Archive for February 2012

one thing that i love about the previous owners is that they were not afraid to leave their mark on this house. every time we've had to open a wall, or move something around, i've found some kind of token from them. sometime it's something that they left on purpose (like notes left inside of walls), and other times it's random pieces of paper stuck behind drawers or between cracks in the counter. when we did some work in the upstairs bathroom i found the box top from laundry soap for a wringer washer. i've found newspapers from 30 years ago. just last week i found i recipe for a jello mold, complete with bits of celery and crushed pinapple.

when we started removing the drywall in the kitchen, right away we noticed that there were some thing written on the wall. the more drywall that we removed, the more words we found.



here it said "howdy" across the bottom, and the word "sunshine" in a box at the top.



off to the right we found this clue as to who wrote these things. this is a stick figure with the name eric. someone added the note "witty" at the bottom. are people even described as being "witty" anymore?? one of the sons of the family that lived in the house before was named eric. i sent this picture to our neighbor who still sees the family, she promised to share the picture with eric next time she saw him.



on the other side of the wall we discovered song titles. here we have "help me rhonda", "surfin safari", and "california girls".



and if there was any uncertainty on who sang these songs, we uncovered have this giant "beach boys" next to it. it also says water skiing below that. pay no attention to that electrical mess at the bottom of the picture, we took care of that too....

it's fun to find these things when we work on the house. i can just imagine the previous family working on their kitchen some summer (1965?), with the beach boys playing on the radio, or maybe while listening to a record. mike and i talked about doing something similar on the new wall before installed the cabinets, but we just couldn't image any of the music that we listen to now still being recongnizable in 50 years :-)

we've been assembling the ikea cabinets a few at a time in our living room. this has been working out well because we haven't gotten overwhelmed with the assembly process, and we've been able to have the cabinets all ready to go when we're ready to install each specific one. the downside of ikea cabinet assembly is that you will end up with giant piles of cardboard and plastic.



the other night we were putting together a particularly complicated cabinet (tall pantry cabinet, it came in 9 various boxes), so our pile of trash just kept growing. once the pile grew to be too tall for me to step over, i decided to just step on the box pile. i was just about to put my foot down when i noticed a fuzzy tail sticking out from beneath the box pile.



not a good hiding place trevi...

2.5.12: started removing items from kitchen.


2.11.12: demo of cabinets begins, discover that we need to remove drywall.




2.12.12: start to work on framing and electrical.




2.18.12: new drywall


2.19.12: install track for cabinets and start installing upper cabinets.


we need less work days and more weekends...

so we did it! a few weekends ago we rented a uhaul trailer, got up at 5am, and drove to chicago to pick up our cabinets.

we had our 4!! carts of boxes ready to be picked up by mid-afternoon. it took us some time to load up the trailer, but we were back home by 9pm. it was a long day, but i was glad we were able to get it all done in one day.

next, we removed the existing upper cabinets. and discovered that the existing wall had a lot of deflection in it. great... we were not planning on removing the drywall on this wall, but i did not feel comfortable hanging our new (much heavier) cabinets on a wall that had so much movement. all of our upper cabinets will be supported off of this wall. plus we needed to do some electrical work to re-arrange outlets, and get ready for the under cabinet lights and range hood. we decided it was best to remove the drywall, re-work the framing, and do the electrical work on the open wall.

i was worried that i would have a hard time covering that window back up after seeing it uncovered. it does bring more natural light in to the kitchen. and it does make the space seem a little bigger. but, the plaster around the wall is in bad shape and would require a lot of work if we wanted to keep the window. i also confirmed that the placement would be difficult to work around with the kitchen layout. i'm not happy about it, but i think i'll be ok to cover it back up. in the end, i think it is going to be more important to have a fully functioning kitchen (window or fridge??), and we do have another window and the back door has a window. plus, the door and window are on the south side so they at let in light all day. we did pull the original trim from the existing window just in case we need it somewhere else in the house.

we were able to access everything we needed for the electrical work, and i re-built the framing in a few areas to strengthen the wall.

i think i'm going to go ahead and add some blocking for the upper cabinets, but we're almost ready to put up new drywall and move on to the cabinets! we left our sink cabinet in place and have been working around it so far, we're hoping we can get the new uppers installed before removing our sink.

meanwhile, our dining room looks like this:

i strangely enjoy putting together ikea cabinets...

cooper has been surprisingly around during this whole process. he normally is afraid of anything different or loud, which means he spends the day upstairs hiding in the bathroom. or outside. but he's been brave and keeps coming down to check on us.

as for murphy, he's a curious little guy, so we have to attach his leash to something in the living room or else he'll be right in the middle of it all. i caught him trying to lick the drill the other day! he keeps sneaking up on to the couch when we're not paying attention. he's technically not supposed to be on the couch, but he looks so cute, we usually forgive him.

that's the update for now. we did find some interesting things written inside the wall once we removed the drywall, but i need to upload the pictures from my camera. let's just say that even though we didn't find a date, we think the kitchen was last remodeled in 1965...