renovation – The Writing Life of a Tadpole

A new addition to our family

December 4 2015

Wow, all those studies were right. Click-bait really does work! 🙂

You came here thinking I was talking about a kid, or a pet, weren’t you? How disappointed are you to know I’m talking about a refrigerator?

When I wrote the blog about the kitchen, I left out “my contribution” to the overall project. Most of the decisions were Andrea’s, including final floor colour, countertops (actually all three of us agreed on that one!), cupboard choices, design for drawers, choice of sink, etc. But from the beginning, I wanted a new fridge.

At night, when I go to make sandwiches for the next day, I was constantly moving three things out of the way to get to what I wanted, constantly shifting leftovers or vegetables to put the lunch containers back in, constantly dealing with the “tight” crunch of the fridge. Totally a first-world-problem, “I have too much stuff in my fridge”, but it was really annoying. We also didn’t have a great place to assemble the lunches, but that was a separate problem to fix with the flow and other stuff being improved with the reno.

So I wanted a larger fridge, or at least one with much improved flow to it.

I also was quite intrigued and interested in the ones that have the water hookups so you can get water, ice cubes, and crushed ice out of the doors. Some of the layouts are terrible, and the mechanical side of things often is painful as the extra features complicate what is pretty simple technology most of the time. But I love crushed ice drinks.

You might think I mean margaritas or something else alcoholic, but I mean things like a Mr. Misty or Arctic Rush or Slushie, although preferably without quite so much rich syrup. I really just like the ice, with water is fine even. I like eating the ice, it freezes my molar area that is often inflamed by my nightly grinding, and the cool nature also relaxes me. Plus it’s water, so counts towards more water per day and doesn’t add calories.

I checked out a bunch of designs, and some of them had water but not cubes or ice. Not sure what the point of that is as there’s a fountain at the sink right behind me, and it isn’t that cold of water. I wanted the crushed ice option, and even passed on a couple of models that only had cubes. I read Consumer Reports, I read reviews, I compared model after model, mostly eliminating ones that were problematic or didn’t have the features I wanted.

In the end, I chose a Samsung model. Now for the sticker shock — this fridge retails normally for $3600. Yep, for a fridge. My father is rolling in his grave somewhere, and my mom is working the rotisserie. Sure, it’s stainless steel which ups the price, but it is still just a fridge. Highly functional, great looking, lots of room, plus the whole ice thing, but still just a fridge. Given the price we were paying for the reno, I didn’t want to scrimp on the fridge as it was, I’m sorry to say, the part that I probably cared about the most after fixing the island with the sink. Fortunately, that fridge regularly goes on “sale” at $3200, and then goes on a real sale to $2200 once every three months. But still. It’s $2K for a fridge. My wife loves me, so we got it.

It was the cause of much angst for the builders. They had never dealt with one so large, I don’t think. They didn’t plan for it very well, even though they had the model, knew exactly what it looked like, but they just didn’t take the doors into account, a bunch of stuff really.

Was it worth it? It’s heaven. The bottom freezer is larger than our old one, and pretty functional. Not perfect, takes a bit of getting used to, but pretty good. Lots of space on the doors in the main part — doors as in plural. Yep, it’s the french door style, opens left and right. I still tend to open both most of the time, but occasionally I can get away with just one. We haven’t completely worked out where everything should go, but the vegetable drawer and meat / deli / eggs drawer are both much bigger than the old one. Not as functional for drink jugs, but workable. And it’s wider – the old one was 28″ wide, this one is a full 36″, and a bit taller. But the big addition is a separate drawer in the middle, as you can see in the picture below. It’s great…lots of room, including for putting lunches once they’re made, along with snacks and things to go with the lunches. It is designed as a separate “zone” — you can set it for a slightly warmer temperature than the fridge so you can keep snacks cool for parties, or keep it the same temp as the fridge, or two settings further to be able to keep fish cold too. We keep it at the same temp as the fridge, but nice to have options.

The fridge is awesome. I love it. I use the ice feature at least once or twice a day, and oddly enough, the cubes are small enough that I don’t even have to use the crushed ice option. I’ve increased my water intake too, which is good. We did NOT go with the option that included a video display unit that ran Android so that you could watch TV, play music, or leave messages for each other. A bridge too far, and was another $800 past the “regular” price. I agree that stainless steel wasn’t necessarily the best option, but they didn’t have it in white.

I give you the newest addition to the family, Will (as in William the Refrigerator Perry, this thing is massive).

Kitchen reno from heck: Summary

December 3 2015

So going back to the beginning, now that you have seen pics of the outcomes, what went wrong during the process to cause such stress? It wasn’t just one thing of course, it was a variety of factors.

Initial design delays — we started asking for design meetings in January, pressured them throughout Jan / Feb / March and didn’t get any official designs until June 15th. Of the nine versions, eight of them were unworkable, a waste of paper not to mention the time and effort they put into doing them. It took another 45 days, mostly waiting on them to get back to us with answers to some questions that should have been dealt with back in April or May, but delayed us into the summer. This meant August 1st before we had an actual design.
Overall start delays — we wanted the project to start in mid-July and, based on the two week estimate, to be mostly over by August 1st. They didn’t even plan to start until August 17th, changed it to the 24th, and were going to run into September at least.
Extreme build delays — While they promised us September 11th at the absolute latest, they didn’t even have all the cabinets in until then. They had told me they were “down a man” but that didn’t explain going from 2 weeks + 1 weeks grace to finish things to seven weeks and me having to threaten them to finish that week or we would hire alternate contractors. Each week I thought, “Okay, they’ll be done this week.” And then the weekend would come, and they weren’t much closer than the previous week. In a related issue, it wasn’t any “one thing” that was running them over for time. If drywall wouldn’t set, or the floor wouldn’t dry, or they were missing ceiling tiles, or the plumber ran off with the electrician’s wife, I could see a “trigger” that was causing delays. Instead, and tied to their slowness in doing the basement, this is just them — they vastly underestimate the time to complete the job, and then run late. I imagine most people forgive them delays because (a) they still show up to do the work and (b) it’s quality work. Or at least quality-ish. See more below.
The disruption — I mentioned earlier that this was partly our inexperience in doing this type of reno, but I thought naively that we would mostly be just disrupted in the kitchen. Nope. Kitchen, family room, living room, all of first floor, door to the patio, my garage was a long-term disaster. I even had to cancel a party planned for Andrea’s birthday and an astronomy outing because the work wasn’t done for the first one and the garage was so crowded, I couldn’t get to my astronomy equipment for the second. Each week, I wanted to rip them a new one, and they kept going longer, and longer, and longer still.
The errors — I didn’t talk about this much in the previous posts, but they made some fairly basic errors that had to be corrected, some minor, some major. I already talked about the pantry problem — they knew we wanted to put cupboards and an upright freezer in there, they measured everything, told us there was room, and then when it was built and the freezer put in there, it didn’t work at all. Like not even close to functional. Pure and simple, outright error. We had to choose between major refit to keep it there, or just move it back downstairs; we opted for expediency over design perfection. That was after I had to talk to them twice about the width of the door into the pantry and the need to make it big enough to accommodate the freezer. Again, they had the specs, they just failed to plan properly for the transfer. I caught it in time, but still. Equally, they completely screwed up on the fridge placement. They swore to me it could go against the right wall, which it couldn’t — the door has to swing 9 full inches past 90 degrees in order for the base drawers to pull out. They put it against the wall, and even the handle was hitting before 90 degrees. They wondered if we were willing to “live with it”; we said “No, rip out 9 inches of cupboard to the left, and by the way, this is your error and your expense to fix.” It wasn’t simple, it wasn’t pretty, it ended up with 9 inches of dead space on the right side (could have been a broom closet, but we already have that), might fix it later but for now it’s dead. But we insisted they do it. Of course that messed up the bulkheads, framing cupboards, counters that were already measured, etc. At the opposite end of the wall, they put a bottom cupboard (that was supposed to be double-doors with pull-out drawers) against the wall to the left. Great, except when you put a handle on the door, it banged against the wall, keeping it from going 90 degrees, and like with the refrigerator, the drawers wouldn’t pull all the way out. The cupboard had to be converted to being just exterior drawers. There were a number of other errors, but the only other big one was the china cabinet…because of a wrinkle in the design, they thought the cupboard was only 4″ deep. Again, I thought, “Who would build a china cabinet and not think 4″ was worthy of a WTF moment and a need to ask questions?” As with the fridge, we told them it had to be fixed. Note these are all separate from the 15 design errors they made when they repeatedly didn’t give us the larger sink we asked for from Day 1.

If we were design experts, maybe we would have caught some of those before they happened. On the other hand, as experienced contractors, they should have caught them before we ever did. I found it incredibly stressful, and this is likely considered by many to being a “good news example” of using contractors. However, as I said, at the end I had to threaten them with other contractors to finish it. They were supposed to be done, almost there, and then I got home expecting them to be done and found out nobody had come at all that day. They were at 99% done, so I finally lost it. Seven weeks for a two-week project, five weeks overdue, and they didn’t even show up to finish. Not once did they suggest coming earlier or staying later, or doing some of the work on the weekend. In the end, they finished it on the Friday (the day after my threat).

Honestly, I was worried about the final bill. I discussed it with Andrea, and I said I was basically willing to pay a little extra because we had tweaked a few things, but I wasn’t willing to go much beyond the original quote. When the bill arrived and it was $8K over what I was expecting, I just about lost it. I was ready to go to war at that point. Then, when I reviewed the bill, I realized that most of it was for the countertops that we had planned to pay for ourselves directly and instead they paid for them. The rest were substitutions and changes for things that hadn’t been included in the original charge (such as some lighting fixtures, etc.). All legitimate adjustments. So they charged exactly the quote plus the needed adjustments. We signed the cheque and showed them the door. And here is the awesome final product.

As they say in the funny pages, all’s well that ends well, or in this case, all’s well that, well, ends.

Kitchen reno from heck: Speciality areas

December 2 2015

There are three other areas that I wanted to talk about quickly, as they are part of the design and reno — the ceiling, the flooring, and some special cabinets.

For the ceiling, the main issue was the bulkhead over the island which matched the island layout but was basically useless to the regular design. Somewhat aesthetically pleasing, but had to exit for the new design. We cut it back considerably as you can see in the photos, and changed the lighting options. We didn’t know what we would find exactly when we opened it up, but there were no issues in the end.

For the flooring, we had considered a number of options. Some required a subfloor that would have meant a step up going into the kitchen, if only a few inches. So, no. Others would be cold, others would be hard, some would take some wear, some wouldn’t take much. Some were insanely expensive, others were not. Some were really popular but had tons of bad reviews after a few years. In the end we went with a vinyl-ish panel that goes down, sticks to the floor, and then has grout in between. It looks quite good. Our only real issue (other than figuring out WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE!) was the series of holes in the floor and “patching” them. There were holes where the ductwork went through in the walls; there were holes from earlier plumbing locations. In the end, it all got done, no real problems.

However, there is a small “drop”/groove in our floor in the middle of the prep part of the kitchen (just past the sink, before the fridge). The floor drops a cm or two over the space of a foot or two. If you think of it more like carpet, it’s like there’s a cord running under the rug boosting it up a bit, while in reality it’s just that the floor that was under the cupboards and behind the wall was just a bit lower before. Not entirely clear to me why, but it was there after they removed the wall, and short of adding in a sub-floor for part of the floor, it wasn’t an easy fix. My only real complaint was they didn’t really talk to us about it either, it was more that we found it after the fact and had to ask about it, before we decided to live with it. No real issue, just annoying. The other thing was that we expanded on the old kitchen and extended the flooring to the corner where the bathroom meets the family room, much roomier kitchen for walking space etc.

The last area I wanted to talk about quickly was some special shelving / cupboards that we had installed and they really turned out well in the end. First and foremost, we wanted a space for Andrea’s spice collection. She sells Epicure spices and that means a decently sized collection of spice jars. We used to have them in a cupboard with some “step shelves” in it, plus some just loose, plus two separate spots on counters, etc. We wanted them all together, highly accessible, well-organized. In short, we either wanted shelves or actual cupboards. We went with cupboards in the end. Room in one for six shelves, room in the other for 7 (different size jars). By about 18″ to 2′ wide. Lots of space. Turned out great. Interestingly, at one point, we were worrying about cost and asked about things that we could scale back — turned out one of their designs that wasn’t broken out in detail included $1000 for EACH of two cupboards. We scaled those back fast. And while they work great, the design isn’t perfect. The one door bangs into the other cupboard a bit when open, would have preferred it go all the way to 90 degrees, but easily livable.

The second area was in response to our lost china cabinet. We added lots of room for shelving on the front of the island, but behind one of the spice cupboards was an 8″ space we could use for our china stuff. We added some drawers nearby for things like placemats, but we added shelves and glass doors going up. It turned out great — in the end. During the implementation, they mis-read the blueprint and the first version had the shelves only 4″ deep. Honestly, who would make a china cabinet 4″ deep and not think, “WTF?”. Apparently they would. We had to have them redo it. There’s even a counter shelf that is open for some stuff to sit on too, looks fabulous. Interior lighting, not super expensive. The cabinet was definitely an “add-on”, but worth it.

Kitchen reno from heck: Dining room area

November 29 2015

Before we started the reno, we had a dining room of sorts. Essentially, when you came into the front of the house, there was a small foyer, and then you went up two steps to a big room that was one-half living room and one-half dining room. It was configured as such, but we never used the dining room, for a couple of reasons.

First, we like having our table in the big kitchen. All together, easy to move from one to the other. It’s also how I grew up, one big kitchen, and while I’m not against a dining room, I don’t mind the kitchen and eating area being one.

Second, we didn’t like the location of the dining room. If you were eating, you would feel a lot like you were almost at the front door, particularly if anyone came by and knocked. Sure, lots of people say, “Oh, eat in the kitchen when it is just you, but use the dining room when you have guests.” But, then I’m just using the dining room on the rare occasions when we have guests? Plus, hello, would you eat dinner on your front porch? There was no separation from the living room or the foyer, so it just felt too close to the front of the house, too exposed.

So the dining room was dead space. We had an idea to make it into a gaming area, i.e. with a table for board games and some shelving, but we hadn’t ever gotten that far in our plans yet. We had a coffee table sitting there that Jacob used for Lego, and a big china cabinet that we really liked but was pretty big for our needs. Early on in the planning, I was worried with the initial redesign that we wouldn’t have enough cupboard space, and I was wondering if we could blow out the wall in between the kitchen and the dining room and just enlarge the kitchen another couple of feet. Seemed doable, and got us thinking along those lines.

However, that wall has a LOT of ducts running through it, some pipes, etc. All movable to some extent but it’s also load-bearing. We could have worked around it, but that would have necessitated a lot more cost and some changes in the basement config we had already done (one option was to MOVE THE FURNACE!!!), so we eventually took that off the list. They finally agreed that they could open up the wall somewhat, enough for a door. Which eventually got us thinking about a walk-in pantry.

This was a pretty attractive idea, and while we debated if we actually needed it or not, we never doubted that it was highly desirable. In the end, the cost differential with and without was minimal in the grand scheme of things, so we started factoring it in. Then we had a small brainwave — what if we moved our upright freezer from the basement and put it in the pantry. The idea blew our minds. The convenience would be AWESOME. I had almost convinced Andrea that we could afford a big honking new fridge (one of my main complaints in the old kitchen was not so much flow as the limitations within the fridge and lack of adequate prep area for making lunches each night). The new fridge had more interior space, ice and water, a separate deli tray with separate temperature control (to change it from cooling snacks for a party to being same as your fridge or even keeping fish fresh), and a decently-sized bottom freezer. More space than we had in the old fridge’s freezer, but moving the full freezer to the pantry? Genius.

So we blew out part of the wall to make a door, had them put in some cupboards, left room for the fridge, and added a broom closet. That doesn’t sound that exciting, a broom closet, but when you have no place on the first floor to even keep a broom, a broom closet can be VERY exciting. Trust me, I saw the excitement, even if I didn’t feel it. Of course, adding a pantry ate into the dining room space, and we got rid of the china cabinet (replacing it in part with a new built in one). It also gave us a small nook to put the aquarium in, and add some open shelving to put some candles on, etc. All good options. Shortens the big room, or alternatively, enlarges the living room. Much more functional use of the space.

Only one problem. The idiots designing the pantry didn’t take into account the size of the freezer, swing space for the door, depth of the cupboards and swing space of those doors. Seriously, I’m not kidding. They built it, and even before they put the cupboards in, it seemed a little small. Plenty wide, but depth seemed low. They knew the exact dimensions of the freezer, including even which way it opened (it isn’t a reversible one). They get it all built (I had to warn them repeatedly about the width of the door to get the freezer even into the room), put the freezer in it, and it doesn’t fit. I mean, I came home that night and it was ridiculous, not even CLOSE to fitting.

If you pushed the freezer right into the corner, and turned 90 degrees, the door would open and hit the wall before it cleared enough to get into it. If you pulled it out from the wall far enough, it crowded the cupboards. If you turned it to face the cupboards (which is the solution they had gone with, and left it with us to see if we could “live with it”), there was about 8-10 inches to open the door. Which would mean the basket wouldn’t come out either. Plus, even the doors on the cupboards didn’t really open properly if the freezer was there. There was no excuse for this error, they had the full dimensions of the freezer, and the cupboards, and we even asked if the room needed to be bigger — another foot or two into the dining room would have made very little difference to us, but no, they assured us everything would fit.

So, with a messed up pantry, we had a few options:

Move the freezer back downstairs;
Squeeze the freezer into the corner of the unit and deal with the incredible tightness, lowering the functionality and convenience considerably, plus upping the regular annoyance factor, and requiring the doors come off one section of the cupboards too so the shelves would be accessible;
Ripping out part of the cupboards (losing close to 40% of our cupboard space) to force-fit the freezer into one of the corners; or,
Ripping it all out and moving the wall back another two feet or so.

None of the options were palatable. If they hadn’t taken six weeks to get to that stage, and they weren’t even done yet, I might have said, “Sorry, your error, you move the wall so it fits”, but that would have added at least another week to the project as well as spread dust everywhere, etc. We weren’t willing to do anything that would be setting us back that far in the process, and we didn’t want to lose the cupboard space. We can always do that at some point if we want to, or put in a small chest freezer, but in the end, the simplest solution was just to move the freezer back downstairs. They ended up having to take the freezer back downstairs again, the third time they had to empty the freezer to move everything (they tried once, early on, got it emptied but then couldn’t get the door off…it has special locking bolts built in, so they put everything back in until they got the right tool).

And it has been okay…we ended up with a fairly roomy walk-in pantry. Andrea tells me there’s a door there, and I saw it when it was put in, but normally we just leave it open (she shut it for a party recently). We haven’t organized it yet, at least not to my satisfaction (I want more space for extra food more than just all our extra food equipment), but it’s completely workable for now. I’m waiting until the new year when Andrea will be done her schoolwork, and we will have some time to decompress a bit with it.

Kitchen reno from heck: Island area

November 29 2015

The other big element of our design was to fix our lousy island. It had a bend in it, which you can see better in the photos below, and the sink wasn’t to our liking either. Mostly though, it was just part and parcel of bad flow in the kitchen.

It took 4 weeks to get a working countertop and our sink back in action. Andrea spent a lot of time doing dishes in the laundry room by hand in a little plastic tub we have for dishes when camping, and then dumping it out in the basement, so she was pretty happy to have the sink back in the rotation. The new working counter helped me for prep for food too, for lunches, but her inconvenience was way above mine.

The Writing Life of a Tadpole

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Tag Archives: renovation

A new addition to our family

Kitchen reno from heck: Summary

Kitchen reno from heck: Speciality areas

Kitchen reno from heck: Dining room area

Kitchen reno from heck: Island area