all sides, with a wooden front.  Metal drawers are actually probably better than wooden drawers but aesthetically I was struggling a bit.  I shut the drawers, I opened the drawers, I looked all around and finally I asked an Ikea kitchen designer if they had other types of drawers?  Like drawers with other sides?  Wooden drawers?  Anything other than these drawers?

“No.”

Literally, that was all she said.  Ok.  Damn it.

I wound up sitting down with a different kitchen designer who did a rendered sketch, based upon the kitchen measurements I had brought with me, and finally gave me a total price for the 11 cabinets that I need for this renovation – $2100.  Kind of amazing.  Though it turns out that part of that amazing price involves putting the kitchen cabinets together ourselves and maybe it was the remnants of the migraine but it all just felt very….well….very, “maybe this will be ok, but maybe there’s another kitchen out there”, so maybe I’ll shop around a bit.

Which I did. I wound up at Home Depot and let me be the first to say that I never thought I’d buy my kitchen at the big HD.  But I sure did.  If you need a kitchen and you don’t have an enormous budget and if Ikea gives you migraines too, go to the Home Depot on Lincoln Avenue, the one just off Devon and ask for Kurt.  He’s a kitchen designer there and he’s fantastic.  I met Kurt, and I told him all about this little condo and then I told him about my little budget and then he showed me the 3 lines they carry, and it’s really easy – they go from kind of cheap, to not so cheap, to pretty expensive (for Home Depot) and then I picked out the style I wanted (which is about sixteen kinds of fun).  He and I sat down together and I got a big lesson in the standard builder sizes of kitchen cabinets and he sketched out my entire kitchen on this 3-D revolving program of amazingness and when I left I had pictures of my cabinets, and we’d even thrown a sink in there and I had 3 different counter top samples to take away with me.  11 cabinets were twice the price of the Ikea cabinets, but I felt twice as good about them and really felt that – taking into account this project and this budget and what I want for this place – that economizing up was the right decision.  I’ll chop away at some other line item to make up for the difference.

Do you want to see my new kitchen in it’s beautiful Home Depot rendering?  I’m kind of in love with it.

Stove view

Sink view

I don’t have a picture of the cabinet doors I chose, but I found the same style on the manufacturer’s website and here is a sample of the doors for this project:

This isn't my kitchen, this is someone else's kitchen.

Here are the details – the entire kitchen is only about 80 square feet, and I focused closely on maximizing storage in all corners.  There is a single 8 foot cabinet in the corner, 12 inches deep and Kurt and I had a long conversation about the importance of making sure one of the cabinets was all drawers.  Finally, my intention was to put seeded glass doors in the cabinet above the sink but oh my god is it shocking what that does to the price.  Bye bye glass doors.

There’s also a small butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room and it’s also getting new cabinets and shelves, but that rendering will have to wait – I forgot to ask Kurt to print it out.  Next up in this project is bathroom tile and a bathroom sink.

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*Can I just throw out there that the Ikea in Schaumburg is ridiculously hard to find?  Would it be so hard to guide the pilgrims in from the highway?  Put up a sign, Ikea People.  Put up four.  DO SOMETHING.

tile

Tile for the kitchen floor has been decided upon and purchased and I managed to snag a bargain.  Home Carpet One (on Lincoln) has a great selection of tile, including some great close-outs.  I walked in on Wednesday evening and immediately saw a 12×12 travertine tile on display, with a large sale note saying that they only have 420 square feet left.  I need 120 square feet.  The price on the tile was $1.99 per square foot, which is pretty unheard of…I looked at the tile…..then I looked at the tile again.  I asked the man behind the counter if this was travertine.  “NO, it’s porcelain!” Up close, I could see that it was porcelain.  From even a couple of feet away it looks like a very nice poor man’s travertine.  They had two shades, and I liked the lighter, cream colored one the best.

This is a small 4×4 sample they gave me to take home, but I’ve now placed an order for 129 square feet.  This is more than I need but they sell it by the box, and better safe than sorry since it’s a close out.  My budget is starting to run away with me so at least I can apply the savings here to some other line item.

Speaking of the budget, I’m struggling to find a vintage floor tile for the bathroom.  I’m fairly decided on white subway tile for the walls, but the floor is a tough decision.  I want a tile that looks like it might always have been there.  Nothing I saw felt right until I saw a green and white marble mosaic tile on display, also at Home Carpet One.  It was beautiful.  Amazing.  Intricate.  I asked the salesman how much it cost.  $80 per square foot.  I need 25 square feet.  So that’s not even CLOSE to going to happen.  Nowhere in this Universe is $80/sf going to happen.  Maybe I’ll cave and put the kitchen floor tile in the bathroom, but I still have hopes for a vintage looking bathroom floor, so the search will continue.

demolition

Yesterday the contractor turned up and announced that it was demolition day.  I asked him what he and his crew were going to demolish first.  He said, “everything!”

I’m not sure how long I thought it would take to demolish every grime covered thing in the kitchen and bathroom, but I hadn’t given enough credit to how much 4 men with sledgehammers and crow bars can accomplish in 8 hours.  The kitchen is gone and so is 75% of the bathroom, with the exception of the vintage tub and toilet, which are now standing alone in an empty shell.  Yesterday there was a huge pile of debris but today it’s all gone, apparently hauled off to some specialty dump that takes construction materials.  The contractor is now working on the re-wiring, and Home Depot has turned up to take an official measurement for the kitchen cabinets.

I thought this was all going to take forever, but now everything appears to be moving so fast that the entire project might be delayed while I scramble to get everything chosen and ordered.  I’ve set my sights on this sink, but it might be too wide.  We shall see.