A New Kitchen

These are pictures of the kitchen before we started the renovation.  The house was built in the early 1980's.  The kitchen hadn't been changed since - except for replacing the vinyl flooring with wood.

View facing south from the old dining room

View facing north-east from the entrance.  The old dining room is through the door.

View facing west from the patio doors.  The front entrance is the light coming in.  On the left (north) is the old dining room.

View from the new dining room into the old dining room - looking west.  The new dining room (behind the camera) is what used to be the living room, at the front of the house.  We never used the living room, and the old dining room was really too small.  So we changed the living room into a dining room.  The old dining room got filled with projects in various stages of completion.

A close-up picture of the old dining room and its plethora of projects.  Note the wall straight ahead with its side window.  This wall with its window and the wall on the left will disappear.

We had saved for many years, maybe 30, for a kitchen remodel.  Now we started talking about what we wanted in a new kitchen - floor plan, appliances, and so on.  I had started drawing up floor plans, but when I mentioned some ideas to Donna, she said, "Hey, I've got a dozen that I've done." So I took a look at them.  Most of them were better than mine, and two were really good.  She said, "Those are my favorites, too."

So Donna talked to many of the remodeling contractors in the Omaha area.  I went on some of these visits.  A couple had come to the house to see what the job would be like.  We were not impressed with any of them.  Some ignored our stated desires and their plans showed what they liked instead.  Others had a great deal of trouble estimating the cost of the job.  This second group didn't seem to have much experience in actually doing the work.  This went on for a couple of years.  We were considering doing the work ourselves, using Ikea cabinetry.  We like Ikea products, mostly, and the cabinets are very much cheaper than the custom built cabinets touted by many of the contractors we talked with.

Then Shelley said she had noticed a sign on a front yard that said, "Ikea Kitchens." Donna and I had seen these signs, too.  Shelley said when she drove by, there was someone in the front yard - so she stopped.  And got invited in.  The lady had a lot of good things to say about her kitchen remodel, and Shelley said the kitchen was beautiful.  So what the hell ... Donna called the guy: Mike Schmidt.  He came out to the house.  Donna showed him our plans and we talked.  He took our plans, measurements of the existing kitchen, old dining room, and new dining room, and list of our "wants." Then he came back a couple of days later with a detailed estimate: both cost and time.  During that time we discovered he'd been doing kitchen remodels for many years in the Omaha area.

We liked him, personally, we liked his price, and looking at his previous work, we liked that, too.  We gave him the go-ahead, and he said he could start in about a week or ten days, depending on some other work he was finishing.  If we couldn't be ready by then, it would have to be in the fall.  So we decided to get ready.  We had to clear out everything in the kitchen, old dining room, and new dining room.

Then Mike called again and said he could start on Monday.  This was Friday.  Yikes!  So we got to work.

You won't see Donna in any of these pictures, but she's always there - taking the pictures.

The kitchen was the hardest.  So much stuff!  Notice that we forgot the copper pots on the soffits.  Here and in the next picture you can see the hole I had made in the soffit over the counter.  This was so I could hook up the plumbing for the tub in the bathroom just above.  Donna and I had done that remodel ourselves - and was one reason we wanted someone else to do the kitchen.  Damn that's a lot of work.

Shelley is moving fast toward the wine.

Shelley and I, wiped out after we moved everything into the garage.

Can't.  Move.

New dining room.  The wire on the wall is an audio hook-up from the equipment stack in the family room.

So they didn't actually start on Monday.  Mike asked us if we wanted to get building permits.  We thought about it and decided it might be nice to do that for a change.  I'd gotten one for the deck I built and it didn't seem like a big deal.  But it turns out the Bellevue building inspectors actually wanted to look at the plans.  That took a couple of days.  They started, I think, on Wednesday.



The first thing, of course was to lose the rug.  Here, in the new dining room they are putting down plywood for the wood floor to come.  The electrician is moving a lot of wiring around - thus the wire hanging out of the wall.  There are two other things to notice in this picture.  On the upper right, you can see where they cut away the wallboard to check the support over the doorway between the old and new dining rooms.  They also cut away the wallboard at the bottom of the supports in the arches to take a look at that.  They looked at the bottom of the floor from the basement side and noticed that this part of the floor is not supported.  There's only plywood holding up the wall.  So they had to reinforce the floor there.  In doing that, they had to elevate the upper floor a little - the doors upstairs wouldn't close until they took out the floor jacks.

That's something Donna and I would not have noticed.  I'm glad it's done.

They pulled the bottoms of the soffits off to see how much of that they remove.  The one across the middle of the picture carries plumbing, but others could be removed.  The middle soffit will be made much shallower and will mirror the island counter as you will see.  In the back of the picture, the windows and sliding door will be removed for new ones.  The double window on the back right of the old kitchen was placed by the original builders in an unfortunate location.  You can see the soffit across the top of the sliding door and window on its right.  This encloses a beam that supports the edge of the roof.  When they installed the double window, they cut the support for that beam.  The roof had been sagging there for several years.  As you will see, Mike's guys fixed that.

Wall removed.  Also most of the soffits have been removed, but a new one is necessary for the plumbing at the top of the picture.

They've removed the double window that was on the right of the back of the old kitchen.  There's a new support post in place (the small ladder is leaning against it.  This mandates that the new windows will be of different sizes.  In the old dining room, they've cut the supports for the floor and replaced them with a beam.  Unfortunately, that beam is too short.  It was supposed to extend all the way across that part of the wall.  They replaced it later with a new beam.

You can see the two white waste-water pipes and the two copper pipes are in place.  One of the white pipes is a vent pipe.

Men at work.

Shallow soffit constructed that will mirror the island below it.

Couple of guys at work.

The green beam is the replacement.  This is two large pieces of wood each 1-3/4 inches thick to make a single 3-1/2 inch thick beam.  Joe, the foreman, said this stuff was relatively expensive.  The blue and white wires in the soffit are mine.  while I had the chance, I ran three Ethernet and a coax cable from a switch in the basement (where the Cox cable enters the house and connects to the cable modem and then to a router).  These will hook to a small television on the wall on the far side of the picture.  the guy on the far left is Joe, the foreman.  Good guy.

Men at work.

Back of the kitchen.  Wallboard replaced and soffit completed.

This soffit carries heat and A/C to the upper floor.  We couldn't get rid of it.

Ikea cabinets being installed.

David's Floors is doing the floors.  They decided to do them after the cabinets were in place.  Notice the shallow soffit.

More cabinets and some window work.

The small and large windows on the back right side of the picture are in.  Donna had ordered the windows from Home Depot; they were custom sized.  They got the specs wrong on the small window so it didn't match, exactly its brother - it was the right size but when installed, its vertical size was wrong.  Home Depot had to reorder the window.

Heime at work.

Heime is the mudder.  This guy is a real artist.  Both Donna and I have mudded walls.  It's a hard job.  We inevitably put on too much and sand off too much.  Heime has the right touch.  The guy is amazing.

Before the floors are in place.

Floors are in but covered with paper.

When David's Floors put the floor in, they left the old wooden floor in the kitchen.  They cut out some of the planks on the edge of the old floor and slid in new planks in their place, making a seamless floor with the random plank spacing you expect.  They cut the old plank by running a circular saw down the plank to make grooves down to to the subfloor - about three per plank.  Then they just pulled out the pieces.  Pretty cool.  After the floor was refinished you couldn't tell which was old floor and which was new.

When they put down the stain and polyurethane the house was pretty stinky.  But that only lasted a day.  But then they did it again.  Woof.

Window in place.

The large window on the right is two side stationary windows and two sliding doors.  The doors open by sliding in front of the windows.

There I am, doing my impression of The Flash.

Doors to the deck and the side window are in place.

Marble (white) and granite (dark gray) counter tops in place.  Faucet and sink in place.

Paper removed from floors.  Refrigerator and freezer in place.  

The refrigerator and freezer are separate units, but side-by-side they look like one.  Looks like a commercial installation, but is much cheaper.

The stove, of which you can just see the top of over the counters, is pretty cool.  It's a six-burner gas top with an electric oven.  The burners are of various sizes: some small for small pots and for warming, others capable of 20K BTU/hr.  Water boils pretty fast.  The oven has steam injection.  The plumber had never seen one like it.  The steam keeps meat a little juicier and makes bread crustier.  Nice computer control, too.  It has a bread proofing mode that keeps the oven at 100 deg. F.  The wall oven is nice, too.  Double-door and can be controlled by a smart-phone.



The ceiling fan, which you see as a blur, is pretty cool.  It looks like a three-bladed airplane propeller. Made by Fanimation, sold at Lowes.



The round table is the old wood table from the original kitchen.  Donna stained it "espresso." The chairs came from NFM. We sat in all the chairs in NFM.  These were the most comfortable.

Finally.  Everything is back.

It took us a lot longer to bring all the stuff back in.  But we did get rid of a lot of it.  Some of it went to Jonathan.  A the rest went to New Life Thrift (36th and Harrison).  I like those guys.  They'll take anything.

Here are some of the guys who did the work.