One Room Challenge: Week 5
/I think I knew this about two weeks ago- but there’s officially no way I can knock the rest of our kitchen out over the next week and actually complete our One Room Challenge. (But the good news is that you can still visit their site to see other rooms that are nearly complete) . Our floor installer stopped by yesterday to assess the situation since we’re still trying to remove adhesive from the floor. ROAR. Apparently, had we used a jackhammer, most of the adhesive would have come up with the tiles. (Oops.) So maybe our floor wouldn’t look like like this right now.
This is after SO. MUCH. SCRAPING and also LOTS of hand chiseling!
Initially, he said we’d need new plywood to lay on top of the existing glue-y plywood- but he poked around a bit and told us he could make do with the current situation and install on top of it anyways. PHEW. For the floors, we’re looking for something that’s relatively close to our existing floors since they lead into the kitchen area on three sides. Our floors now are white oak. I don’t like them at all- BUT, I also don’t want to redo the rest of the flooring in our house as we undertake the kitchen project. Thinking we’ll use a similar white oak but with larger planks. (The existing ones are 2 1/4” and definitely look and feel really dated!)
Marginally better? Certainly will be better than the tile!
We had (or thought we had!) a carpenter on the hook to build an island for us. But we haven’t actually heard from him in two weeks soon now I’m reassessing that and reaching out to another carpenter I’ve worked with and also investigating the prospect of doing an island using IKEA cabinets and fronts from Semihandmade. Not sure where that will lead.
I did settle on a quartz for the counters (and for the island). It’s this one:
However, in order to template for countertops, we have to have the island in place. And the countertop process with our fabricator takes about a week for them to come out and template and then potentially another week or two on top of that for them to be installed. Womp womp.
Our new light fixture for over the not-yet-built island is currently stuck in GA and I’m not sure when that will arrive. When it gets here, we’ll need an electrician to move the wiring in the ceiling because our old fan isn’t centered over where the island will be need to have an electrician wire up from the basement so we’ll have an outlet in the island and said electrician will also need to maybe help install the pendant over the sink since the old fluorescent light we took out was rigged up in a way that won’t support a pendant. But the good news, though, is that at least we aren’t dealing with this anymore.
That insane trim over the sink hiding a fluorescent light on a MOTION SENSOR.
I attempted to install several of the new cup pulls today. They’re an unlacquered brass from House of Antique Hardware and I LOVE the look and feel of them! When we moved in, I replaced our old knobs with cup pulls in some sort of weathered nickel finish BUT those pulls, as it turns out, are just ever so sliiiightly smaller than these new ones. (To make things as complicated as possible, the old holes are too large for the new screws). As a result, I need to drill out one of the two old holes (I’d patched the up for painting), fill it with wood filler, let that dry- and install the new pull with one screw in the modified hole. I actually knew this when I ordered them but had incorrectly assumed that I had enough wiggle room so the holes wouldn’t overlap!
Unlacquered brass pulls from House of Antique Hardware
Once the counters are in, we’ll still have the tile backsplash to install. We tried to remove a few tiles last week and it didn’t go well. So we thought that better/the correct tools for the job might be the key to our success. Picked up this little tool (a 3” bent scraper from Goldblatt) at at Floor and Decor this week while I was looking at flooring samples but it seems like it isn’t doing us any favors. Or rather, it does what it’s supposed to do but it feels like there’s no avoiding all of the plaster coming off and having to redo the drywall behind the counter!
3” bent scraper
Feels almost like I’m still on week one! AHHH! At least the One Room Challenge has me ATTEMPTING to make some headway on this.
