Andrew's View of the Week

Does it Ever End?

Posted on 08/03/2025 by Andrew Reynolds

Tolkien said something like that in Lord of the Rings. I’m not on that kind of adventure, but I do wonder if kitchen remodels ever end. No pictures this time, but as of last Thursday we officially started using the kitchen again. All the appliances are connected and working. I even moved some furniture into the living room end of the space. It’s so nice to wash dishes in a real sink and cook on a real stove. Camp stoves are fun, but only for a weekend, not 12 weeks. Yesterday I made a batch of spaghetti sauce and Heather cooked a wonderful quiche today. It’s nice getting back to normal.

There are a dozen small details left like moving a heater vent, some final trim to set and setting tile around our new gas fireplace. Hopefully that all happens this week. As you can imagine the biggest problem we’ve had is scheduling all the different trades to come out and do things. You know, the plumber can’t work until the counter guys finish drilling the holes, and the counter guys can’t work until the electrician has finished … and … and …

It does seem to get worse at the end of the project when you don’t have a full day’s work for someone. They just don’t like have lots of little jobs they have to drive around town for. I get it, I wouldn’t like that either.

I had a minor setback on my deck project. I had finished digging all the post holes to set the concrete posts when starting last Sunday we had two afternoons of heavy thunderstorms (flash flood heavy, lots of damage around town). My whole work area got flooded and party filled in my post holes. There have been threats of more storms all week so I just had to wait for better weather and for my holes to dry out. It looks like the weather is improving for next week and tomorrow I’ll be able to back to work. If my plan works out, I’ll have six concrete posts in by Friday and will be ready to order the wood I need.

Hopefully. That’s it for this week. Hopefully I’ll have some nice pictures next week and not to sore a back. Until then, if need me, I’m out checking for thunderstorms.

Posted in General | Tagged cooking, deck build, food, kitchen remodel, life, writing | 20 Comments

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.

Posted in General | Tagged deck build, diy, garden, gardening, home, kitchen remodel, nature | 19 Comments

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.

Posted in General | Tagged kitchen remodel | 11 Comments

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.