Sans Kitchen: Week 3

I was doing pretty well for the first two weeks of life without our kitchen. I was eager to come up with new, easy clean-up meals for us and enjoyed eating dinners at night out on our porch. I didn't even mind doing dishes in the bathroom:

Crockpot in the bathtub. Yum.

 But I've been in a grouchier mood about it this week. Kind of like this:

I think it's partly because we're coming up on losing an entire month trying to figure out our wall situation and because all of our cabinets and appliances got delivered this week (which equals boxes all over the house, nowhere to put them, and Jen going crazy over all-this-stuff-in-the-middle-of-the-living-room-that-I-can't-put-anywhere!) If we had an enclosed garage, we might have been able to stick them out there, but we have an open carport.

We've also been storing things we had to move out of the living room/dining room area (glassware, our dining room chairs, picture frames, etc.) in the back rooms, so it's kind of been hard to organize or do any projects in those rooms (like our office redo which, I'm still going to try to get done by the end of the summer--maybe). 

Well, the structural engineer did indeed finish up our plans this week and I've sent them to the contractors we've been talking to. Hopefully we'll get some estimates this week and see if we can get this show on the road...

Crowded Out

Our cabinets and appliances got delivered yesterday—very exciting! Not so exciting is the fact that it will probably be a while before we can install anything—we're still waiting for the plans to be drawn up for our wall removal. We went ahead and got them delivered, though, 'cause the distribution center where they were being held was going to start charging us holding costs. We made some room for them but, uh, it's feeling a bit crowded in the dining room:

Luckily the cabinets are flat-packed so they're easy to stack.

We're planning on selling our old appliances on Craigslist ASAP, so at least there won't be two sets of appliances taking up space. Hopefully we'll know more about the structural plans for our wall sometime this week. And we'll see how long I can go without freaking out over all these boxes in the middle of the house. Robert is taking bets...

Dining Room Mood Board

Aahh, decorating and embellishing is my favorite part of the redo process. I haven't been able to do much hands-on decorating lately but I've found that mood boards are a great way to scratch some of the itch and help me plan out what some of our rooms may look like down the road. Here's one I created for our dining room:

 

I used the Jonathan Adler room I was wooing over as inspiration. 

We already have the sideboard (the angled-leg sideboard from West Elm) and the chairs (the overlapping square chair from West Elm). The chairs are dark brown now but, going along with my goal to make things a little lighter and brighter around here, I'm going to attempt to paint them white.

I'm planning on buying similar-looking mirrors off Craigslist or eBay and spray painting them white. The screen grab of the painting is from local artist Brandon Mclean's website. I bought one his paintings a few years ago (not this one) but it has a similar retro feel.

Some succulents in vibrant potted plants and graphic blue fabrics (incorporated in a rug or some pillows?) would finish it off.

*A really useful tool for making mood boards is mydeco, by the way. It's come in handy for me...

Structural Shmuctural

The structural engineer came out earlier this week to take a look at our wall. He's going to draw up the plans for framing out that area and then hand them over to us so we can start getting estimates from the contractors we've been in touch with. So we should probably get the plans sometime mid-next week. And then hopefully we can get this thing going along (smoothly from here on out would be fantastic).

Although calling in a structural engineer was an expense we didn't anticipate, at the end of the day it's probably a good thing that we did our due diligence and, hopefully, avoided headaches down the road. Having your ceiling start to sag is never a good thing. So, for now, I'll leave you with our current view of the kitchen (a.k.a, "the pit"):

Robbie's Gardening Corner: Blowin' Up!

Robbie's vegetable patch has come quite a ways since I last featured it.

  

We even have a discernible bell pepper and a tomato:

We're hoping they'll make for some good eatin' soon.

Admiring Adler

So while our kitchen project is slowly moving along (seems very slowly at the moment) I've also been thinking about the redesign of our living room/dining room--as you saw here. Once the dust has settled from the kitchen (literally), I'm eager to repaint that area, sell some of the furnishings that won't work in the space anymore (some of which I've had since I moved into my first apartment in Brooklyn--holla Patty!), and bring in a new color scheme. Tryin' to get away from the dark wood/beige thing that's going on in there at the moment and infuse more color and graphic patterns. So I'm love, love, loving this design from Jonathan Adler:

Most of the furniture we're keeping has clean lines, so I want to add some punch with fabrics (like in this Adler photo) and ornate accessories. Right now I have colorful syroco mirrors on the brain:

 

 

My plan is to buy them cheap off ebay or from thrift stores and then spray paint them the color I want. 

*Mirror photos are from here, here, and here.

The Wall of Discontent and Dusty McDusties

There he is. The wall that's holding up our entire kitchen renovation. How rude.

After talking to two different contractors, both of them want us to have a structural engineer come out and assess our, uh, wall situation (since the wall we want to ax is indeed partially holding up the ceiling in our living room/dining room and some of the roof). The engineer would draw up blueprints for opening up the wall and have us (or the contractor we choose) submit the plans to the city at the time we pull a permit.

Structural engineer? Permits? This was all starting to sound a little hectic (and expensive).  Another option would be to just cut out a pass-through in the wall. With that plan, there would only be a restricted opening between the kitchen and the living room. The white built-ins would stay where they are and the wall where the kitchen meets the dining room would pretty much stay as is. No structural integrity would be compromised and we wouldn't need an engineer (right now we want to take that wall out from counter height all the way up to the ceiling--essentially creating an island with no walls around it)

But Robert and I talked about it and we figured, hey, we have this wall opened up anyway and we're committed to our idea of creating a more open floor plan. We might as well do what we want to do now rather than half-ass it, hate it, and want to change it down the road. So I emailed the structural engineer that, coincidentally, both contractors we talked to recommended. He's coming out early next week to take a looksies.

After he does his magic and we're, gulp, about $750 dollars poorer, the contractors will take a look at his plans and give us their estimates for the work. I guess at that point we'll see if this whole idea is totally unreasonable or not. Sigh.

On another note, our house is Dusty McDusty, i.e., really dusty. We didn't really think about the fact that, because our kitchen/living/dining space is essentially just one big room, when the kitchen became dusty construction zone, the rest of the living area became dusty construction zone. So drywall dust is all over the place. We're trying to contain it by putting plastic sheeting over the furniture and trying to keep our food/dishes as clean as possible. We've been hanging out a lot in our bedroom and I think the back patio will become our regular dining zone.

Demo Days

So here's what our kitchen looked like on Friday:

Here it is somewhere midway through demo on Saturday:

And here's what it looked like toward the end of demo on Saturday:

(That's Robert and my mom hammering away at the drywall. Big thanks to my mom and dad, by the way, for helping us out all day on Saturday).

The biggest hiccup was when we realized, after opening the drywall and exposing the beams, that the wall we want to take down between the kitchen and the living room is more structurally significant that we thought. We're hoping that it will just be a matter of reframing the wall a little differently and placing new headers for more reinforcement. So this all may mean more money and more time if we still want to stick to our original plan. We should no more over the next week as we reassess our plans. Until then, we've set up a little makeshift kitchen in our living room.

Things are a little messy around here at the moment but we're makin' the best of it. Here's to creative cooking and doing dishes in the bathroom for the next couple of months.