Kitchen Remodel — Week Whatever

Posted on 07/20/2025 by Andrew Reynolds

First, progress on the deck continues. Not as fast as I’d like, but afternoon temps have been in the upper 90s so I’ve only been able to work a couple of hours a day in the morning. I have removed most of the old pavers that need to go and have started placing the forms for the concrete blocks that need to go in:

The wood thing is just a jig I used to visualize where the gazebo will go.

The tubes are eight inches in diameter and about 16 inches long. They’ll be filled with concrete and the deck will sit on top of these. The final deck will be about a foot above the pavers. The soil in this area isn’t just dirt, it’s mostly rock and in a couple of places chunks of concrete. I suspect that at some point in the past this area of the yard may have been used for a dumping area of unneeded concrete. I’m not so much digging post holes as I am hard rock mining. It’s taken a couple of hours to dig out each hole and I’ve got six in total to put in. I’m figuring at least another week of digging and moving rocks before I can get the concrete in.

Last Friday they installed the appliances for our kitchen!!! Here’s a quick look at a few of them:

And we’re starting to put things in these cabinets. There is still a long list of things left to do, but it’s getting closer. The good news for this week is that with the appliances in we can start some limited use of the kitchen and might be able to move one of the cars back into the garage. It’s been a long road, but we’re almost done.

That’s it for this week. If you need me, I’m digging rocks out of the back yard.

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Kitchen Remodel Week 8

Posted on 07/06/2025 by Andrew Reynolds

Only one picture this week:

A lot of work happened here this week but most of it in the crawl space or attic. I didn’t follow the either the electrician or plumber to either space. This new faucet is the only thing I got a picture of (and not a very good one). We did get most of the plumbing done and almost all of the electrical. There are couple of things that are still on order and a few things that can’t happen until after the room is painted.

I did some work out on my deck project, but most of that was moving pavers and shoveling sand around. Nothing to really take a picture of. I hope to make more progress on that this week.

This next week on the remodel we hope to have the painters in. After that we’ll be ready to start installing the appliances. If all goes well, we’ll be able to start using our new kitchen in a couple of weeks. Until then we’re still cooking breakfast on the camp stove, heating lunch in the microwave and I’ve figured out how to cook a pizza in our new fancy Ninja Flip air fryer and tonight’s pizza night so if you need me, I’m in the living room air frying a pizza.

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Remodel Week 7

Posted on 06/29/2025 by Andrew Reynolds

I did post anything last week about the kitchen remodel because, well nothing really happened that week. We were waiting for the countertops to be fabricated. Well this week we had a lot of progress.

First the flooring company came by and installed our new flooring:

This is a hardwood laminate product and much nicer than the white title that was here before. Also note that the fireplace people came by and have started to work on our fancy fireplace.

We also had the trim carpenter on-site preparing trim details for doors and windows plus some work on our crown molding. Didn’t take any pictures of that since most of his work isn’t finished. The electrician also came by to do a little rough in work.

The big thing that happened was on Friday when the counter top guys showed up and installed our new granite counter tops:

This is the island and back corner of the kitchen.

Here is the sink area and plant window.

and here is a close up of the stone we selected:

All of the stone has this intricate veining pattern. This is one of the reasons it took so long to get the counters fabricated. Some of the veining caused one slab to break and we had to buy another section and we wanted to get the veining patterns to match between the countertop and backsplash. That meant that they had to put all the slabs on their CNC machines for pictures and then a little computer work to find the right matching patterns before programming in the cuts.

We’re thrilled with the results. I haven’t made much progress on the deck. Both Heather and I have had medical procedures to deal with so I’ve been on the sick list for a couple of weeks, but this week I’m back to the deck project. The next steps there are to figure out where concrete footings need to go and exactly how many I’ll need. More about that later so if you need me I’m reading load spanning tables and calculating dynamic loads.

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Remodel Week 5

Posted on 06/13/2025 by Andrew Reynolds

Some progress this week, but not all of it is worth a picture. The cabinet guy got our island unit set:

and they pulled out the old fireplace unit:

We’re getting a newer gas fireplace with all kinds of fancy controls so the old one needs to go.

Other progress included the granite countertop guy came by to make the measurements and templates for our countertops. They say then need two weeks to fabricate them before they can be installed. Next week we hope to get the flooring company out to do the floors. It’s all progress.

I was out of action two days this week for a routine medical procedure so there was much progress on the deck — well not enough to take pictures of. I did work on some of my plans for next phase and did order a couple of tools I need for the project.

I hope you realize that the major reason I take on a new project at home is so I can order new tools. It’s really the tools/toys I want, not whatever I’m building. That’s it for this week and if you need me, I’ll be on-line looking for a powered post hole digger.

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