In terms of scope, time, energy and cost, the kitchen remodel is probably the largest project we will ever undertake on our home. Of course, it will also give us our single biggest boost in equity position as well.
I am still proceeding off the back of an envelope. Our initial budget was based on providing installers with an empty room with plumb walls and all problems corrected, and it is turning out that the hardest work is the tearout – by the time I get done ripping everything out and overcoming all of the shortcuts, shoddy workmanship and bad design, hanging the new cabinets will be a single afternoon project that could be done between a few hands of poker and Mai Tais.
There are a few exceptions to my abilities (a gas line has to be run to serve the new range, some wiring will have to be moved, and the floor needs to be refinished), and these tasks will be farmed out to people with the mad skillz.
Other than those few exceptions, it might turn out that I will be doing this entire project in the evenings over the next month!
This house is full of mysteries and amazements. Here is a homemade writing surface next to the fridge that was slapped in place using scraps and cutoffs. It is held to the wall by four drywall screws. Thankfully, I never set anything heavy on it, and I never stood on it, because it would have collapsed.
The surprising thing is that the tile glued to the top is very heavy, and I would have expected it to fail under its own weight. But like so many other things in this house, it remained precariously balanced until my attention was focused on it.
And now, thankfully, it is gone.
There is a wealth of contradictory clues about the history of the “interior decorating.” Oh, if only these walls could talk! I have an enormous attraction to the mystery of how much of these ghetto-riggings were done by well-meaning but deeply ignorant handymen, and how much was done by incompetent and/or careless subcontractors and laborers at the original build.
From time to time, I find myself standing in the middle of the room in slack-jawed amazement, and I stop myself from wasting any more time puzzling over the origins of these misdemeanors. I can hear my friend Wayne Kuhn softly in my ear, “Mister Tabor, just press on.”
Above that desk was a fluorescent lamp fixture, wired to a switch. The “installer” ran the Romex through two studs, up two feet, poked it through a hole in the drywall, then made a series of bash marks in the drywall in order to come back down the two feet it had just traveled up, and lie flush behind the wall cabinet.
My feeble imagination simply will not stretch far enough to guess at the process by which any human being thought that was a good way to run a power line, or the calculus and circumstance that might have directed that outcome.
Then there is the conversion of drywall to Swiss cheese by a blind monkey looking for studs to mount the wall cabinets. The last time I checked, this could be accomplished easily with a tape measure, a pencil and an IQ over 65. There are dozens and dozens of holes behind the wall cabinets, a handyman’s Whac-a-mole.
It appears that the person mounting the cabinets was also working from their jar of spare screws, because the screws are all different sizes and colors – all of them too short for the task of reliably supporting the weight of cabinets full of dishes.
At least the tile came off the wall fairly easily with a heavy scraper and a mallet. The technique I perfected will be important later, when I remove the tile from around the kitchen window.
The next few weeks will be a grand adventure full of a complete range of emotions. I’m sure we will catch a few breaks, and I’m sure I will be deeply disappointed in things I did not correctly predict, or in unforeseen things we have to cope with. Semper Gumby!
