Friday, July 22, 2016

Kitchen Remodel.. the pilgrims have died.

One of the projects we knew we had to do (and by "we" I really mean "Matt") when we bought this house was the kitchen. The cabinets are great, the appliances need to be updated, the curtains need to be less old lady but the number one complaint was the pilgrim and windmill tile on the back splash.
I apologize that it isn't a close up, but it's bad. They were really bad and I wanted those suckers down and down immediately.

Also, anyone who knows Matt knows that he will not start a project unless I have damaged something to the point where it needs to now be fixed.
Which is how I got new counter tops and a new sink. Dammit if that red Kool-aid didn't spill everywhere.

I hate when that happens.

But the new counters and new sink look really nice and have been up for some time. The next phase of the project was going to be the back splash and Matt said it would be loud and messy. So much so that he kept putting it off until he "had time alone" so Penelope and I made that happen. The big kids went to my parents to spend the night for fun, Penelope and I went to run errands, and I left him a bunch of tile removing tools in the kitchen.

After all of these years of marriage, I've learned it's best to spring a project on him because if you give him the luxury of starting it himself, it will never get done. But while I was out and about, this is the text I got.

Worrisome, sure.
I ended up coming home because I wanted to see what was happening before he got too far in. This is what I saw and I immediately thought he was being a tad over dramatic.
Then he continued on and as it turns out, he wasn't joking. Chunks of wall were coming off because the sheet rock wasn't installed correctly.
In all, we had two major chunks of wall come off. Not the end of the world, but it obviously added more work to the job for Matt having to replace those sections.
The silver lining to chunks of wall falling off, especially near the outlets, is that Matt discovered none of the electrical in the kitchen is safe or done correctly. The people we bought the house from were do-it-yourself people with zero knowledge or experience. They relied on word of mouth on what to do and YouTube videos.

I don't think I have to really mention this, but if you have no idea what you are doing, JUST HIRE SOMEONE. Seriously. It's going to save you money in the long run and the next owners will not curse your name and wish terrible things on you.

Matt spent hours re-doing the electrical. And I'm not kidding. We had live wires touching wires in the wall, nothing was grounded. The guy thought he grounded things but no, it was either done completely wrong or the ground wire was just hanging out, not connected to anything. Matt used his light up plug thing to figure out what was wrong and every outlet had it's own issue. Nothing was even done the same way, which is bizarre. I won't even get into the absurdity or our breaker box. Absolutely nothing was wired to that box in any kind of planned fashion. For example, one outlet in the kitchen shares a breaker with a basement light, a front porch outlet, and half of Jackson's room upstairs on the other end of the house. Matt said if he took the sheet rock off the walls, we'd see an actual maze of wire crisscrossing the house in every direction.

The great news is that Matt actually does know what he's doing, so after spending hours in our walls the electrical in the kitchen is 100% safe. And done correctly. Which is really exciting because as it turns out, it's not normal for the garbage disposal to come on when you flip the task light above the sink on.

WONDERS.

The project this evening is to go to Home Depot and get the grout for the tile and whatever the stuff you put on the wall to make the tile stick to it. Once we get home Matt is going to tape and mud the drywall that he had to fix and my job then tomorrow (hopefully) is to sand. I'm not very good with much, but by god I can sand drywall! So I offered to do that while Penelope naps tomorrow and he's at work. Hopefully we can get tile installed next week? We'll see. Being that I'm on the verge of giving birth any day now who knows. We're just going to keep plugging along.

No comments: