I bought my house in the spring of 2002 and spent 6 months renovating parts of it (removing popcorn ceilings, redoing the floors, removing wallpaper, painting, updating electrical, etc). While we did minor updates to the kitchen, I decided to wait to do a complete renovation. I didn’t imagine it would take me twenty years to finally do it!
This is what the kitchen looked like when I bought it. The owner was an 80 year-old woman and the kitchen reflected her tastes, which weren’t ours.
We quickly updated the lighting fixtures and fan, removed the curtains, replaced some appliances, and painted the walls and ceiling. We changed the floors in the rest of the house to porcelain tile (removed all the old carpeting and linoleum tile), but left the Saltillo tile in the kitchen. I figured there was no point of re-tiling until we renovated the entire kitchen.
We took the first steps for this year’s renovation almost a year ago. Alastair and I did the initial design and started discussions with a contractor recommended by a friend. We purchased all GE stainless steel appliances from a local appliance retailer just before Thanksgiving last year, taking advantage of a sale and $900 of rebates. In January, I started working with A Handyman’s Haven for the cabinets and countertops; and, for various reasons, some out of our control, it took several months to finalize the design. My designer, Rebeca, was fantastic through the whole thing!
We signed an agreement with McEwen Construction, LLC at the end of January, and once we had all the appliances and cabinets they began work at the end of March. We lived without a kitchen sink for almost a month, but fortunately the weather was still cool during that phase so washing up outside wasn’t as bad as it could have been. We set up the new refrigerator in our front room with an area to prep and cook food in our new Instant Pot (we were also without a stove for more than a month). Alastair created a tent over the whole area using a metal framework and drop cloths so it would be protected from all the dust created during demolition and drywalling. It worked very well!
Demolition took a couple of days, followed by installation of new plumbing and electrical, putting up drywall, installing a large fixed-picture window, and laying tile. That all took a couple of weeks. After the contractor finished, I completed some of the final drywall texturing. The old kitchen had a passage from the main hallway into the kitchen, which was a nice shortcut, but it was always awkward and a waste of space. After that was closed off, we had to match an existing drywall texture on the hallway side, which our contractor had not done before. It took me a week to figure it out, but I did it and they were impressed with how well it matched.
Next came installing the new cabinets, appliances and granite countertops. Thankfully that all went well, and we were happy to finally have a functioning stove again!
The final step was putting up the tile backsplash. Alastair and I had picked out a great mosaic tile, and before installing I did a number of Photoshop mockups so we felt confident that it would look good. The mosaic tile comes on 12″ square sheets with a mesh backing which helps keep a good alignment of the individual 1″x2″ tiles, but it still requires some amount of manual alignment. One of my contractors’ employees completed about 3/4 of the job after one day, and after he left I sat back to take a critical look. Alastair and I agreed that the work unacceptable – many of the tiles were not aligned well, giving it an overall wavy look. I message my contractor that night and he came the next morning to discuss it.
The conversation was not pleasant. Our contractor tried multiple ways to convince me to keep it, even warning me that trying to remove the tile would damage the wall so much that it might have to be cut out and replaced, possibly even having to take the cabinets down and redoing the whole wall. That sounded extreme and unnecessary to me, so we agreed that I would make the first attempt at removing the tile. I’ve had some experience with drywall repairs and felt sure that I could figure it out. It took a couple of weeks working on it part-time, but after some very stressful days and studying a lot of YouTube videos and DIY websites, I finished and was very pleased with the result. Again, my contractor was impressed with my work!
Rather than trying to use mosaic tiles again, we decided to change the design, using larger and fewer tiles. It’s unfortunate to have wasted money on materials and labor, but in the end we were much happier with our final decision.
