Reflections on kitchen renovation

It occurred to me that I might want to say something useful in this blog, instead of blathering on about my limitations as a homeowner and housekeeper. So, while this blog is concerned mainly with our first floor master suite addition and new garage, I thought I'd offer my musings about our recent kitchen renovation, now that it's been some months since it has been completed and I've had the chance to reflect on what worked well, and what not so well, in the project.

Features of the New Cabinets that I Really, Really Like

I chose American Woodmark cabinets, marketed through Home Depot, simply because it was easy and convenient to browse through samples there, and the Woodmark cabinets were solid, middle of the road cabinets. Not cheap and flimsy, but not overly expensive, either. I got a little carried away, though, when I saw the brochure on all the extra features you could special order. In case you're planning a kitchen renovation of your own, here's the features I'd recommend strongly:

1.) Pull-out trash drawer. This is probably my favorite aspect of the new cabinets. The pull-out drawer looks just like an ordinary cabinet door, but it contains a nice deep plastic trash bin, and a second shallow bin behind it that I use for storing the box of trash bags. In my old cabinets, we had installed a rickety pull-out trash bag holder on our own, but like most of our home maintenance attempts, this didn't really work well (it kept coming off the tracks), and food/trash kept getting all over the floor of the cabinet and making a royal mess.

2.) Tilt-out drawer at sink. I *almost* didn't even order this, but it has turned out to be my second favorite feature. Before I just stashed my scrub brushes, scouring pads, and sink plugs behind the faucet, which would make my sink area look cluttered and messy. Now they all fit easily in the tilt-out drawer, readily accessible yet leaving my sink uncluttered. I love it. If you order one, get the plastic little containers (so you can pop them in the dishwasher), and make sure the installer doesn't screw them in tightly so you can put them in and out easily.

3.) Cookie sheet tray divider. This is a pull-out unit with little dividers where you can store all your baking sheets, cookie sheets, muffin trays, pizza pans, etc. standing on edge, without them being mashed together in a pile where it's impossible to extricate just one.

4.) Fancy glass panel on one cabinet drawer. As I attended various open houses, I noticed that a lot of upscale homes had fancy glass doors in their cupboards, with collections of priceless crystal and fine china on visible display behind them. We had very little of that stuff, but we did have one set of nice china (from Jonathan's grandmother). So I ordered one glass cabinet door, with a pretty embossed fern design on it, and used it on the cupboard with the china in it. All of our other cabinets, containing the mismatched Scooby-Doo plates and plastic cups we actually use every day, keep their contents hidden from view behind solid doors.



5.) Long tubular modern cabinet pulls. Our old cabinets had the basic round knobs on them. Any way you cut it, round knobs are boring. I liked the modern look of the long tubular pulls, and that's what I went with for the kitchen renovation, even though I had the sneaking suspicion that the peak of popularity for them had passed. I really like the knobs, though. They're easy to grab onto, and easy to clean.

Features of the New Cabinets I'm Not so Crazy About or Would Skip if I were Doing it Over

1.) Pull-out trays in the cabinets. I was tired of leaning way over and rummaging through cabinets to find various pots and pans. So for the renovation, I ordered pull-out trays for all the cabinets. What I didn't realize is that the trays and sliding mechanism take up a fair amount of space on each side. What this means is that I could not fit as much in the cupboards as I had before. So even though the renovation added at least one new cupboard, I had less net space after the renovation than before. That's not ideal. If I were doing it over again, I'd buy pull-out trays for the hardest to reach cupboards but use regular shelves on the others.

2.) Our old cabinets were intalled under soffitts in the ceiling. For the renovation, I decided to keep the soffitts to minimize costs. (Tearing them out would have entailed "significant ceiling repair," Wagner told me.) In hindsight I wish we had taken the soffitts out. The new cabinets hang down lower than the old ones, which gives me less clearance under them. The coffeemaker doesn't fit, for example, nor does the canister with all my big spoons and whisk.

In sum, there's a learning curve associated with doing any kind of renovation. I think I could do a kitchen renovation now faster, easier, and with better outcomes. The implication that I am currently making all sorts of mistakes with the master suite addition is one I don't like to think about much. ;)

Digression: Wagner's Halloween decorations

Every year, Wagner decorates his house for Halloween. I don't mean the plastic skeleton on the door (which comprises MY sole Halloween decorating this year), or the fake tombstones in the yard, or the cobwebs on the bushes. I mean an all-out spectacular display. He kept urging us to bring the children by one evening. So Saturday night we went out to his house. We knew it was something special when we saw the dim glow of lights a block away, and crowds of people parking and walking up to the house.

Apparently we weren't the only ones who thought the decorations were pretty special, because somebody sent in a photo of Wagner's house to the Today Show's national contest for best Halloween decorations, and it was named one of the 3 finalists. If you stumble across this blog before Halloween, you can go to the website and vote:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27364818/

I wouldn't presume to tell people how to vote, but fyi, Wagner's house is House #1. ;-)

[UPDATE EDIT: I wrote last night that Wagner's house had lost by a hair, but it turns out that the web page I was looking at showing the vote tallies hadn't been updated. The show's producers called him last night and said that their house had won, and they announced it on the air Halloween morning. Wagner also said that the producers told him that the Today show didn't have a "big budget" and so the prize would be two "Today Show" coffee cups filled with candy. WOOT.]

The photo (copied above) doesn't really do the decorations justice. His yard was jam-packed full of skeletons in outlandish poses and costumes, both scary (emerging slowly out of coffin) and funny (a porta-potty opens to reveal a skeleton pulling up his boxers).

Wagner says he usually gets 450-500 children coming by for trick or treat. Now with all the publicity (once the local paper and news stations found out about the Today Show contest, they sent crews of their own to cover it, spying an opportunity to drum up good publicity for Lexington), he's worried he's going to have to go out and buy even more candy.

As for me, my plastic skeleton on the door is looking pretty lame. I think I'll go out and buy some cobwebs for the bushes.

Progress report --- Week 7

Progress accomplished this week:

--Framing of top story of detached garage completed
--Roof of garage put on
--Brick for addition and garage has arrived
--Telephone "grid box" (where telephone line enters house) relocated
--Tile for master bath and laundry room selected
--Estimate for new fence along back of property obtained
--Neighbor's shed relocated, neighbor's plants dug up and reburied, so we're all clear for moving our fence. Wagner and his men took a full day and a half accomplishing all that, including laying down new grass seed and straw, and adding supports to the shed underneath because the new location wasn't level. Wagner says the neighbor carefully supervised all the work and seemed happy with how it turned out. We're glad the whole thing's resolved, and once again I am convinced of my husband's brilliance in handling that situation.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Another day of rain, which slowed outside work.
--Tree stump on property line discovered. We will either have to remove the stump, or (if we're lucky and the posts don't have to go down through it), just saw it off closer to the ground and put a section of the fence over it.
--Many paint chips collected from various stores. Massive disagreement among family members as to what color paint would (a) match the bathroom tile and (b) look good. This is complicated by the fact that paint chips lie through their teeth and don't look anything like they appear on the chip once the paint is up on the wall.

All in all, this week has seen the most dramatic visible progress. The detached garage is tall and HUGE. Maybe too huge. According to zoning requirements, garages cannot be taller than the house they accompany. Our new garage will be 8 inches shorter than our 1 1/2 story house. That's still pretty darned tall. Our neighbor, Jane (the poor woman who has had construction on all three sides of her house), remarked to our contractor that she now feels hemmed in. I guess I'm hoping that once it's built and all the construction equipment etc. is out of the way, it won't look so mammoth. I also hope that we end up using that room on the top often enough to make it worth it.

Warm tootsies, re-reconsidered

Luckily for us, Louisville Tile is an authorized distributor of the SunTouch mats we were thinking about for the shower/bathroom floor. While we were there I asked about them, and Kathy told us that they actually had a sample system installed and turned on in one of their hallways. So I immediately ran over there, took off my shoes, and walked across it.

I will say this: You can definitely feel the difference, and it feels great. :) Heated floors are without question a nice luxury touch. But as I thought more about it, I finally decided against installing the system, for a couple of reasons. First, it simply wasn't giving off the blasts of heat that I had in mind for the drying-off portion of the shower. Second, Kathy said the system was designed to be left on all the time (at least during cold weather), because it took a while for the floor to heat up, whereas I was looking for something that could be used on a short-term basis (while we were showering) and was therefore immediate-acting.

So while it sure felt nice on my feet, and I could envision how wonderful it would be to tip-toe my way to the toilet on a warm floor in middle of a brutally cold winter night, we ultimately decided against the system. I had already gone way over budget in my choice of tile and that fancy medallion for the floor. I'll just have to wear warm, fuzzy socks on those brutal winter nights. ;-)

Tiling away the hours

This morning, instead of working on a book chapter that is due October 31!!!!, I spent several hours choosing tile for the master bathroom. This was not time I minded spending, however, as the tile choices for the bathroom rank right up there in terms of being the most consequential and important. (To me, that is; I'm sure Wagner would regard the truss decision as being more important.)

We called one tile store and said we'd like to stop by, and the lady who answered told us to come on down. [Warning: Mini-rant follows.] When we got there, though, we were met by a sales associate who immediately informed us that "we are very short-handed today" and "it is better if you schedule an appointment." Of course, I'm thinking that we had in fact called in advance and done exactly that. The saleslady waved a hand toward walls of tile samples and told us to look around while she made a few phone calls. Twenty minutes pass, and then she comes out, apologizes again for being so short-handed, and then assures us of all the personal attention she could give us if only we scheduled an appointment... the earliest of which she had available being a week from now. We made the appointment and left, disgruntled, or at least I was disgruntled. I don't mind being told that appointments are necessary. But I mind very much being told over the phone that it is okay to come right over, only to be sent on our way after dangling in the wind for half an hour. Harrumph. [/end mini-rant]

...But the laugh will be on them, because I will be cancelling that appointment and buying our tile from a different store. We drove straight to Louisville Tile (actually, their branch office located in Lexington), where we met for several hours with an extremely helpful woman named Kathy, with the end result being that I have identified all the tile and decorative border choices for the master bathroom and laundry room.

It is a minor miracle I arrived at these decisions so quickly, because there are few places more intimidating and perplexing than a tile store. Walls and display stands are jam-packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of tile samples in all sorts of materials, textures, and colors. And that's just the basic tile. Also crammed in there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of options for borders (tile mosaics, premanufactured patterned strips, etc. etc.).

Fortunately, Kathy also immediately realized I was feeling way overwhelmed, so she asked a few questions to narrow down the options. Did I want a stone floor or porcelain tile? Or maybe marble? That was easy, actually. Marble was too expensive and too slick; I wanted a tile with a texture where we would be less inclined to slip and fall. Stone floors are dramatic and beautiful, but they require regular sealing, and y'all know my position on sealing: It ain't gonna happen in my household.

So porcelain tile it was. Kathy then guided me to one of the display stands with textured porcelain tiles and asked, without much hope in her heart, if I had any idea as to a basic color scheme. "Yes!" I triumphantly announced. I wanted something that would be compatible with the biscuit colored undermount sinks and whirlpool that we had already ordered. More important, I wanted something the color of soap scum.

You think I jest, but I am deathly serious. While I love the dark, slate-colored tiles that are popular these days, even I recognize that they would be a nightmare to keep clean of water spots and soap scum. And in doing research for this renovation, I came across more than one expert who warned against dark tiles, as they require "considerable maintenance" to maintain a "pristine appearance." So I wanted something in a pale beige-ish color, possibly with pinkish overtones. And, again, something textured, ideally with a mottled appearance to hide spots etc.

As I flipped through the display panels, I paused at one particular choice and said, "This one looks rather nice." Kathy then pointed out that they had a sample shower across the room in that precise tile pattern. Being able to see what it looked like over a large area in a naturalistic context was very helpful, and I liked it even more. It is the Cortesia line produced by American Orlean:


So that's the tile that we'll use for the shower walls and the bathroom floor. For the shower, we'll use 10" x 20" tiles, stacked vertically. That's what was in the shower mockup and it looked elegant, a little different than the ordinary square tile motif. For the floor we'll use 13" x 13" squares. (For the shower floor itself, we're using 2" x 2" squares of a matching color.)

So then Kathy asked "What about a border?" I really liked the looks of those tiny tile mosaics that have geometric patterns in them. But when I asked about it, she told me that all those little mosaics involve stone, which require regular sealing. "Nope!" I said. She then hesitatingly pointed out that it would only require sealing maybe every couple of years, and surely that wouldn't be too big of an effort for me? I assured her that it most definitely would.

At that point I noticed the brochure for the Cortesia line showed a decorative border that was designed for this particular tile. And it was a border that was pleasing, consisting of irregularly sized small rectangles and squares with a fossil motif:


Even better is that I saw that this particular line of tile had a 40" x 40" medallion that could be ordered. They had a sample one installed on the showroom floor, and it was gorgeous:

I fell in love with the idea of having that on the floor of our bathroom, and after a few anxious moments of fiddling with the scale on the floor plan, we determined that the medallion would fit easily in the large open space on the floor between the whirlpool, shower entry, and toilet. Wagner had planned that space there to have a five-foot turning radius to meet ADA accessibility standards. If all goes well, we'll never need to use that space for maneuvering a wheelchair, but I'm happy to have it if it lets me have my pretty mosaic in the floor.

At this point, I knew I had already gone well over budget, but I thought we needed some kind of narrow trim or molding to set off the decorative border in the shower. I spied a few examples that I liked, but Kathy explained that they were stone and steered me to the resin samples. There I picked a wider one for the top of the border that included a leaf design, and a simple, thinner half-round for the bottom of the trim.

By that point, I was tired and hungry and ready to go home. But then Kathy said "Now it's time to pick out the grout!" Turns out that grout comes in about 4,683 colors, most of which are shades of grey or beige. We held up a dozen of them against the tile, and they all looked perfectly fine, so I went with the one Kathy suggested.

It probably goes without saying that I picked the brand of grout that comes with a sealer already blended in. ;-)

Having lost all capacity for decision making at that time, I was ready to leave, when Wagner said "Don't forget you need to pick out a tile for the laundry room." Because I basically did not care what the laundry room floor looked like, he suggested we look at the close-out sale they were having, and I picked a porcelain tile that was going for 99 cents per square foot. It's sort of off-white with greyish streaks running through it. Cheap. And perfect. :)

How we chose our contractor

Of all the decisions we had to make for this renovation, the choice of contractor was the easiest and the quickest. Home building and remodeling books and websites will all say that this should not be the case and that one should interview several prospective contractors and research them thoroughly, check with the Better Business Bureau, call references, check with state licensing and bonding agencies, etc. etc. Then you should solicit multiple bids, bearing in mind that the lowest bid isn't necessarily the best choice.

We didn't do any of that for this renovation.

Instead, we chose the Wagner Company because we have used John Wagner for several construction/renovation projects, dating back to 1992, I think it was. When my husband bought a new building for his rare coin business, he hired Wagner on the recommendation of his banker. That job was fairly complicated, involving adding on a second story to the building where Jon put a small apartment, as well as adding on a large concrete-lined vault room in the back with a banker's vault door and extensive security features throughout. Jonathan's office turned out absolutely beautiful, and it has held up well over the years.

Then when we bought our last house out on the Kentucky River, it needed a lot of work. It was a rather unique building, a contemporary house built largely underground. We bought it as a bankruptcy foreclosure, and it had been vacant and neglected for some years. We had Wagner come in and fix everything that was broken, as well as add a fireplace to the bedroom and convert the sunroom to an all-season room with heat and AC.

And then, of course, there were the two renovations we did in the current house--the master bath a few years ago and the kitchen this summer.

The bottom line is that no matter how big or small the job was, we have never had anything but a positive and successful experience working with Wagner. Many people have horror stories of contractors who start jobs and then disappear for days, weeks, or (gulp) months at a time. That just doesn't happen with Wagner, and we have first-hand knowledge that the work he does is of excellent quality. Better yet, he is terrific on call-backs and follow-through.

So when we decided to pursue this renovation, we didn't even bother calling around any other contractors. There's probably people out there who would've done this job for less money. But we'd rather pay more to work with somebody reliable and whom we can trust to do a terrific job.

Progress report --- Week 6

Progress accomplished this week:

--Framing and walls for first floor of detached garage finished
--Large steel support beam installed in detached garage
--Ceiling/floor put on detached garage
--Plumbing for addition finished
--Gas line for addition (new furnace unit) installed
--Freon line for new AC unit installed
--Old intact bricks that had been removed from garage wall had mortar painstakingly chipped off, in preparation for being merged in with new brick
--Met with lighting specialist and have worked out a plan for most of the lighting in the master bath and laundry room


Obstacles encountered this week:

--Downpour of rain lasting an entire day, which slowed framing work on garage. I can't complain because we're in a moderate drought situation and really need the rain.
--We're re-thinking the truss for the addition. A "truss" is yet another construction term I wasn't completely familiar with, but my online dictionary quickly tells me that it is "a supportive device, usually a pad with a belt, worn to prevent enlargement of a hernia or the return of a reduced hernia." ...oops... that's the medical definition. Never mind. A "truss" in the building context is "a static structure consisting of straight slender members interconnected at joints into triangular units used for spanning or bracing structural elements." In short, it's the triangular unit of wood that goes on the top of buildings and holds the roof up. Wagner had his carpenter nail up a mock-up of the truss that was originally planned so that we could see how it would affect the view outside our (current) bedroom window on the second floor. Turns out that it would block the window a lot more than we had initially envisioned. And it doesn't look too good. So we're now going with a different truss that will not have as steep of a slope and not block the upstairs window as much. This is going to set us back some $$ as we had already ordered and paid for the first truss, but it's worth the last-minute change to have it look nicer.

Warm tootsies, reconsidered

I've been doing a lot of research in the past couple of days, trying to resolve our dilemma of having a doorless shower yet still feeling warm while we shower and dry off. One of my Piano Forum buddies, Monster M&H, sent me the URL for a wonderful website called "Fine Homebuilding," which has tons of resources and articles for all aspects of residential construction and renovation. I signed up for a 14-day free trial and have spent hours browsing all the articles there.

What I learned from that site is that my impressions of heated bathroom floors was not correct. I had assumed that all it would do is warm the tile, which would do no good at all in terms of warming the rest of our bodies as we showered and dried off. However, it appears that these radiant floor heating devices could actually waft a bunch of warm air upwards, and--in fact--many people use radiant heating as their sole source of heat. And then I was talking with my buddy, Rich, about the heated floors, and he assured me that an acquaintance of his had just put them in his new home, and he, quote, absolutely loved it, unquote.

So now I am leaning toward adding in some heated floors in the bathroom. Wagner has in the mean time added a furnace vent in the drying off portion of the shower. While that will help somewhat, there will only be heat coming through that vent when we have the furnace for the addition blowing, and there are lots of time we take showers when we don't necessarily want the furnace going. I'd rather have some limited heat source that could be turned on for the duration of the shower and that would affect only the bathroom area.

What I wasn't sure of is whether the radiant floor heating devices could be used in our shower proper. After a bunch of googling I found one manufacturer, SunTouch, who explicitly states that their mats can be used in the shower as well as outside. I have emailed them and asked if the heat radiates upward or simply warms the tile. I'm a little nervous about the thought of electrical wires running underneath a (very wet) shower floor, but I really do want to have plenty of warmth as we take our showers.

Grapple grapple.

A chill in the air

So I spent two hours this afternoon at Brock-McVey (a fixture supply warehouse in town) talking with their lighting specialist, Nancy. My mission was to decide on all lights for the master bathroom, including obtaining their cut sheets so that Wagner could start the wiring process. (Again, more terminology I wasn't familiar with: A "cut sheet" is a printout showing a product description and, most important for Wagner, including detailed enough specifications, e.g. measurements, amp requirements, etc., that one can use it for building purposes.)

I went into my meeting with Nancy with a clear idea of what I wanted. I left with a vague feeling of disappointment, frustration, and not at all sure of how to proceed.

Here's the issue: I mentioned in an early installment of this blog that our current master bath shower has glass doors, which is quite fashionable and looks terrific but exacts a high price in maintenance: Because our local water system has extremely hard water, it is important that we squeegee down the shower doors each and every time we use the shower; otherwise, unsightly water deposit spots can form on the glass doors that are impossible to clean off.

I don't mind the squeegeeing duties that much, or at least I think the hassle is worth having a terrific looking shower. I truly despise the floppy shower curtain look and the mildew that inevitably ensues. But my hubby, Jonathan, hates squeegeeing. He'll do it, but only under duress, and he's been vocal about not wanting glass doors in our new bathroom.

Since I don't want a floppy shower curtain, and Jon doesn't want glass doors, that doesn't leave us a whole lot of options. Then one day I attended an open house where the master bath had a serpentine-shaped shower that didn't have a door at all. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and my jaw dropped open over the sheer ingeniousness of such a design. I knew, at that point, that I wanted a shower like that--one that would not require a shower door.

So when we were drafting the initial plans, I sketched it out for Wagner and shared our desire for a shower design that would have no doors, and hence no squeegee responsibilities. Quite gratifyingly, he bought into our vision and pointed out that such a design was compatible with our broader goal of designing the renovation to be universally accessible and wheelchair compatible if and when that became necessary in our old age.

There was only one teeny-tiny snag. The winters in Kentucky can get darned cold, down to zero degrees F (or lower), and we are the miserly kind of people who turn the thermostat way down (62 degrees) at night. This means in the morning it can be positively chilly when we wake up to shower. We were both worried that, without a shower door to trap in all the nice hot steam, we could be freezing our fannies off in our new shower.

We mulled this over for a while, and then I had the brilliant (to me) idea of installing one of those bathroom fan/heaters you find in hotels where you can turn it on for a short while and keep toasty warm as you're showering and/or drying off. I even found a nice Panasonic "whisper warm" fan that seemed to accomplish all that, PLUS being very quiet to boot.

The only snag is that when I printed out the specs, I noticed the fine print which said "not listed for shower tub/enclosures." I didn't want the heater to be in the shower part per se, near or under the water stream, but I was hoping to put it in the drying-off portion of the shower so that when we turned the water off we would still be warm.

So that was the main question on my mind when I went to talk with the lighting specialist. She seemed a little out of her depth when I asked her about it (I got the impression that very few people asked for a "walk-behind" or "doorless" shower, and even fewer asked for a shower fan/heater), but she called several of the shower fan/light companies while I was there and asked them about it. All of them said the same thing: There are no bathroom shower fan/heater combinations that are approved for use in the shower. I can get fans; I can get shower lights; but I can't get anything that includes a heating element. I'm not exactly sure why, but it has something to do with the danger posed by moisture getting into the heating elements. If I want a heater, it has to be outside the shower enclosure.

Shucks.

So now I'm a bit at a loss of what to do. Nancy suggested that we go ahead and put a fan/heater combo outside the shower, where it could do double-duty with the toilet. But I'm worried that won't get the heat where we need it, which is right when we turn the shower off and are drying off and freezing our fannies off. Wagner says we should revisit the idea of installing a heated floor. I'm not wild about THAT idea, as it's my fanny that gets cold, not my tootsies.

Worst case scenario, I suppose, is that we try the heater fan right outside the shower, and if it turns out to be too cold, we go ahead and put in a shower door and drag out our squeegee. Sigh.

Taking nothing for granite

Wagner tells me that it is time to "start thinking about" the remaining details of the master bathroom. I already know that choosing a toilet will be a major issue. The last time I was in Ferguson's picking out the whirlpool tub, I sat on every toilet they had there and wasn't crazy about any of them. (If you want to feel silly, try sitting on a toilet fully dressed while other people are walking around looking at faucets and the like.) And picking a toilet will be a cakewalk compared to selecting a tile pattern and decorative trim for the shower.

But today I'm talking about the vanity top. Wagner wrote up his bid assuming we'd go with granite, as that's the fashion these days and we chose granite for our master bath remodel a couple of years ago, as well as for our kitchen renovation this summer.

But I'm having cold feet about granite for the new master bath. While I love how it looks, if you've been following this blog you know that we are not exactly the home maintenance handy type of couple. (Remember the toilet flapper incident involving the twist ties from a bread wrapper?) The problem with granite is that it is very porous and has to be sealed on a regular basis (ideally every 6 months) to prevent liquids from seeping into it and staining it.

When we remodeled our master bath a while back, I wasn't planning on granite for that very reason. I know my limitations. But when I was picking out the tile with Wagner, we spied a special sale on a granite vanity top that, according to Wagner, had a very good price. The salesperson similarly assured us that this was "an unbelievable price." I'm a sucker for a bargain and was secretly tickled at the prospect of buying a fashionable counter material, so we went ahead and got it for our bathroom, with me uttering (at that time) sincere vows to seal the granite religiously. And when we got the granite countertop installed, the very first thing I did was seal the sucker.

That was, I hate to confess, the last time I sealed the sucker. Months would go by and I would tell myself, "I really need to reseal the granite countertop," but I never seemed to find the right time to do it. (To seal it properly, you need to clean the countertop thoroughly and let it dry for 24 hours, then seal it, then let it dry for another 24 hours. Who has 48 hours where they don't need to brush their teeth?) After a couple of years of that kind of neglect, the countertop now absorbs like a sponge and has a few stains. Oops.

For the kitchen, I realized there was absolutely ZERO chance of us being diligent enough to seal the countertop regularly, so I was initially leaning toward quartz instead. But when I was looking at Home Depot, I came across a special kind of granite called Stonemark that allegedly had received a special PermaSeal process and was guaranteed--guaranteed!!--never to need sealing for 15 years. I had a hard time believing it, so I pressed the saleslady repeatedly, and she repeatedly assured me that if I bought that granite counter, I would never, ever, EVER have to seal it.

Well, that clinched it for me. And even though it cost about 20% more than a normal granite counter, I bought it for the kitchen. Then we got the counter installed. I'll skip the story about how the installer measured it wrong so we had to replace the counter for half of the kitchen (shudder!). But after we got the counter installed, correctly, the second time, I noticed that it wasn't acting like its counterpart across the kitchen or the first top they installed (the one with the wrong measurements). When I placed wet dishes down on it, the stone would turn dark below it, almost immediately--almost as if, in fact, it weren't sealed at all.

This concerned me a little. Okay, it concerned me a LOT. Because, after all, I had paid a 20% premium to get this special PermaSeal granite and here it was acting like it wasn't sealed.

I'll spare you the long drawn-out negotiation with the granite people. Suffice to say they admitted that the sealing was not as good as it was supposed to be, and they are sending out their "reactivation specialist" who will do some sort of special process that is supposed to "reactivate" the seal and make it water- and fluid-repellent the way it should be. Assuming that happens (this specialist handles the entire Midwest U.S., so he can't get to my home for a couple of weeks), I'll be happy. The counters are absolutely beautiful, and nothing else has the same kind of shimmery depth as granite. I want to keep the counters. I just don't want to seal them.

So this experience has kind of dampened my enthusiasm for granite counters. I don't really want to take another chance with the Stonemark granite, and I *really* don't want to be sealing any countertops. So while I don't know what color scheme I'm going to go for with the new master bath countertop, I do know this: It won't be granite. We'll go with quartz or Corian or something solid instead.

Judging distances

The other deficit this renovation project has highlighted in my skill set is my almost complete lack of visual spatialization abilities. As much as I hate to confirm sex role stereotypes, I've always had a problem with estimating distances or amounts. When I try to guess what size Tupperware container I need to store leftovers in, I always guess wrong, and I end up with food slopping over the sides or huge amounts of empty space in the container.

When we were planning the renovation, my (lack of) spatial skills became a thorn in my side. I'd look at the floor plans and try to get a good image of what the finished addition would look like. Then I'd go outside and stare at the ground where it was going, which Wagner had conveniently staked out with markers, and I couldn't reconcile the two. The floor plans showed the master bedroom (the bedroom part only, not counting the closets or bathroom) as being bigger than our current family room. Our family room is plenty big, so I thought, okay, the bedroom will be nice and big, and certainly big enough. Then I'd go outside and look at the part of the driveway that would be dedicated to the bedroom, and my confidence would waver. It sure didn't look that big. And the last thing I wanted was to disrupt our lives for 6 months and spend a huge amount of money for a bedroom that would be too small.

Before we made the final decision to go ahead, I knew I had to feel confident that the proposed space of the addition would be sufficient. So I went up to our bedroom, tape measure in hand, and measured out the dimensions of all our bedroom furniture (bed, nightstands, dresser, couch, bookcases). Then I went outside, armed with the kids' sidewalk chark and the tape measure again, and started sketching in all the furniture in outline on the ground.

Something was wrong. When I drew in where the bed would go, instead of crowding the outline of the bedroom floor, it looked scarcely bigger than a shoebox in relation to the outline of the walls. I must have measured the bed wrong. So I went back upstairs and remeasured the bed. Nope, I had the right dimensions. So then I went back outside and double-checked to make sure I had drawn it right. Yup; it was drawn correctly... but it still looked impossibly small. I sat there, flummoxed and scratching my head, when my daughter, Athena, came up and asked what I was doing. "I'm sketching out where the furniture will go in the new bedroom," I replied. "Well, you did it wrong, " she said, "the bed is way too small." She refused to believe me when I told her I had checked it and that the dimensions were in fact correct. So we went back upstairs a third time and remeasured again.

The outline still seemed way too small. So finally I told Athena to lie down on the "bed" on the ground. (The one benefit to being a parent is that you can order your children to do things you'd feel too silly to do yourself.) When she did so, the "bed" suddenly and magically became normal bed-sized, and it was clear that we had drawn it correctly. And it was also crystal-clear that our new bedroom would have way more than enough space to fit all our furniture and not feel crowded. Phew.

I think this is a good example of a paradox of Euclidean geometry, which is that filled space looks bigger than empty space. That's why real estate agents hate to be in the position of selling a vacant house, so I think I will call this the "Realtor's Paradox."

Progress report --- Week 5

Progress completed this week:

--Framing of garage (first floor) completed
--Plywood walls put up on garage
--HVAC ductwork installed in addition
--HVAC exhaust vents drilled/installed
--Plumbing pipes laid down for addition
--HVAC inspection carried out
--Termite spot treatment conducted in garage
--Floor joists put down in garage and addition part
--Holes drilled through concrete wall in our basement where freon pipes will have to run through
--And probably a lot more other stuff I can't tell what it is from the various pipes etc. lying around
--Had fence people come over to give us an estimate on moving/rebuilding the fence

On the whole, it seems to me that a lot has been done, and the area certainly looks quite different. Wagner, though, said grimly, "I consider myself to be a week behind schedule."

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Wagner's having second thoughts about the depth of the new garage. He's measured our cars and uttered dire warnings that we'll "never get a big truck in there." Our reassurances that we have no current or future plans to buy a big truck do not quell his concerns. We do, however, want to be able to fit our bicycles and lawn mower around the cars. He fiddles with the floor plans, decides to make the stairway skinnier (from 40" wide to 36" wide); shift the stairway over 2 feet; and move the furnace up into the garage attic space to free up some shelf/workbench space in the back of the garage. He also decides to add 8" to the depth. I was initially reluctant because I thought it would mean repouring one wall of the foundation, but it turns out the foundation was deliberately made bigger to begin with so it won't be any problem to make the garage deeper.

Pipe dreams

One thing this renovation has made crystal clear to me is how little I actually know about construction and how houses are built. My respect for architects, building engineers, and contractors has skyrocketed now that I have seen just what is involved in putting up a building, even something as relatively minor as our project. It's not just a matter of nailing some 2 x 4's together and slapping on drywall.

A good example of my naivete is the water pipe issue. Wagner was going over the day's progress with me one evening when he casually mentioned that they had put in the water pipe for the garage apartment. Prior to this renovation, when I heard the words "water pipe" I had a mental image of one of those big concrete culverts you sometimes see sitting at the edge of highways, or at the very least a heavy duty cast iron pipe a foot in diameter. So I peered into the foundation area of the garage and, not seeing anything that looked remotely what I thought a water pipe should look like, asked Wagner "where's the pipe?" I was gobsmacked when he pointed to a teeny tiny blue hose poking up out of the ground. I told him it was too tiny and flexible to be a water pipe, and he laughed and said it was 3/4" diameter. Who'dve ever thunk all the water coming into your house would be going through something so tiny.

The saga of the neighbor's shed: The end, maybe

In my last report on the conflict with our Neighbor From Hell behind us, the one who refused to let us move his shed off our property so that we could reclaim our 46" strip of land, I announced that we were having our lawyer draft a letter announcing our intent to file suit if he did not move his shed.

When we finally saw a draft of the letter, we were not happy with it, for a couple of reasons: First, it gave the neighbor until December 1 to move the shed. We didn't see any point in giving him that long, as he was either going to let us move it or not. If we didn't file suit until December 1, who knows how long the whole case would take to be resolved. Second, there was the teeny-tiny problem that the lawyer's draft was addressed to MY name at the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL'S address. Yikes!! Lucky for us, our mailman caught the mistake and delivered it to us at our address. Otherwise it could've been a bit embarrassing. Or--who knows?--maybe a shrewd tactical move. But I'm glad I didn't have to find out if it backfired.

So Jonathan was none too pleased with our lawyer (sending drafts of documents in a lawsuit mistakenly to the defendant doesn't seem like a smart strategy). He spoke with him the next day and told him that we wanted to change the letter to give the neighbor a much shorter deadline. Jon then asked, innocently, "what if we just go ahead and move the shed right now and wait for HIM to sue US?" This caused no small amount of agitation on our lawyer's part. He is normally the perfect stereotype of a proper, staid, and subdued lawyer. But at Jonathan's question he started sputtering and squawking and told us under no uncertain terms that such a stunt would be A Very Stupid Thing to Do, as there would be an excellent chance that the Neighbor From Hell could claim we had caused all sorts of damage to his property and win significant monetary damages. (We didn't even tell our lawyer that our Plan B was the excellent suggestion made by one of my Piano World buddies, who wrote me an email that said simply, "Two words: Shed fire." Good thing, too; I think it would've given him a stroke.) Our lawyer then begged us to come in for a meeting with him and the real estate law expert from the firm.

At this point, Jonathan lost what limited patience he has for the legal profession. He could see the future, and it was one long grim year--or more--of meetings with lawyers billed at $250 an hour and endless legal wrangling. And he just didn't have the stomach for it.

So then, on his own initiative, Jonathan called the Neighbor From Hell up, told him point blank that if we sued, we would win, but that we wanted to avoid the time and hassle of a long legal fight. He also said that we would much prefer not to have an adversarial relationship with our neighbors.

Then he offered the N.F.H. $1000 if he let us move his shed and relocate his hydrangea bushes for him, as compensation for the inconvenience.

Yeah, I know. It sticks in my craw, too, to reinforce jerkish behavior. But after getting over my strong initial revulsion at the prospect of paying the N.F.H. off, I have to concede that I think my hubby is an extremely wise person. Assuming the N.F.H. does not weasel out of this bargain, this is probably the quickest, least expensive, and best all-around solution we could've hoped for given his initial refusal to do the right thing. Yes, we would've won a lawsuit. But it would be a long, drawn-out process that would end up costing a heckuva lot more than $1000 (and our lawyer was not at all optimistic that we would be awarded legal fees if we won). And I really wasn't relishing the idea of living right next to a guy whom we had to sue and would no doubt henceforth hate our guts and become bent on revenge. Peaceful relations with one's neighbors is worth holding one's nose and making the best of a bad situation, I think.

But when Jonathan told me that he was thinking about simply removing the fence and moving the shed, but NOT putting up a new fence--maybe planting tall grasses as border instead--I drew a line in the sand and said No Frigging Way. If we're going to all this trouble, by God we're going to move the fence, and we're going to put it half an inch away from our property line.

Return of our six-legged little friends

Recall that a week or so ago, when the crew removed the drywall from the garage, we discovered signs of an old termite infestation. We knew the house had been treated before we bought it for termites, so we weren't particularly worried about it. We also had a termite person come out and look the garage over. She said it looked like old damage but recommended treating the entire house "just to be sure." We didn't see any reason to treat based on the evidence so just filed the estimate away.

Then today the crew was back in the garage removing some more stuff, and this time they found not just signs of more termite damage but a few of the little critters themselves, wiggling and squirming away.

Uh-oh.

So now we'll need to bring the pest control company back out again and retreat the entire house. There's also a couple of spots where the wood will need to be replaced and/or patched up somehow. Wagner took me out to the garage to show me the damaged areas. He must have seen the look of horror on my face when I saw the temporary wooden supports they had set up, because he quickly assured me that our bedroom (which is currently above the garage) was in no imminent danger of falling through the ceiling of the garage.

But I have to say it makes me wonder what OTHER damage could be lurking in other places of the house that we don't see right now because it's covered up with drywall. Then again, maybe I don't want to know. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Progress report -- Week 4

Progress made this week:

--Concrete blocks put in for foundation of addition and garage
--Old bricks removed from exterior of garage and side of kitchen
--Garage doors removed
--Conduits for plumbing/utilities to be rerouted put in place
--Termite pretreatment of addition and garage
--Lots of decisions made. In addition to the critical fake tiny window panes style, I also chose:
(a) the style of brick to use on the addition and garage. We could not find an exact match to the existing brick, as the house was built over 30 years ago, but we found a set that comes pretty darned close. Wagner also managed to save a fair number of bricks from the portion that had to be removed, so he can mingle the old brick with the new to make it blend better;
(b) the whirlpool tub for the master bath;
(c) faucets for the tub and bathroom vanities; I chose the Lahara line from Delta, which I like for the sleek modern look and ease of cleaning/repairs:


(d) undermount sinks for the vanity; and
(e) shower head, faucet, and diverter for the master bath shower. I stayed with the Lahara line for this, too:



(f) hand-held shower on bar for master bath shower. I didn't care for the look of the Lahara hand-held shower, so I chose another more contemporary Delta version:


(g) finish for all faucets. I knew I didn't want polished brass or chrome, but it was harder to pick from all the other remaining choices. After 15 minutes of wandering around Ferguson's (the plumbing supply company we're ordering from), holding up various faucets against whirlpool tubs in biscuit (the color I had chosen to go with for our sinks/toilet/tub), I narrowed it down to "aged pewter" or "brilliance stainless" (which is what Delta calls a finish that other people call "brushed nickel") and finally decided on "brilliance stainless" for everything.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--When looking at front windows during the window pane decision process, we noticed a large crack running diagonally from the gutter. Wagner said, "that doesn't look good," and checked it out the next day, whereupon he discovered that whoever had replaced the roof last (this occurred before we bought the house five years ago) had not installed flashing properly at one point, and water had gotten in and damaged the wood. I'm a bit disgruntled, as it seems to me that the home inspector we hired before we bought the house should've noticed that, as well as the gutter company we had hired a year before to install fancy new "ever clean" gutters. Wagner says it is not a major problem, but we will have to replace the damaged wood and flashing and fix the crack.

Darkness descends

One of the downsides of the renovation plans is that it meant losing two of our kitchen windows. The current layout of the house has the kitchen and family room extending out in the back, so that the kitchen has windows on two sides and is nice and airy with lots of natural light. The renovation would basically extend the garage area and line up with the edge of the kitchen/family room, making the footprint of the house a perfect rectangle. So that meant one of the (current) exterior walls of the kitchen, which has two windows (one over the sink, one over in the eat-in kitchen area) would become the bedroom wall, with the windows taken out and dry-walled over.

This is probably the part of the design that I am least thrilled with, but there really wasn't any other option. So what we are doing to cope with losing the windows is increasing the natural light in other ways. We are going to enlarge the remaining window in the eat-in kitchen area, making it a double-width window rather than a single window. That should help quite a bit. Second, we are going to install a large skylight in the roof directly above the kitchen proper, which should make things quite a bit lighter, if the experience we had with our master bathroom is any guide. The skylight there helped immensely to brighten up that room.

Wagner warned us about a couple of things when I told him that we wanted the skylight. First, it would add noticeably to the expense of the project. More important, he said that installing the skylight would actually be the most disruptive and intrusive part of the entire renovation in terms of interfering with our lifestyle. There will be a period of about a week where kitchen activities will be disturbed, and we'll have a huge hole in our roof with plastic sheeting covering it. We'll have to repaint the kitchen ceiling, etc. But I kept remembering how I had concluded that the skylight in our master bath was a huge success and I was really glad we had gone for it... so I told Wagner that the hassle and expense were worth it and we wanted a kitchen skylight.

Now I am extremely happy we made that decision. The crew recently placed plywood boards over the two kitchen windows (to prevent glass breakage as they remove the brick from the exterior of that wall). Soon they will be covered over permanently. And so my nice bright pretty kitchen for now has now been transformed into a still pretty but dim kitchen. I'm looking forward to getting more sunlight back.

Window pains

One of the most humbling and at times overwhelming aspects of any renovation is all the decisions that have to be made, at all steps along the way. I went into our kitchen renovation, for example, naively thinking that all I had to do was pick out cabinets, countertop, the lighting fixture, and paint color. Ha! I could not believe how many little decisions went into each of those components, and how many more decisions had to be made in addition to the major ones. For example, what style of quarter rounds did we want? (Quarter rounds, I learned, are those skinny curved pieces of wood that make the junction between the wall and the floor look pretty.) In what stain? Did we want sliding drawers in the cabinets? In all cabinets or just a few, and if just a few, which ones? etc. etc. ad infinitum.

(Incidentally, one of the features of the cabinets that I have ended up liking the most is that I decided to spring for a tilt-out drawer at the sink. It is incredibly handy for stowing away scrub brushes and the like and is WELL worth the money.)

Having recently gone through a whole bunch of agonizing over countless aspects of the kitchen renovation, I felt prepared to face the even larger number of decisions that would surely confront us in this renovation. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to go ahead with the renovation at this point in time (besides feeling that it was better to sink our money into the house rather than leave it in the stock market, yikes!) is that I am on sabbatical from my university position. While I still need to work on my research, my time is completely flexible, and I am in a better position to consult with Wagner and go look at paint chips, tile, bathroom fixtures, lamps, etc.

It was also decided early on that I would be the point person for these decisions. Jonathan does not have the same kind of patience as I do for making fine discriminations among Eggshell, Sand Dollar, and Navajo White paint chips, and he is even less concerned about the ramifications of making the wrong decision. So when debating the pros and cons of renovating, Jonathan made me an offer I couldn't refuse: He'd write the checks if I would handle the day-to-day details of the project.

Which is why I spent 45 minutes today trying to decide between various styles of window panes that, at first blush, looked virtually identical. Our house is rather traditional in appearance, and most windows in Kentucky have the grids that make it look like there are tiny panes of glass in a larger window. What I didn't realize is that nowadays those are just *fake* tiny panes, and most windows instead merely have a gridwork superimposed on top of a larger sheet, or between two sheets, of glass to make it LOOK like there are separate tiny panes.

Okay, so I can deal with fake tiny panes. What I *couldn't* decide was how best to accomplish this fakery. One style (the "Simulated Divided Lines") puts fake grids on BOTH sides of the window, and I suppose it looks the most convincing. But it also costs 15% more, which we would have to pay for additionally because the more expensive option wasn't considered in the bid. The second style (the "Grilles Between the Glass" option) actually puts the fake gridwork in between the dual panes of glass in the window. Apparently this style is a bit easier to clean because it's just one smooth sheet of glass inside and out. The downside is that you have to pick from a limited number of colors, which you are then stuck with for all eternity because it will be embedded inside the window. The third style (the "Wood Interior Grilles") has the fake gridwork snapped on the interior of the window. It is slightly harder to clean (you have to remove the gridwork to get at the window pane efficiently), but it has the advantage of being able to paint the gridwork after the fact and change colors.

So I stared at the brochure and kept asking Wagner questions like "what's the downside of picking this style?" and "why does this style cost 15% more?", which he kept answering patiently. I was able to rule out the more expensive option quickly enough on the grounds that they all basically looked alike to me so I didn't see any sense in paying another 15% for it. Then I wavered between the other two and almost decided to boycott them entirely because of the pretentious spelling of "Grilles". Then it occurred to me that if we went with the Grilles between the Glass option, we would have to decide our bedroom paint color RIGHT NOW so that we could order the right color for the gridwork. There was no way I was capable of making THAT decision so hastily, so it's the "Wood Interior Grilles" for us.

Phew.