Manic Mechanic Wekiva's Kitchen Rennovation

Our Kitchen Rennovation To Our Home Of Twenty Years

This story is about our old new house in Wekiva Hills, near Wekiva Springs State Park and the Wekiva River. In particular, this is about our kitchen remodel. We accomplished this in a number of stages, which I will elaborate upon shortly. The formica countertops were chipped and worn out, but the main emphasis was the old, worn out, low quality, particle board cabinets that had seen better days. The leaks beneath the sink had prompted a previous replacement of its floor, and we had already replaced it as well.

The time had come to get rid of the worn out junk and replace it with better quality cabinetry and counters. But as I said, we would have to do this in stages. The kitchen wasn't tiny, but the 70's style "drop ceiling" just made it feel closed in and small. That would have to go, or at least, be moved back up to the original ceiling rafter height. But to do that, we would have to remove the wall cabinets first. Then once we had the ceiling moved, we could then replace the cabinets. Well, at least the wall cabinets. While we have the base cabinets out, we need to remove the old, square, generic, slippery as shit floor tile, then we can install the base cabinets and new floor tile.

The question then becomes do we tile beneath the cabinets, or, just set them in place and tile around them like before? Because we are impatient, we opt for the latter. I guess it's not so much impatient as eager to have a functional kitchen back as soon as possible. After all, we have to live here and bare concrete is definitely a huge dust and dirt generator. Not anywhere near as bad as having a gaping hole into the attic, where the ceiling used to be, open to all that nasty blown insulation. I think what wore on me the most about this particular remodel was 1) not having the time to do it myself, and 2) not getting what I asked for when paying someone else to do it for me. The latter was the worst part of it for me...

I don't want to start bitching about what wasn't done right or wasn't done to my liking... Well, actually, yes I do. But I'm not going to. It's not going to help with telling the story now, looking back years later. For most of this, I captured the "drama" as the story unfolded, so the details were fairly fresh in my mind. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to jump in and start doing and demolishing things before I remember to take before pictures, as is the case here. My before picture is one of Nick making a funny face with the view of the kitchen before in the background. You'll notice how close the ceiling looks to the top of the door frame and how small it feels. What is not captured by this picture is the recessed flourescent lighting fixtures and how much the entire structure is just wasted space.

It is somewhat ironic that as I write this primer, this lead in, this landing page for our kitchen remodel in Wekiva, we are currently in the midst of remodelling the kitchen here in Mount Dora. Somewhat more expeccted is once again, no before pictures, again with none other than Nick in the picture with the kitchen before in the background. For the lulz as the kids would say... The big difference is this time we are doing it ourselves, and this time the walls are plaster, not drywall. But I'll wait and let you read all about that once we're done with it. We were talking about our Wekiva kitchen remodel, not Mount Dora.

So the short version - we started the first stage in June of 2008 and had to stop until around Thanksgiving time. During that idle time in between, we were living out of the old wall cabinets, sitting on the floor around the breakfast nook. This was just inconvenient at first, but soon grew old. The ceiling was done, and it certainly opened up the kitchen like we wanted, but we were ready to be done with it. Part of the problem was deciding what cabinets we wanted. I say we... more like Ann deciding what cabinets she wanted. And there's nothing wrong with that. After all, it's her kitchen!

Once that was decided, our funds replenished, and they were on order, we picked back up with the next stage - getting the old cabinets out and the new ones installed. We couldn't really remove the old ones until the new ones arrived though - we still needed a functional kitchen. So when the new cabinets finally arrived, we were somewhat overwhelmed with cabinets everywhere, both old and new! During that time we also removed that old floor tile. What a mess! Bare concrete, with the walkways covered in cardboard, and dirt and dust everywhere... Once the cabinets around the stove were installed and we could see the beauty that would be our new kitchen, we just wanted to be done already.

With all the new cabinets in place we could have the countertop installers come out and make their templates. The way it works is no wall is perfectly straight and flat, so they make templates from thin plywood that follow the contours of the walls exactly, then take these back to the shop to create the countertops themselves to perfectly match your installation. But it takes about a week or so, and you have to schedule them to come back out to install them, so we needed to keep the old countertops in decent and usable condition until the new ones could be installed. If we wanted to have a functional kitchen while we waited that is.

So with the cabinets and countertops installed, all that remained was the floor tile, which I started just after Christmas and finished by New Year 2009. At first I thought I would just knock out the tile on Saturday and be able to grout by Sunday... Not even close! Working out the pattern took time as did laying it out to see how well it would fit. The pattern we chose made it difficult to lay down a large enough mortar bed to not skin over before setting the tiles. So Saturday turned into a couple Saturdays and a Sunday just to set the tiles, but once it was grouted, well... Wow. Just Wow.

The finished product was well worth the effort and all the headaches. Again, looking back, we may have done things a bit differently. The decisions made in the moment, with the time pressures more immediate and weighing heavily on one's judgement, are a different story. Do those things that weren't done the way I wanted still bother me? Yes. Does it matter when I'm admiring the beauty of our "new" kitchen? No. Perhaps others may learn a thing or two by reading this. Perhaps they would do things differently. But for me it's pretty much like the old Cary Grant flick, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House". So with that in mind, continue on to the rest of the story, as I captured it "In The Moment"...

The cabinets installed