Kitchen redux

The remodel of the kitchen is finally and visibly underway.  We really started several weeks ago with planning and design with Kim Annable, and Jeff Wooster has been building our cabinets in his workshop.  Kim also scraped all the old nasty finish off the pantry; with a new, flat finish, the beautiful cherry wood is really going to glow.  And we picked out new Thermador appliances several weeks ago from Home Appliance:  gas cooktop, electric convection oven, microwave, and warming drawer.

This is how the kitchen looked up to yesterday evening.  Kind of sad that our "before" pictures were our "after" pictures less than a year ago.  We didn't think we'd need to remodel so soon...this picture of Sunny and me was taken just last January and I can see I have my construction clothes on.

But yesterday we emptied all of the cabinets and today Brian and Christopher began demolition.  It's a big mess and has entailed removing the dishwasher, range, and microwave, so no more cooking for awhile.

 Demolition will continue for another couple of days, then the new cabinets and cabinet doors will be installed on Thursday.  On Friday we should be able to get Brian from Solid Source to come out and template our granite countertops.  I think the new appliances will be installed on the 12th but we should be able to use the old ones until then once demolition is done. 

Choosing the granite was a process in and of itself.  We were sent to Mont Granite to choose from I don't know how many colors of granite; I had no idea there was such an amazing diversity.  We finally narrowed it down to four then made our final decision on Saturday.  This is what we chose:

It's called "Fire Bordeaux" - is it gorgeous or what?   I'd like to take a piece of whatever's left over and put it on a wall somewhere.

Demolition derby

From Feb. 20 to 29 the focus was on tearing down.  Dom and I moved upstairs to the third floor apartment where there is a full bath, if the shower leaves something to be desired, in addition to bed space and lots of closet space.  We moved Sunny up there, too, to get her away from the dust as much as possible.

The pictures speak for themselves:

Totally gutted

The upstairs is transformed.  Most of the walls are down, all the fixtures are gone.  It would seem that there's plenty of room for 3 bathrooms!  Still more to do but it appears that most of the demolition is done.  We have discussed our thoughts for exposing some of the brick and wood structure with Kim and Josh.  Kim thinks it's feasible; Josh is mulling it over and will let us know what he thinks.  I like the idea of seeing the 130-year-old "bones" of the house, and would consider tearing out the dry wall in the larger guest room to expose the brick there as well.

Had a long discussion with Kim about the kitchen and have asked her to draw up a set of plans based on our joint ideas.  An island might be a good solution for some of the issues we have.  Plus we need to replace the long window and rearrange some of the appliances.  We noticed, for the first time, that the sliding door to the outside was put in backwards (on purpose), so that the screen is on the inside.  We'll probably want to turn that around.  So maybe we'll just stick with Kim and not have to wait a month.

I did send an inquiry to the Cleveland design firm yesterday but I haven't heard anything back from them.  Not very responsive.