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Final Review Part 2
Posted Aug 25th, 08 at 7:50 pm by cbracerx
In preparation for the next finish phase, I insulated the addition using a “green” insulation made of shredded cotton (Ultratouch by Bonded Logic). It was very blue, so you can guess what the likely source material is. What a pleasure to work with, you can use your bare hands. Rip it apart and stuff small areas, sling it around, let the pre-schooler help – no problems. And no itchy hands, arms and necks afterward! It cost very little more than the fiberglass type, and now I can say my house is insulated by Levi Strauss.
So now my actions turned to drywall. And I made a rookie mistake. Instead of simply removing all the ceiling drywall, which had the dual trauma of beam removal (this damaged a lot of drywall) and the soffit extermination (which left 24” gaps to the walls), I chose to patch drywall in. Wrong move. This created a lot of extra work taping and sanding the joints on the ceiling, and patching up the beam damage was very time consuming. My teenage helper made it lot easier to get the big pieces hung and screwed in (I bought a special drywall gun for this purchase that saved a lot of time). I am not a fan of drywall work, and I had never done much other that the occasional simple repair. But now I was doing it all, corner taping and beading, multiple coats of mud and then the inevitable sanding. I found quite a few DIY videos on drywall on YouTube that were very helpful. But in the end this was a back breaking job of spreading joint compound over and over. I went thru two five gallon buckets of compound!
When the time came to sand the joint compound, I used a few different approaches, none ideal. I purchased an inexpensive drywall sanding dust reduction system on Amazon (Magna MT800) which worked well (but is very noisy – earplugs a must). I hooked up my Porter Cable orbital sander to this device using the magic of duct tape, and found that was very helpful for knocking down rough areas. But my best results came from the pole sander (Magna MT999) and mesh drywall sanding pads. I did not do a massive amount of sanding, the video’s had shown me that putting the coats on smooth and knocking down high spots with the knife was a lot easier than sanding. So I muddled through this phase, but it nearly killed me dealing with the tedium of the process.
Finally, on May 18 I started the floor tile installation. First I used my nail gun to fasten all the plywood down thoroughly to prevent creaks in the floor. Then I started putting down the ½”
concrete backerboard, which started to get heavy after a while! I choose to use thinset between the backerboard and the plywood, and screwed the backerboard down to the plywood. Then taping and coating the joints between the boards. At this time the fridge and the range finally had to leave the room – serious stuff! The fridge went to the family room, and the range went to the driveway to be sold.
The tile pattern using 12” x 12” porcelain was changed from a simple ½ offset grid parallel to the walls, to a 45 degree diagonal grid. No problem, right? You just need to cut the tiles on all 4 walls… I rented a tile saw that made this job as easy as could be expected and got to it. It was backbreaking work and hard on the knees but the tile was placed. After the thinset cured I used a Rotozip Spiral Saw to remove the thinset from between the tiles, that was really fun – being down on the floor again. And then, the grout. This was a rather large area to cover, and I had to mix two 25 lb bags of grout to cover it all. The tile had a lot of nooks and crannies that caught the grout, making the cleanup job tedious. I hired two teenagers to go over the tiles with brushes after the grout cured and remove all the little tenacious bits – money well spent!
OK, now let’s get back to Ikea cabinets. I had started to organize the many boxes in my garage, and I found that some items on my draft orders were missing! And others I seemed to have twice as many of. H’mmm. As it turned out, when I placed my order (in person) I had so many items that they had to set up two draft orders, and then convert these to “real” orders so I could make the purchase. The draft orders is what I signed off on, “looks great!”. But the “real” orders ending up being a problem. A big problem. A “oh dear this is going to be a major headache” problem. And as it turned out, after auditing the draft orders and the receipts, I found that I had gotten (are you ready?) one order twice and the other not at all. Ouch.
So I called the Ikea Philadelphia store and spoke to the Kitchen department manager. At first they offered to exchange all my duplicates at the store. I had to remind them politely that I was not at fault here, and to make me rent a van again, bring the items down was a hardship. So they then offered to pay for the van. Closer, I said, but not quite good enough. You need to bring me the right stuff here in New Hope, PA – and take back the stuff I was not supposed to get twice. It took a day and a call from the store manager, but they made good on it! I got a visit about a week later with a large van, the assistant kitchen area manager and a nice guy to help move stuff. We went thru the garage and they exchanged everything. It took a few hours but when it was done I had all the “right stuff” and a better understanding of the system Ikea uses to sell cabinets. I ended up getting two more visits from the nice helper guy, he delivered one missing item and then brought me my vent hood that was on a backorder. So bravo to the Philadelphia Ikea on the follow thru!
It was time, finally on May 23, to start actually _building_ cabinets. I decided to do the base cabinets first, against conventional wisdom. But I had a goal of getting the kitchen back “on-line” for my family as soon as possible, and this meant having a real sink and a working dishwasher. So the base cabinet assembly process was begun. I found the highest spot on the floor and started there. The first cabinet run was made using an Ikea kitchen table as a workspace, with a cardboard “soft cover” on top. I built up the base cabinets using a cordless drill to drive all the fasteners, even the camlocks. A framing square was used to check, well, the “squareness” before nailing the back panels. I used an air driven brad nailer for the back panels, which was a tremendous time saver. I also went the extra mile and perimeter hot glued the panels on after the nailing. I did not share legs between cabinets, and I hot glued the leg base onto the bottom of the cabinets. Since I had so many of these to make, I got pretty fast at building up bare cabinets!
The sink cabinet was a custom job, which was completed on May 25. I showed the measurements of the sink to the Ikea kitchen specialist when I made my order, and her comment was “I have no idea how you will fit this into our cabinets, you are on your own.” Not a surprise really, I expected this to be a DIY project. The basic 36” sink cabinet was used, and I installed 2”x4” bracing inside to support the weight of the sink. I cut the sides of the cabinet down to fit the sink flush, and installed one of the top braces below the sink to use as a door support. The cabinet was installed to the wall and leveled with the other cabinet run. I installed an outlet in the cabinet for the garbage disposal, as I decided to use an air switch (In-Sink-Erator STS00) for this. I sweated on new fittings for the water valves and installed the sink and new disposal (In-Sink-Erator Evolution Essential) with new drain line. I made a temporary faucet support from plywood for the single hole faucet (Giagni PD11-PC), and hooked up the water lines. Then I moved over the dishwasher and plumbed that into the water and drain lines. Voila! A working sink and dishwasher. The family was pleased, and teenage grumbling on washing like “Little House on the Prairie” was reduced.
So it was 25 days from no sink to a return to civilization. Still a long way to go, but the family didn’t suffer too badly. At least, from what I have seen, it _could_ have been much worse!
So now my actions turned to drywall. And I made a rookie mistake. Instead of simply removing all the ceiling drywall, which had the dual trauma of beam removal (this damaged a lot of drywall) and the soffit extermination (which left 24” gaps to the walls), I chose to patch drywall in. Wrong move. This created a lot of extra work taping and sanding the joints on the ceiling, and patching up the beam damage was very time consuming. My teenage helper made it lot easier to get the big pieces hung and screwed in (I bought a special drywall gun for this purchase that saved a lot of time). I am not a fan of drywall work, and I had never done much other that the occasional simple repair. But now I was doing it all, corner taping and beading, multiple coats of mud and then the inevitable sanding. I found quite a few DIY videos on drywall on YouTube that were very helpful. But in the end this was a back breaking job of spreading joint compound over and over. I went thru two five gallon buckets of compound!
When the time came to sand the joint compound, I used a few different approaches, none ideal. I purchased an inexpensive drywall sanding dust reduction system on Amazon (Magna MT800) which worked well (but is very noisy – earplugs a must). I hooked up my Porter Cable orbital sander to this device using the magic of duct tape, and found that was very helpful for knocking down rough areas. But my best results came from the pole sander (Magna MT999) and mesh drywall sanding pads. I did not do a massive amount of sanding, the video’s had shown me that putting the coats on smooth and knocking down high spots with the knife was a lot easier than sanding. So I muddled through this phase, but it nearly killed me dealing with the tedium of the process.
Finally, on May 18 I started the floor tile installation. First I used my nail gun to fasten all the plywood down thoroughly to prevent creaks in the floor. Then I started putting down the ½”
concrete backerboard, which started to get heavy after a while! I choose to use thinset between the backerboard and the plywood, and screwed the backerboard down to the plywood. Then taping and coating the joints between the boards. At this time the fridge and the range finally had to leave the room – serious stuff! The fridge went to the family room, and the range went to the driveway to be sold.
The tile pattern using 12” x 12” porcelain was changed from a simple ½ offset grid parallel to the walls, to a 45 degree diagonal grid. No problem, right? You just need to cut the tiles on all 4 walls… I rented a tile saw that made this job as easy as could be expected and got to it. It was backbreaking work and hard on the knees but the tile was placed. After the thinset cured I used a Rotozip Spiral Saw to remove the thinset from between the tiles, that was really fun – being down on the floor again. And then, the grout. This was a rather large area to cover, and I had to mix two 25 lb bags of grout to cover it all. The tile had a lot of nooks and crannies that caught the grout, making the cleanup job tedious. I hired two teenagers to go over the tiles with brushes after the grout cured and remove all the little tenacious bits – money well spent!
OK, now let’s get back to Ikea cabinets. I had started to organize the many boxes in my garage, and I found that some items on my draft orders were missing! And others I seemed to have twice as many of. H’mmm. As it turned out, when I placed my order (in person) I had so many items that they had to set up two draft orders, and then convert these to “real” orders so I could make the purchase. The draft orders is what I signed off on, “looks great!”. But the “real” orders ending up being a problem. A big problem. A “oh dear this is going to be a major headache” problem. And as it turned out, after auditing the draft orders and the receipts, I found that I had gotten (are you ready?) one order twice and the other not at all. Ouch.
So I called the Ikea Philadelphia store and spoke to the Kitchen department manager. At first they offered to exchange all my duplicates at the store. I had to remind them politely that I was not at fault here, and to make me rent a van again, bring the items down was a hardship. So they then offered to pay for the van. Closer, I said, but not quite good enough. You need to bring me the right stuff here in New Hope, PA – and take back the stuff I was not supposed to get twice. It took a day and a call from the store manager, but they made good on it! I got a visit about a week later with a large van, the assistant kitchen area manager and a nice guy to help move stuff. We went thru the garage and they exchanged everything. It took a few hours but when it was done I had all the “right stuff” and a better understanding of the system Ikea uses to sell cabinets. I ended up getting two more visits from the nice helper guy, he delivered one missing item and then brought me my vent hood that was on a backorder. So bravo to the Philadelphia Ikea on the follow thru!
It was time, finally on May 23, to start actually _building_ cabinets. I decided to do the base cabinets first, against conventional wisdom. But I had a goal of getting the kitchen back “on-line” for my family as soon as possible, and this meant having a real sink and a working dishwasher. So the base cabinet assembly process was begun. I found the highest spot on the floor and started there. The first cabinet run was made using an Ikea kitchen table as a workspace, with a cardboard “soft cover” on top. I built up the base cabinets using a cordless drill to drive all the fasteners, even the camlocks. A framing square was used to check, well, the “squareness” before nailing the back panels. I used an air driven brad nailer for the back panels, which was a tremendous time saver. I also went the extra mile and perimeter hot glued the panels on after the nailing. I did not share legs between cabinets, and I hot glued the leg base onto the bottom of the cabinets. Since I had so many of these to make, I got pretty fast at building up bare cabinets!
The sink cabinet was a custom job, which was completed on May 25. I showed the measurements of the sink to the Ikea kitchen specialist when I made my order, and her comment was “I have no idea how you will fit this into our cabinets, you are on your own.” Not a surprise really, I expected this to be a DIY project. The basic 36” sink cabinet was used, and I installed 2”x4” bracing inside to support the weight of the sink. I cut the sides of the cabinet down to fit the sink flush, and installed one of the top braces below the sink to use as a door support. The cabinet was installed to the wall and leveled with the other cabinet run. I installed an outlet in the cabinet for the garbage disposal, as I decided to use an air switch (In-Sink-Erator STS00) for this. I sweated on new fittings for the water valves and installed the sink and new disposal (In-Sink-Erator Evolution Essential) with new drain line. I made a temporary faucet support from plywood for the single hole faucet (Giagni PD11-PC), and hooked up the water lines. Then I moved over the dishwasher and plumbed that into the water and drain lines. Voila! A working sink and dishwasher. The family was pleased, and teenage grumbling on washing like “Little House on the Prairie” was reduced.
So it was 25 days from no sink to a return to civilization. Still a long way to go, but the family didn’t suffer too badly. At least, from what I have seen, it _could_ have been much worse!
Total Comments 1
Comments
 | hi - what color grout did you use for the terra cotta tiles? thanks |
  |
Recent Blog Entries by cbracerx
- Final Review Part 3 (Sep 15th, 08)
- Finished Kitchen 3D Photosynth Experiment (Aug 27th, 08)
- Final Review Part 2 (Aug 25th, 08)
- Final Review Part 1 (Aug 25th, 08)
- Pretty Much Done With It, but one more post to come.... (Aug 25th, 08)
