Kitchen floor

Once again not much was accomplished yesterday. I laid the backer board down in the kitchen.


The plumbers appear to be making some progress though.


This is the knee wall in the attic space above the dining room that will become our laundry room.

Finishing up the sub-floor

Not much work got done yesterday. I put self leveling cement down on the new sub-floor.


Also the granite company came out to make a template for the counter-top.

Kitchen subfloor

Yesterday I installed the leveled subfloor for the kitchen.



You can see our new dishwasher in the second picture.

I also installed some more sheetrock and set up the pantry cabinet.

Kitchen cabinets

The kitchen cabinet install is coming along nicely. Today we hung the upper cabinet above where the hood vent will be and the 12" one next to it. We are still waiting on the 15" cabinet that goes to the left of the window and the upper wall oven cabinet.

We also installed all the shelves and hung the doors on all the upper cabinets.



The empty space above the corbels is where the hood vent will go. The wall oven cabinet will sit to the far right.

Sunroom windows finished

Yesterday afternoon I finished the sunroom windows. Just in time too, we're supposed to have 4 days of rain...

More sunroom windows

I got 3 more sunroom windows and the door frame installed yesterday evening.

Sunroom Windows

I worked on the sunroom windows yesterday afternoon and only got 2 more done. It's very slow going, First I have to build the casing for each window, every trim piece either has a miter or a bevel cut plus I'm having to cut about 3/4" off each side of each window. Once all the windows are installed I'll go back and remove them one by one to restore them properly.



I had to stop doing that and go upstairs into the attic above the kitchen and dining room to install a knee wall. The plumbers need the wall in place so they can install the water heater. Half of this attic space will become our laundry room.


The water heater will sit where the plumbing is in front of the new wall (A new door will be opened up to the left out of the picture). I only built this small portion of the wall because at the end of it the wall will break right about 3 feet before turning back. The knee wall at that point will only be about 3' high. This will give us more room in this space.

Kitchen cabinet installation

I'm learning some things as I go so sometimes I have to go back and correct some mistakes. One of them is the window sill for the sunroom, or the lack of one. I realized that I hadn't allowed room for one so I dropped the lower 2x4 cross braces down a few inches and installed a 2x6 sill. the sill is slanted downward 7 degrees to match the bottoms of the windows.


I've since installed one window but I stopped because I didn't have enough of the trim I needed.

I also installed the sub-floor in the upstairs bathroom. Hopefully we'll have a toilet soon...




I got the cabinet issue sorted out. Turns out that there are no 15" deep cabinets. You sandwich two 2x4's together behind the cabinet to bring it out 3". I had thought this might be the case but wanted to make sure.

With that issue resolved we were able to start hanging them again. We could not hang all of the uppers because of a few issues. We realized that the cabinet above the vent hood is too big. The cabinet maker will be building the vent hood to fit, with a 24" cabinet above it I think it will look too squat so we'll be replacing it with an 18" tall one. Second, the upper to the left of the window by the sink is too small. For some reason we got a 12" instead of a 15".

Once the uppers were done we began installing the base cabinets and quickly realized that the floor wasn't going to work. It was no where near level enough for the cabinets. So I removed all the base cabinets, removed the plywood base that I had put down for them, took a bunch of measurements, then cut a bunch of 2x4 shims and installed them. Then I laid the plywood base down on top of them.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of this but you can see the edge of it in some of the cabinet pictures below. I'm going to have to bring the rest of the floor up before I install the travertine now since I had to raise it over 1 1/2" in some areas.

The wall oven cabinet is not installed yet. The upper cabinet for it is the wrong size so I need to wait for the replacement.






We're hoping to get the rest of these issues fixed soon so we can finish the installation.

Finishing up the sun room framing

Since we cant do anything else with the kitchen until we get the correct cabinets I've turned my attention back to the sunroom. I still had some framing left to do.

First I had to remove the windows from the old sun room so I could measure them.



With the windows removed I could accurately measure the height so I would know where to install the headers.

Then I installed the headers.


and the rest of the framing for the roof.


and then the sheathing.

Hanging the cabinets

We began hanging the cabinets yesterday.


We only had 2 cabinets up before we noticed that they screwed our order up. We have 3 cabinets that sit 6" higher than the rest. These 3 have to be 15" instead of 12" to give the crown on the cabinets on either side something to butt up to. Well they gave us 12" cabinets. We checked the sheet and it has the 3 15" cabinets on them so we did order them. The problem is the cabinet people are now on vacation in Jamaica until next Friday.

Here are the 3 upper cabinets we got installed. The lower in the picture is just there for reference.

Since we cant do anything more with the cabinets we're going to turn our attention to other things this weekend.

Cabinets have arrived!

We've turned our attention back to the kitchen because our cabinets have arrived. On Wednesday I put down some self leveling cement on the sub-floor to seal the joints and level the floor.


Yesterday we worked on finishing up the sheetrock.



Here is a peek at our new cabinets.



I'm hoping to have them installed by the end of this weekend.

Sunroom roof

Yesterday afternoon I installed the tin roof on the sunroom.

First I put down felt.


Then I installed flashing.


And then the tin.



Next I need to finish the framing then get the windows installed.

Framing the sunroom

The last few days were spent framing the sunroom. In the last post I left off with cutting out the rotted areas of the floor. With that done I added new joists and put some floor jacks underneath them for support. The one on the outside corner is temporary, I will come back and add a brick pier in it's place later.


Then I added a double layer of plywood to the open areas to match the existing flooring. As was mentioned earlier, this will become the sub-floor.

Next came the framing of the sunroom.



The studs are 2 and 3 thick since I cant run them 16" on center. I still need to add the headers above the windows and a support stud above and below each window.

Speaking of windows we removed one from the old sunroom and trimmed it up to get an idea of how it will look.


I'll need to sand the frames, replace the missing pieces, reglaze, then paint all the windows.

The roof framing came next. I had originally intended to make this a hip roof but the pitch is so low that I dont think it would have looked right.




During this whole process I actually hired a helper to remove all the debris that was piling up everywhere. He did a great job. He completely filled the 40 yard dumpster within 2 days and almost filled the 30 yarder that replaced it. I've never hired anyone to do this before so it was really nice to not have to do it. I think I got a little spoiled.

He and I demoed the main bathroom walls and the walls in the side hall. You may remember that this side hall used to be the bathroom but it was originally a side hall.

Main bathroom

Side Hall

As you can see in the picture I found the original wainscoting beneath the tile walls. you can also see the 3" drain pipe in the wall on the right, the plumbers have been busy in the upstairs bathroom.




The side hall ceiling is 11' while most of the first floor is 10' (the kitchen and dining room are 11' also). To get the plumbing down from the bathroom upstairs the plumbers had to use that extra foot. I'm going to drop the ceiling in the hall to 10' and use beadboard to match it.


This afternoon I should be back out there to install the tin roof on the sunroom.