New Countertop Installation!

This post is long overdue, as we've had out new counter top for about two months already. Several weeks after the template was made, the old counter was removed and the new one installed, along with the new sink and faucet!

Removal took just a few minutes:

Then the two guys brought in the new counter top. There are 2 pieces so just one seam.

IT'S SO SHINY

Once the two pieces were in place, they had to secure them, seal the seam, caulk around the underside where it meets with the cabinets, and of course seal in the under-mount sink.

Once done with all of that, they removed all their equipment and cleaned up.

We saved almost $500 on the installation cost because Nick could unhook the pipes and water lines from the sink and reattach them once they were finished. Seriously. That's all he had to do. Then because of the drying time needed to make sure the sink attached securely, we couldn't run the water for 24 hours.

Here's a close up shot of the new sink:

Love, love, love the under mount sink. And the new faucet with integrated sprayer is perfect.   

And of course here is a before shot to compare:

Old sink and faucet

Old counter top

Close up of the counter over the dishwasher, compared to the old counter length seen above:

New counter top

Original kitchen

And this is the backsplash we've picked out:

Plycraft Lounger Touchups

I occasionally see this same chair listed on craigslist or ebay for $500-1000, so we got a such a great deal for paying just $300. There were a few scuffs on the wood here and there, but nothing too bad. Here are a couple shots of the blemishes on there when we bought it:

With the exception of one small edge area where the wood was slightly damaged, the rest of the scuffs just needed to be buffed or sanded out. This was a quick project. I systematically worked my way over each section of the chair, using a fine sand paper to lightly remove or minimize the surface blemishes, then went over the entire thing with a nice wood oil. This was one of my rainy day projects at some point over the winter, just hadn't gotten around to posting about it.

Here are some shots of the chair post-clean up and oil polish:

So beautiful. It looks nearly new now. What surprises me is what great condition the leg bases are in. Compared to the wood parts, there's not as much you can do about improving those once damaged. Common problems I see on so many of the same loungers for sale out there are the metal is rusting significantly, the black base cap and/or an end piece or two is missing, but ours isn't missing anything and there's minimal tarnish on the legs.

Gainey Pots and Indoor Plants

With south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and such a big living room space, adding a few indoor plants was an obvious must. Especially after scoring two large Gainey pots on Craigslist. I wanted to have at least one fruiting tree, since our entire space is so much about functionality. The first was an easy choice - a lime tree!

After doing some research on different varieties and finding out which grow best indoors, I decided on a 3-year old Bearss lime tree, which we purchased back in early October from Four Winds Growers. It's a seedless variety, and when ripe we'll be able to pick limes right from the tree in the living room and add to a rum and coke, Nick's famous tacos, or just a glass of water.

It began blossoming in mid-January, and here's a picture of it on February 1st:

I selected the matte black planter for the lime tree, which is my favorite of the two Gainey pots. It looks a bit funny because the tree is only about 2 feet tall right now, but it will definitely grow into it. The Bearss lime is a semi-dwarf variety, which means it can get up to about ten feet tall. We'll probably let it grow to around the top of the window. And there's a plant caster with wheels underneath the pot to make it easier to move if needed.

I was really surprised at the number of blossoms on such a small tree. Obviously they won't ALL turn into limes, but there are easily over 50 of them on this little guy already. Here's a closer look at the top cluster:

I liked the idea of having the window framed by plants on each side, and really wanted another fruit of some kind that wouldn't do well outside here (at least not year-round). We considered avocado, pomegranate, and another variety of citrus, settling on a clementine tree. Finding true clementines in the store is sometimes difficult. I would like an avocado tree, but there are several cold-hardy varieties that grow just fine outside in the northwest, so that's what we will get if/when we decide to get one of those.

The grower where I found my lime tree doesn't sell clementines, so I just looked around for a good deal. Once ordered, the clementine tree took awhile to arrive because of a snowstorm in the midwest, and it was pretty much dead on arrival. The company does have a replacement policy and did send me a new one, though it seemed to take threatening to contact my credit card company to reverse the charge to hear back from them, claiming they hadn't gotten my earlier email. So I'm not going to name the company I bought from. Also they've sent me so many spam emails since my purchase, while I've had zero from Four Winds.

Still, once they sent my replacement clementine it arrived quickly AND was blossoming, which was great! It's a 5-6 year old plant and quite tall:

We also have a little aloe plant at the base of the clementine

You can see in the above photo the second Gainey pot, similar to the other but a glossy black instead of matte. I don't like the shiny finish as much as matte, so from most views within the room it's partially hidden behind the Plycraft chair.

The trunk and branches are pretty thin but will thicken up over time. There was a pretty good-sized unripe clementine on one of the branches upon arrival and it made that branch droop over a lot, so I'm not sure how it will handle mass fruiting. This one has quickly gone from having a few blossoms to, like the lime tree, having at least 50 in clusters all over.

Closer look at one side of clementine blossoms

I've been pollinating both of the trees with a small paintbrush since there aren't any bees around to do it. We'll see over the next few months how well that worked.

The final indoor planter we needed to find an inhabitant for was the pot and stand we bought from Modernica. With the two larger indoor pots being used for fruit trees, this smaller one was perfect for a purely decorative plant. We perused the indoor/tropical section of Portland Nursery and fell in love with this dracaena marginata, or Dragon Tree. It's the 'colorama' variety, so instead of solid green fronds it has green and pinkish-red ones. Since this matte black pot matches well with the matte black Gainey planter, those are the most prominently featured within the living room. The dragon tree and its beautiful pot and stand looks perfect placed between the fireplace and the hutch.

We also recently found 2 smaller brown Gainey pots at Hawthorne Vintage in Portland, but those will be used outside on the patio, plants to be determined.

Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing, Part 3: Cabinet Doors and the Big Reveal

At the same time I was working on all of the drawer boxes and new drawer fronts featured in the previous kitchen post, I was going through the same motions (staining, drying, staining again, drying, polyurethane, more drying, etc.) with the 10 cabinet doors, many of which are very large. As I finished pairs of those I helped Nick hold them in the door openings to measure for hinge placement, then he attached the hardware.

Attaching door side hinge

Below is a stock photo of the type of hinge we used for the cabinet doors. This kind was required for the inset door look we were going for because it attaches entirely inside of the cabinet, remaining completely hidden. The previous cabinet doors were overly with hinges on the exterior.

These hinges are actually two separate pieces: the part that attaches to the door itself then clips to the part screwed into the interior wall of the cabinet base. To remove the doors you can simply unclip instead of unscrewing either. The hinges are even adjustable: after installation you can use two adjustment screws to move the cabinet doors slightly up or down and left or right, to easily center them within the door frames.

Only three of the doors were able to be installed right away because this inset hinge type needed to be flush to the cabinet door opening. For the remaining seven we had to build out the interior space in order to attach the hinges correctly, and there were a variety of differences in the space and how best to go about attaching the cabinets so the process wasn't always the same. We know about this going in, so we allotted for it in our installation time. This was one of Nick's contributions and he did a great job. Two of the seven built-in hinge bases shown below.

The wood will be painted the same green as cabinet interior. 

Once all the measurements were taken and each hinge piece installed, we clipped the doors into place to see how they looked. Below is Nick clipping one of the two largest doors into the cabinet base. We did this part after the stain was finished but before the polyurethane was applied, just to see how it all looked. Then I varnished the doors two at a time, taking them down and moving them to my workstation in the garage. After two coats on the front and one on the back I'd return them, re-attaching the door-side hinge pieces and clipping them back into place. Each pair took about a day because of drying time.

We added hardware as we went along. After I finished varnishing a pair of doors during the day and returned them to the kitchen, Nick would attach the cabinet door handles in the evening. We used Ikea Lansa stainless steel cabinet door handles. Nick did a fantastic job at this as well.

It looks crooked in the photo, but it's straight!

And now the first internet look at how the cabinets turned out and what the kitchen looks like now: 

And the 'before' photo again

Notice that the lower cabinet to the left of the range still doesn't have a door. The drawer above it hasn't been replaced either. This is the next step in the remodel: putting in a dishwasher. That's an update we're really looking forward to having. It's been about 4 years for me but much longer for Nick, as not many apartments in New York City have them. After the holidays we're going to have an electrician look at the space because we need to have the range outlet moved a foot or two to the right and a new outlet and breaker installed for the dishwasher. We've decided on a smaller 18" wide size, which should still be more than enough room for us and also save space.

After the dishwasher installation we can continue the renovation with ordering a countertop, removing the existing white tile backsplash, and after the countertop is installed, putting in a new backsplash. We were waiting to decide on a countertop color until seeing the cabinets entirely finished, to be able to get a better feel for the space and what would look best. All along I've been saying black would look best and after seeing how it turned out, Nick now agrees. As of right now the backsplash plan is stainless steel, but that could change if we find something we like better.

By the way, the photo below is nearly all of the garbage we generated during the remodel so far. Keeping all of the original cabinet bases made a huge difference. Instead of those going to the landfill, the only waste generated in order to reuse them were two small cans of paint stripper and newspapers used for collecting the paint/stripper remnants. I gave away all of the original cabinet doors and hardware by listing them on Craigslist's Free section, so those were reused by someone else. Add a few more sanding disks to the pile of wood below and that's about all of the trash created so far. Of course removing the countertop and backsplash will add to that considerably, because those can't really be re-used, but it's still not bad for such a significant kitchen makeover.

Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing, Part 2: Cabinet Interiors & Drawers

I didn't take photos of the cabinet staining process because it was pretty boring photo-wise: I brushed several coats of Minwax 'Jacobean' stain over all of the areas that I had stripped the paint from the previous week, then after both coats were dry I brushed a layer of polyurethane over it. Once done I started painting the rest of the cabinet interiors with a Benjamin Moore color called 'Spanish Olive.' 

I painted an entire section of cabinet at a time, shelf by shelf. It took about a day to do each whole section, including the drying time of two coats. Also each day I had to re-shelve the stuff I'd taken down the previous day in order to paint that area and then remove everything from the next section. 

You can see below the new stain finish and the new green interior compared to the old white interior:

Taking a break from my second section of interior cabinet painting

Lower cabinet interior drying

We are incredibly happy with how the green and the dark stain look together and how both look with the newly tiled floor! Now to replace those old doors and drawer fronts. You've seen some photos of the kitchen cabinets before, so here's a shot of the old drawers from before. Even before I stained the frame around the drawers shown. The tiles weren't even set yet either, just laid out along the cabinets to get a look at what they'd be like: 

Photo doesn't accurately represent how ugly these were

We researched cabinet doors for a while before finding the right ones. Both of us dislike the look of raised-panel, so we were looking exclusively for slab style. One evening while browsing manufacturers we found exactly what we wanted at a place called Barker Door. When we saw that it was a local place in Tualatin, Oregon, Nick went to the showroom to check out the quality and what the slab doors looked like in person. That they were available unfinished sealed the deal, since we could then stain them with the exact stain as the bases instead of trying to match it to the options available by companies that only offer a pre-stained door selection.

Unfortunately they don't allow product pick up from their facility, so we had to wait for them to be delivered. But that only took one day since we are so close. We ordered the doors on November 7th and they arrived on the doorstep on November 21st. Not bad at all.

Photo below shows a couple doors with a first coat and the rest of the drawer fronts unfinished as they arrived via Fed Ex Ground, ready for staining right out of the boxes. I got to work right away.

Unfinished doors

And first coat complete.

First coat of stain drying

The drawers were basically a project all by themselves, which is why the rest of this post is about them.

Between applying coats of stain on both the front and back of the new drawer faces and the seemingly endless hours of each coat drying, I got to do some 'demolition,' by which I mean remove the rest of the ugly old drawer fronts and get the entire box to their final, finished state. I positioned the chisel and hammered along the drawer front edges both inside and out, rotating the entire thing as I went. I knew this would work and we'd end up with a clean removal and solid box because I'd removed the front of one of the three large drawers before we ordered the replacements.

My tools for this: chisel and mallet

After pulling out the nails used to attach the old front, I ended up with this below. I filled any nail holes with spackle, sanded after that hardened, and made sure those edges were level so the new front could sit upon on the base with no gaps.

Early green on what was the 'test' drawer front

All that was left for this drawer was two coats of the Spanish Olive paint. Between coats I would work on the other 4 drawers, which were in various stages of demolition and reconstruction. For example, while this final coat below was drying, I had spackle drying to fill the nail holes of another drawer, and would start removing the front of the next. The kitchen was a mess during this project because everything in these drawers were in bags on the floor or scattered around the counter top.

One done, four to go

I did all of this on the weekdays leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday break, when Nick was able to join in with the fun over his four day weekend. The drawer boxes were done, and it took the two of us to hold the newly-stained replacement fronts up to see how they'd fit best on those bases. Nick measured and marked and measured again and carefully attached the drawer faces to the boxes using thin finishing nails:

After the nail was in so far that the hammer was nearly hitting the wood, he switched to hammering using a screw in between. This also allowed him to continue pushing the nail into the wood enough that I would be able to cover it with wood filler. 

Finishing the drawers took another two days. Once the wood filler was dry I lightly sanded it smooth and dabbed stain over the area after wiping it down. After another full coat of stain dried on top of that, I applied the polyurethane: two coats on the outside and one on the inside face of the drawer. All coats needed to dry and then they were ready to come back inside, since I did all of this in the garage to prevent the smell in the house. 

Nick still needed to re-attach the drawers to the runners, which took some straightening of slanted runners and choosing more secure attachment points on the bottom. 

We're incredibly happy with how the drawers turned out once installed, as seen below before their pulls have been attached, though you can see what hardware we've selected on the cabinet doors to the right. You'll see the finished drawers inside and out on the Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing Finale I'll post later this week.