Happy 4th birthday to this pup! It was too cold to go to the dog park, but he at least got a sheep toy, the stuffing from which is now spread all through the house.
My favorite part of Porchfest 2024 (oh, sure, the music was good too). Ithaca’s is the original, and probably the best.
New door day! Which is also my way of saying, after all the work we’ve done for the last several months, we finally moved into our new house three weeks ago! Big projects are done (for now), but there will still be plenty of small ones.
New fence, same dog.
We’re done finishing our floors. Now we’re just reattaching (and in some cases repairing) the trim, painting some smaller spots, and cleaning up before we finally start moving in!
While we’ve started finishing our floors, the fence builders we hired removed our old chain link fence and have begun installing a new wooden one. The old fence was 2.5 feet high, and our dog has jumped it to chase rabbits. The new one will keep him in and help make our side yard feel like an oasis.
The walls are all painted and we’ve nearly finished sanding the floors. The lighter look of the wood brings a greater sense of light and spaciousness to the rooms in our house that was lacking before, so we’re going to forgo staining and get right on to finishing once we clean everything up.
We’ve primed all the walls in the house, next comes a couple coats of paint to finish things. For the rest of the house, we picked the same shade of white as the kitchen, since it worked out so well. We’ve started to zero in on some accent color choices for a few spots too.
The old vent hole has been patched, a recessed light was installed, and the walls and ceiling have their first coat of primer on them. The room will need at least one more coat of primer. We’ll be repeating this process throughout the rest of the house, then finally repainting.
With the kitchen work mostly done, we’ll be repainting the rest of the house next. But before we do that, we need to spackle areas where the old paint has chipped. The hole in the ceiling is one of a few old vents that are no longer used. We took them down and will be filling the holes with drywall.
With the installation of our new dishwasher, the kitchen project is more or less complete. We still have to install hardware on the cabinets, but we’ll be holding off on that to first prioritize some other projects throughout the house.
More progress on the kitchen renovation—We now have countertops! The new lighting has also been installed. At this point, we’re just waiting for our dishwasher to be delivered, and that’ll be a wrap for this project!
Our cabinets arrived a little over a week ago, and are in the process of being installed. The room is finally starting to look like a kitchen again! Tomorrow the countertop installers will be taking measurements, so we can get that process started too.
We finished painting the walls and ceiling and then installing the new floors in our kitchen. It’s incredible what a difference these two small changes make to the look of the room. In a couple of weeks the new cabinets should get delivered!
The kitchen begins to take shape
Friday, January 19, 2024
The kitchen renovation project has come a long way since my last post about it. After we removed the old cabinets and backsplash, not only did a lot of the plaster come off the walls, but we also discovered that the sink’s drainage pipe was cutting one of the corners, getting in the way of where we wanted to put one of our new cabinets. The old cabinet that occupied that spot had been built around it.
We already had a contractor agree to update the electrical outlet locations and install the new cabinets and appliances, so we asked them to move the drainage pipe back into the wall too. When they took apart the old cast iron pipe, they found it had corroded to the point where it was about 90% clogged. And so some more extensive pipe replacements took place, along with clearing out the pipe to the sewer as far as the snake would allow.
Of course, this led to needing to remove and repair an extensive portion of the walls too. They ended up also spackling and priming all of the walls and ceiling when all was said and done. This made things quite a bit more expensive, which I don’t love. Nevertheless, the contractors did a great job every step of the way and ultimately, once the kitchen is done and we’re moved into the house, we’re going to be happy to have made all of these improvements.
Now that the walls and ceiling have been primed (twice!), the room is ready for us to paint it. We already have some paint picked out, and will be working on that this weekend. Hopefully next weekend we’ll be able to put in the new floors. These things are easy enough to do ourselves, so at least we’ll save some money that way.
Another couple days of kitchen demoing down. We cleaned up since this photo was taken, but I forgot to get a newer one. The walls may be 3 layer plaster, or something similar, which I guess wasn’t uncommon in the 1940s. Next step will be figuring out how to address the exposed parts so we can paint.
Today we started demoing the kitchen in our new house. Excited to be starting the renovation process, and to see it all come together. Some of the cabinets we’re removing have been there since the house was built in the 1940s. The space is small but our design will make it a lot more functional.
A recent visit to one of my favorite places, Cornell’s Botanic Gardens.
We went camping in Maine this past weekend, not far from Acadia. What a beautiful place! It was the furthest up the east coast I’ve been. Maybe next year we’ll go all the way to Nova Scotia.
I feel so lucky to be living in the finger lakes again.
