Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

As I hinted at in my post on Monday about the lighting updates in the kitchen, WE HAVE A FLOOR.

If you don’t understand why I am using all caps, let me just catch up up on this floor saga. It went a little something like this:

* We did not plan to replace the floor, and so did not include it in our original $10,000 renovation budget. We knew our reno plans would leave us with some gaps in the existing floor that would require about a dozen replacement tiles (out of 380 square feet), but foolishly assumed we could find a match at a Big Box or specialty flooring store.

* But then we discovered that could not find a match for our current tiles anywhere. We looked, we really looked. And you came up with some great ideas for creative approaches, but you also overwhelming said that we should bite the bullet and replace the floor since we didn’t like the tile much anyway.

* So we decided to take the plunge, and we tore out all 380 square feet of tile with a sledge hammer. Sam is a hero. That left us with a coat of dried thinset all over the plywood subfloor, which we painstakingly removed with a series of trial and error techniques and several Home Depot tool rentals.

* I ordered new tile for $2/square foot, which is so cheap but still felt like a steep price for a floor we didn’t original plan on buying. But then the tile arrived, and I did not like it. Fortunately I convinced Lowes to come back and pick it up, so I only lost the original cost of shipping.

* I just couldn’t find tile I liked at an affordable price, and did not relish the difficult installation that 380 square feet of tiling promised to be. So I searched high and low, and that’s when I discovered Marmoleum Click, a floating floor linoleum product that seemed perfect except for the price. I resigned myself to increasing our planned spending from $1,000 for tile to $2,300 for Marmoleum.

* But despite the entire internet swearing that Marmoleum Click is DIY-friendly, I could not for the life of me install it. I just couldn’t.

* So I added to the pile of unexpected bills and hired a professional to do the install for me. Nick, one of the guys who worked on our wall removal, was up for the challenge, and he did an awesome job for a very reasonable price (more on that soon).

* But we ended up being one box short, and so he had to stop halfway through installing the dining room floor so I could order two more boxes (to be on the safe side). Fortunately the company where I bought the floor, Green Building Supply Company, very generously agreed to waive shipping. Two boxes added $240 to the floor costs.

* The final two boxes arrived last week, and so this past weekend Nick returned for a few more hours of work and HE FINISHED THE FLOOR. After all the unexpected surprises I still can’t quite believe we’re out of the woods (and we still haven’t installed trim and thresholds, so maybe that will be our downfall), but after 2.5 months of nothing but plywood subfloors there is actual flooring under our feet and it is amazing.

(A quick reminder that the color will change slightly as it’s exposed to light, so in the photos above where you can detect some bluer and some greener sections that will change within the next week to be all blue.)

With the floor finally down, we were able to move some furniture back into the dining room. It’s all very temporary, but here’s how things were looking a mere two hours after Nick wrapped up the floor:

I’m so excited! I love the floor, and think the color is going to work perfectly in the space — nice and neutral, allowing us to add color through furniture and accessories. And with the floor down, we can move on to new projects at last!

The next two big projects (which I won’t be able to tackle until later in July/August given that we’re traveling the next few weekends) are to tear out and retile the backsplash and to paint the cabinets. I’m intimidated by both, but excited to be moving on to them! Of course we have a million smaller projects to tackle as well. I need to share a list of what still remains for us, but for now I actually wanted to share a budget update since we’ve completed all our biggest projects expense-wise.

Here’s what we’ve spent so far, with a link to the posts where you can get more detail:

Corian counters in “White Glacier” — $1,033 for 39 square feet, including installation (Home Depot)
Lighting & electrical — $290 (new light for above island from Home Depot; new circuit breakers, outlets, and switch plates for various wiring projects)
Wall paint — $60 (two gallons of Behr premium in eggshell finish, “Chantilly Lace” by Benjamin Moore)
Fridge surround — $50 (nice plywood from Home Depot for the sides, everything else we already had)
New glass wall cabinet — free because we used one of the cabinets we salvaged/pillaged from that local school last year
Pantry — free for now because my dad has been building it for us and not charging, but I actually have some money tucked away in the budget that I am going to try to convince him to take when all is said and done
Island — free because we cut down and reused the buffet
Wall demolition — $5,188 ($3,200 for labor, $1,100 for supplies; $678 for permit and engineering drawings; $210 for a Bagster for debris removal)
New floor — $3,591 ($210 for Bagster for disposing of old tile; $170 for tool rental to demo the thinset from the old tile floor; $65 for shipping for tile I ended up returning; $2,281 for 386 square feet of Marmoleum Click flooring plus $240 for 40 more square feet; $625 for professional installation)
Cookbook shelf under the new longer countertops — free because we already had the scrap wood
New fridge — $1,300 (from Home Depot)
New sink — $200 (from Home Depot)

Total spent to-date: $11,712

That feels pretty reasonable to me, given that it includes all our big ticket items of tearing out an entire wall, new counters, a new fridge, and an unexpected $3,600 floor expense. Based on the projects we still have left and the budget I’ve set for them, we are on track to spent another $2,000, which will bring our total costs in at $13,500 hopefully. That’s more than the $10,000 I originally budgeted, but if you exclude the totally unexpected floor project then it comes in right on budget.

And now here are some before and “now” shots to show what that spending has gotten us so far:

It’s been a busy few months! I’m excited to keep plowing forward, and of course will update you every step of the way. Thank you for all your encouragement and advice so far, it has meant so much especially in those moments of frustration and impatience!

Is your interest in my kitchen project waning as it continues to drag on? Well too bad, because I’m still working on it and thus will keep blogging about it. This weekend we were in Vermont visiting friends and family, and people kept asking us how the reno was going and if we’d be done soon. The answers: “It’s going,” and “no.”

BUT, we’re making progress and we will reach the end eventually. And in the meantime, I don’t have to worry about running out of things to write about on the blog. Today I have a quick project to share, and then Friday I’ll be back to share some more progress plus shots of the FINISHED FLOOR and a budget breakdown to-date now that the biggest projects and expenses are behind us.

Today’s post is about lighting. Most of our kitchen lights are recessed — which is great for our low ceilings — but we also have a pendant light over the sink and a chandelier over the island. The pendant is pretty nondescript, but has been looking especially lackluster since we partially disassembled it during the wall removal and never bothered to put it back together:

The chandelier is incredibly unattractive, and is also a major hazard. When there’s a table or island under it everything is fine, but when we’ve moved those items to do work in the kitchen like removing and installing floors, suddenly it is just a metal and glass structure hanging randomly in the middle of the room that anyone over 4’5″ is guaranteed to slam their head into repeatedly. I actually broke part of it with my head the first day we moved in.

And it only got worse from there. At some point in the last year Sam unscrewed the canopy in a fit of rage and started trying to take the light down, before he realized that there were live wires running to it and he probably shouldn’t do that (he’s not the most familiar with electricity…but at least he knew to stop). So it’s just been hanging there making us mad and looking totally dejected.

Murphy just has to be involved in telling the story of this light fixture

With the floor almost done, I finally decided the chandelier’s time had come. I really didn’t want to spend much on lighting given where we are with the budget (more details on $ spent to-date on Friday), and since we have such low ceilings I didn’t want to go too crazy with statement lighting anyway. I did want to find something with enough mass that it wouldn’t look too dinky hanging over the island, though.

Given Naomi’s dining room chandelier hunt, I thought this had the potential to turn into a months- or years-long search. Fortunately I found something I was happy with in about 45 minutes of online shopping.

At 36″ wide it seemed like the perfect size for our island (which is 48″ long), the price couldn’t be beat, and the reviews were favorable. I hit “buy” and the next week it was on my doorstep.

Installation was pretty quick. First I shut off the power to the ceiling box, and removed the old light by disconnecting the wires and unscrewing the light from the mounting plate. The new light came with several extender stems to easily change the drop length, and I opted to use just one of them.

It was as simple as pulling the wires through that, trimming them to length, attaching the new mounting plate, matching black wire to black wire and white to white, and then screwing in the fixture. All told it took about 20 minutes from the time I opened the box to the moment I flipped the breaker back on. It probably would have taken me longer if I’d bothered to take more than the one process shot above, but I didn’t. Sorry. Let me apologize with this after shot:

I’ve got paint chips on the island to pick a cabinet color — progress!

Ahhhhhhhh, so much better. The coffee bronze finish isn’t my favorite, but before I decide what to paint it (oil rubbed bronze or maybe something colorful) I want to get the cabinets painted so I have a better idea of the color scheme in the space. When the time comes, it will be really easy to take the light down, hit it with some spray paint, and then reinstall.

The unexpected win was that I ended up getting two new lights out of it. The package came with an extra metal shade (not sure that was intentional), and so I decided to take down the pendant over the sink, remove the glass shade, hit the canopy, stem, and extra metal shade with some oil rubbed bronze spraypaint I had on hand, and reinstall the light using the metal shade instead of the glass shade. Easy peasy!

Let’s see a side-by-side to remember where we started:

Right now it looks a little odd because it’s the same shape as the chandelier but they’re slightly different finishes, but I think it will look great once the chandelier is also ORBed or painted something more colorful.

And so for the price of $135, I have crossed kitchen lighting off the to-do list and the concussion-inducing chandelier is finally gone from our lives. Hurray!