How I Spent My Summer Vaction, By the_Bird

[the_bird]

PROBLEM 1:
Kitchen sucked. Like, sucked balls. Anyone who's been to my house can attest to this fact.

PROBLEM 2:
I'm cheap.

SOLUTION:
Five months of backbreaking labor! And, violation of child-labor laws!

The best I have of a "before" picture.

Helper...

Helping...

Helpers come in various sizes, too.

 

[Laughing_Gnome_Invisible]

Wow! Look at that kid go!!!

 

[the_bird]

PROBLEM 3: Wall.
SOLUTION: TERMINATE

That's either water or fire damage I uncovered (and fixed) in the corner.

The world's two worst linoleums, evah.

 

[uglygoat]

we had that same pattern in our old house growing up. it was in the basement, and hidden under the carpet in the upstairs.

are you leaving the chimney bricks exposed, or walling them in?

 

[the_bird]

Installing my $1,500 cabinets (god bless Craigslist).

Building a peninsula.

Learning to tile...

The damn slate edging cost more than the granite tiles.

 

[the_bird]

Floors! Woot!

I'm getting pretty good at this ****.

 

[the_bird]

AND... as of yesterday afternoon, about 3:00.... DONE!

I'm tired. My brother helped me the one day of demo (wanted someone more experienced around in case that wall we took down was more load bearing than expected), and I hired an electrician (under the table, wink-wink, nudge-nudge) and a plumber. Other than that, this has been BY FAR the biggest DIY project I've ever even contemplated.

Total budget, I need to do the numbers today, but is within a pubic hair of $10k.

There's a bathroom to be added in the spring, behind the new pocket door. Ran out of time for that to get done as part of the main project.

 

[Bopper]

Great work! Nice tile job...especially in the last picture! The room looks awesome!

 

[Yooper]

Wow- what a great job! Which was the worst- doing the work, or living in a house without a kitchen?

Thanks for sharing all those pictures. If you spent about $10K DIY, how much would you guess it would have been if you had to buy the cabinets new and hire out more help?

 

[Bobby_M]

Nice. It only took me 24 months for mine.

 

[the_bird]

We did *kinda* have a kitchen, just not very function. We had the electrician move the 220 over to a corner of the dining room during construction, so we had an oven but realistically couldn't do much. Not having a sink was the biggest PITA, whenever we had to do dishes it was lugging them into the slop sink in the basement.

To be totally fair on the budget, you'd almost have to add in the cost of going out to dinner way, way more often than we would have otherwise, which I'm just going to ignore. I have no idea how much it would cost to pay someone for this. I'm incredibly thankful for having a very good electrician who was working on the weekends for only $20/hour, and who only tried killing me twice. On demo day, he accidentally left a wire live that he told me I could sawzall through - got a few sparks. Yesterday, I was changing an outlet and he turned my circuit back on; a little tingly. Other than the attempted murder, a real good guy!

My plumbers weren't especially cheap, but they were at the house within ten minutes of my emergency call when the water shutoffs stopped shutting off, water was leaking all through the kitchen and into the basement, and all of the other shutoffs were rusted shut. One of the plumbers also took this huge-ass wood stove that I never used off my hands, lugging it up the basement stairs when I'm pretty sure the house was built around it. So, that was nice.

The cabinets, we never priced out new. Because they were used and because I was building the peninsula, I ended up having to convert a lot of uppers into base cabinets (which is why there's wainscoating around, to cover up the 2x that I'm using as the bases). They're nice cabinets, though; very solid, the pantry one has shelves that slide out. The corner one by the stove I had to cut down and install a new back, but well worth it to buy used. Had one left over that we could not find a home for.

The biggest thing now is that we've been eating like crap because it was hard to do much more "cooking" than throwing a frozen pizza in the oven. I miss cooking, and I miss eating halfway decently.

 

[bad67z]

Very nice work, this looks exactly like my wife's idea of a vacation. It's nice to find others who are too frugal to call a contractor. My wife and I have gotten plenty of OJT since buying our first house 6 year ago.

Recently we have filed a claim along with most of my neighbors, We all received wind damage last fall and this spring one of which was from a f'in hurricane that made it to central Ohio WTF. All of them have had roofs put on by a contractor, not in the Sherry house. We have gotten the quotes $7000 to $8500 for 16 sqr. roof, I can buy the material for just under $2000. So I'll be on the roof and pocketing the difference.

And in closing this evening @ my first brew club meeting I will hoist a pint to you and your achievement...

 

[the_bird]

Oh, the chimney bricks we covered up because they really weren't in that nice a condition (it wasn't built for them to be exposed) and because we needed to put a couple of outlets on that wall for code purposes.

One thing that I may well regret.... the wall that we built next to the bricks is also right next to the peninsula, and DIRECTLY ABOVE the kegerator. VERY tempted to run a couple of lines due north, but I just couldn't justify spending the time and money on figure out a cooling system and all of that. Didn't really think about it until the wall was built, I could have gone back and run some lines, but... alas. There's room underneath, there's a little cubbyhole, that could fit a small wine chiller, and on the side there might be room for a dorm-fridge-based kegerator if I ever build one.

 

[the_bird]

Very nice work, this looks exactly like my wife's idea of a vacation. It's nice to find others who are too frugal to call a contractor. My wife and I have gotten plenty of OJT since buying our first house 6 year ago.

Recently we have filed a claim along with most of my neighbors, We all received wind damage last fall and this spring one of which was from a f'in hurricane that made it to central Ohio WTF. All of them have had roofs put on by a contractor, not in the Sherry house. We have gotten the quotes $7000 to $8500 for 16 sqr. roof, I can buy the material for just under $2000. So I'll be on the roof and pocketing the difference.

And in closing this evening @ my first brew club meeting I will hoist a pint to you and your achievement...

I actually have to re-do a roof soon, as well. Thankfully, just the garage roof, but it's been needing work since we bought the house six years ago and just started leaking recently.

One of our HBT colleagues actually drunkenly volunteered to come out and help... let's see if he remembers his folly.

 

[Bobby_M]

Why did you tile all the way to the floor behind the stove?

 

[the_bird]

Couple reasons. Those tiles weren't that expensive, so it wasn't that much of a $$ to do it all the way down. The transition was going to be a little awkward if I didn't go all the way to the floor. Depending on how tight to the wall I have the stove, you can still see behind it a little bit. If I had cabinets on both sides of the stove, I probably would have tiled only down to the countertop level, but since the stove is on the end, I thought it would look unfinished to not go all the way down.

Ease of cleaning, too, is a biggie. Not likely that it'll get greasy back there, but anything that does spill, or just grease from the air, is going to be easier to keep clean on tile versus on painted drywall.

The biggest thing, though, is just making it look as finished as possible for when we sell the house. I put up wainscoating to cover up my upper-cabinets-converted-to-base-cabinets on the side of the stove, which you really WILL never see... unless somebody who's looking to buy the house is looking around pretty closely, or if we've already moved and taken the stove or whatever. I'm trying to think ahead to what will make the house as marketable as possible - little things like, we're not going to have a TV in there but I've got a coax hooked in there since it literally cost me $2 to do so.

 

[Bobby_M]

Gotcha....

 

[paulthenurse]

One of our HBT colleagues actually drunkenly volunteered to come out and help... let's see if he remembers his folly.

If you keep saying I was drunk I might just unvolunteer. lol


I can do Monday the 5th, Wed the 7th or any day the week of the 12th.

PTN

 

[the_bird]

Awesomeness, Paul, I'll let you know after I get a chance to talk to my brother. I'll see if he's free to help me on 10/4.

 

[Ryan_PA]

Redoing a kitchen once, makes you really look more closely at the kitchens in the home you look at for the next house. It looks great man!

Day 1 of demo when I did mine, we learned the wife was preggo. That left me with the whole kitchen and doing 900 sq feet of hardwood myself. 3 years, one hernia surgery, and a sold house later, it was the single best dollar for dollar return I have ever done.

 

[paulthenurse]

Can I bring my big-assed, Chinese-tattooed girlfriend?

 

[the_bird]

Keep her off the roof.

 

[ohiobrewtus]

She's a real beauty, Clark!

Great job, bird - it looks awesome!

 

[flyerwire]

awesome... i'm doing close to the same thing, got the wall torn down and the i-beam up (it most definitely was a load bearing wall), the room which I am expanding into has been gutted and drywalled (GOOD BYE DROP CEILING!), and the next phase is the existing kitchen gut and re-do. Have to save some money for that, hoping i can be without a kitchen for only 3 months or so

 

[paulthenurse]

Hey Jay,
I totally forgot to talk about this when you were out here last. Where do you stand now with the project? I'm working all the rest of this week but can be available the following week. Let me know.
PTN

 

[the_bird]

Paul, I decided to just tarp the garage roof for the winter and I'll deal with it in the spring, probably in the context of a much bigger project around the garage. I got up there, and it's really in BAD shape. I was able to poke a few holes through in spots. There's probably five layers of shingles on there. I'm thinking I'll do a total strip-down and probably lay down a lot of fresh plywood.

But, it's tarped, and I remembered that even only being twelve or so feet in the air - Jesus Christ, I hate working on roofs!

 

[Yooper]

Your project reminded me of something that happened a couple of years ago. I have a good friend (male) that is a real handy man type. He lives a couple of hours from me, though, so he only helps when he's able to devote an entire day or weekend. When I was single, he helped me install a dishwasher in my previous house, replace baseboard, etc.

I decided that I was going to replace the kitchen cabinets. It was a galley kitchen, and I found the cabinets dirt cheap. When I asked him if he could spend a weekend hanging cabinets, his reply was "Cabinets are a PITA. I'm NOT installing cabinets for someone I'm not ****ing".

Anyway, so I know now how much work a new kitchen can be!

 

[flyerwire]

it is a pita that makes me dread the tear down day when i look at these pics. Luckily i have a drywaller (bro in law), electrician (co-worker) and cabinet installer (co-worker) that all work for beer... where i'm basically doing demo/clean up and helping. I'm not sure if i want to tackle tiling though... that and it gets real expensive, real quick

 

[the_bird]

Tiling isn't as hard as you might think. Buy a wet saw; even the bare-bones, $80 model works fine. It's just work. Grouting is a PITA, but nothing that you can't do.

The project does get expensive pretty quick, but the more work you can do yourself... I deliberately chose things like granite tile for the countertops since I could do that work myself. I can hang drywall myself, it's not perfect but I'm getting better at it. I can lay tile. I can hang doors. I can install cabinets (with a little help).

Hell, probably 25% - 30% of my budget went to paying professionals to do plumbing and electrical (there was a LOT of electrical work); I got lucky in having someone who was doing the work cheap, but if you don't need to move or add a lot of lights or new outlets, and if you have someone who'll work for beer, that's one of the biggest cost items.

I'm really, really happy with the kitchen, and I'm very confident that I've increased the value of the house by a lot more than the $10k or so that I put into this (and that cost is even including the amount I spent on tools). It wasn't like I was skimping on things like the sink and the lights, either.

 

[flyerwire]

Tiling isn't as hard as you might think. Buy a wet saw; even the bare-bones, $80 model works fine.

yeah, i'm at the point where with the wife's help we are going over budget, so tiling is starting to slide into "do it yourself", i live in a house built in the 20's, so the only thing i'm worried about is trying to level the floors and square up corners

 

[the_bird]

That's why they make mud and baseboard!

My floors were so far out of level, it was ridiculous. I probably could/should have used some of that self-leveling stuff, but it was going to be tough with the transition to the hardwood floor in the dining room section.

 

[TexLaw]

Effin' beautiful, Bird!


TL

 

[paulthenurse]

Your project reminded me of something that happened a couple of years ago. I have a good friend (male) that is a real handy man type. He lives a couple of hours from me, though, so he only helps when he's able to devote an entire day or weekend. When I was single, he helped me install a dishwasher in my previous house, replace baseboard, etc.

I decided that I was going to replace the kitchen cabinets. It was a galley kitchen, and I found the cabinets dirt cheap. When I asked him if he could spend a weekend hanging cabinets, his reply was "Cabinets are a PITA. I'm NOT installing cabinets for someone I'm not ****ing".

Anyway, so I know now how much work a new kitchen can be!

Don't go there, Paul. Don't do it!!!! Walk away! Turn around and walk away. Right now!

PTN

 

[RDWHAHB]

Yoop-
You didn't finish your story...did he install the cabinets or not??

 

[StirStarters]

Awesome work, Bird! Now you have a nice cozy nest!