Kitchen Reconstruction :: Day One

Yesterday, we mostly unpacked boxes and sorted gazillions of parts:



























































We thought about posting photos of all the tiny parts, but we had to draw the line somewhere!

And, we put together the first piece: our tiny island! Here she is:



Now, we are getting started putting together all the upper 12" deep cabinets. We are going to glue them as we assemble (thanks for your advice Robin!). We hope by the beginning of Wednesday to be done with all the Ikea assembly. Then we will move back into the actual room and deal with wall and ceiling prep. Electrician is coming then to put in new circuits for lighting.

News from the Homeland

Gee i'm so proud that Cobb County had finally woken up and decided that Evolution is nothing to stop teaching in science class! BC, could you imagine if you'd been the science curriculum coordinator there in the past few years? Sheesh. Click here to link to a fellow blogger's story about this. I love his quip: "Next battle: There's no such thing as "gravity." What happens is intelligent falling."

Afternoon at Night at the Museum

For our last day of work until next year, everyone from Hilferty went to see Night at the Museum yesterday after lunch. I'm not sure if it was just all about timing (having just finished two gargantuan deadlines) or what, but I can't remember when i've enjoyed a movie more. I highly recommend it, and all the inside jokes that surround my little world of design are right on. Who knew Dick Van Dyke was still working? He's a great villian!

kitchen demolition part II

As you can see from this panorama i just stitched together, lots and lots of plaster came down with Barney's kitchen cabinets. Joy. Happy happy joy joy. Now we are faced with several choices:

1.) Hire a contractor to come in and reskin all walls and ceiling with gypsum board; or

2.) see if we could find someone who could actually fix the old plaster; or

3.) put up bead board ourselves, ceiling and walls.

I like option 3 because it will add a bit of texture, it is easy to install, and I think it will look great with our faux foam oak beams above. We are thinking about renting one of those air guns and just going to town with bead board... we'd still have to patch behind it to fill in the plaster holes, but it certainly wouldn't have to be pretty back there, just a flush substrate.

We both talked about how much we would love to break down ALL the plaster and just leave the lathe exposed... and even though we aren't obsessed with censoring our instincts for resale value, that might be a bit much. Plus, just not a good idea in a kitchen, with grease, steam and water occasionally atomizing things. Still, it would lend a certain je ne sais pas--scooby doo ness?--to it all.

So, we are taking votes: what do you all think (all 2 or 3 of you!)? Bead board, or smooth gypsum, or fix the original plaster are the choices (unless someone has another suggestion of course). Send us a comment, and give us your vote!

Steven's essay was posted

on the This I Believe website! It's good; if you didn't read on his blog, you can link to the essay on the website here.

Any of You Interpret Dreams?

So after 2 glasses of wine and a ton of sugar at a party last night, I had this dream that I keep thinking about. Steven and I are riding our bikes down the side of this impossibly huge skyscraper, enjoying the novelty of the anti gravity. Then, the cat appears, and we both panic, knowing that only on a bike does one ride down a skyscraper. She prances around for a minute, and then dissolves into the distance, breaking up like the space shuttle on the way down. Then I wake up and she is right there, sleeping on top of Steven's chest like she has since it started getting really cold.

Can anybody interpret this? What does it mean? I don't want to hear any of that standard stuff about skyscrapers now.

The Future's Not Ours To See

Found this interesting piece on some aussie guy's blog. Never heard of Wax Tailor before, but checkin them now.

Images of the Social and Economic World

Remember those maps after the 2004 election that showed a new "cartogram" of the US, to help ease the anxiety of liberals like me who saw a whole sea of red on the map? This "cartogram" weighted each state according to its population, rather than geographic size, and suddenly the US was half red and half blue; or even slightly more blue. Well, I came across these other maps--looking at social and economic cosmology--today from the same Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan. Very interesting. Very interesting how, of all places, South America seems to contribute very little in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and take very little resources, in proportion to their population. You can find the maps, and their interpretation here .

Sans Soucis

Sacre Bleu! Sans Souci. Definitely. Without a doubt.

This is my favorite feature of our new Thermador: the super duper handy dandy extra-low feature. It really works.

Appliances Arrive With Much Fanfare

It was like christmas around here yesterday. Appliances and other miscellany for the kitchen were delivered. On Monday, the cabinets and more miscellany (like the sink) arrive from Ikea.

It is hard for me to just not plug this baby in and start searing some meat right now! Well, it will be at least 2 months before I'll be able to do that. Steven cooked a pretend grilled cheese last night on the griddle while he went on and on about making a detailed Chinese users guide for his Ma. On our last Thermador in Atlanta, we all scratched it up a good bit and put some unnecessary miles on it by cleaning it improperly (and perhaps a bit too obssesively?). It is really easy to clean stainless the WRONG way and muck it up.



Two of these star lamps will hang from the foam faux oak beams at the ceiling. They will provide general light and eye candy; about a gazillion other lights in the hood over the stove, the pot rack, on a track over the island, under the upper cabs, and inside all the glass-doored cabs will provide the real & task lighting. The faux foam oak beams are primarily to cover new electrical conduit we'll add to supply all this new lighting on new circuits. Currently, as in any old house, the circuits in the kitchen are overloaded. We've learned that we can't have the toaster and the microwave going at the same time, which just adds to the drama of cooking in a challenged kitchen.



Here's the fabulous dish drawer. We were shocked and amazed to find a beautiful, smooth stainless housing around the whole thing, which one doesn't get to enjoy when one builds it into cabinets, as we will.








This is our Bosch fridge (sorry to be a label queen) and it is counter-depth and built-in.



If I ever get past my work deadlines, I'll be free to work on my new kitchen soon! We've got so much to do... Everything is just parked in the Dining Room for now, which will be our War Room where we'll assemble all the cabinets one by one. Jing Xia's bedroom will become the supply post, full of all the boxes of cabinet parts. And the kitchen will be the real war zone. We are hoping that when we take down what remains of the existing cabinets that the plaster won't come down with them. And we are also hoping to get them down without destroying them, so we can use them in the garage/greenhouse. We'll see.

























































We actually--neither of us--dislike the green/blue/purple Barney "we're a happy family" quality of our existing kitchen. The cabinets, especially, are good, but probably 40 years old. Solid wood and sturdy, but dirty and not super functional, with sticking drawers and doors, etc. But that tile counter we both loath. It is impossible to keep clean, especially the grout, and we've both given up trying to finazzle it. It will be gone soon. And the appliances were just bad, aging white bottom-of-the-line stuff that we're too snobby to deal with.

We are especially concerned about what is behind that tile backsplash: Where the old stove hood was we can see a yellowish kind of linoleum, and who knows if there is plaster behind there or not? When we took other parts of the counter out, we found that someone had glued the ceramic tile directly to the fabulous fifties counters which were a nice bright red laminate with cool aluminum edging. Anyhow, hopefully the Barney cabinets will make it unscathed into the greenhouse (we'll keep the carnival of colors). And, these provide nice "before" photos. Hopefully in 2 months or 3, we'll have some nice "after" pictures.