So now we’ve got a real deadline: Po-Po has decided that, in fact, she does want to move in here. We gave her a firm date of the end of September. We need to finish the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom by then!
Janeen’s parents came here both days last weekend, and they worked really hard. I also took a few days off work to get the kitchen moving faster.
I took down the cabinets to get wiring in for additional plugs and under cabinet lights. It was surprisingly quick to string the wires in and add the plugs. Had to cut some new holes into the tile, and big gashes into the wall…
Then John showed up and fixed all my messes. He patched in tile where I’d broken it out.
And taped and plastered over the holes in the walls. Meanwhile, Janeen and her mum worked with a wallpaper steamer that we’d rented to take all the old wallpaper and many layers of paint off the walls in the bedroom.
The photo below shows John and me getting perfectionist about the caulk on the edge of the old tile. The person who had put in the tile had failed to polish off the grout from the surface of the tile when they put it in, so the tile all had patches of grout; we scraped and chipped it off. They’d also used grout where they should have used a flexible caulk – at the interface between the counter top and the tile – so it had cracked; chipped that off too.
The photo below is of me plumbing the dishwasher drain hose into an “air gap”. Previously, it had been directly fed into the drain, but the air gap prevents water backing up in a blocked sink and emptying into the dish washer (a good thing, I’d say). Janeen and Judy had become pros with the steamer by now. I wish we’d known about this tool before.
Not content with a solid day of work, they came back for more punishment the next day. John caulked the gaps in all the wainscot boards and helped me put the cabinets back in. Janeen and Judy moved on to steaming the kitchen. The photo below right shows them installing plaster washers as a team. I think Judy thought her job (assembling the screw onto the washer) was too easy.
I went and hid down in the garage and put the final coat on the door that goes to our hallway. I think John thought the steamer looked like fun, so he took it and did a wall.
Below left you can see the mess we’ve got the kitchen into. Not quite finished steaming off the wallpaper here. We suspect that grease in the air has made the wall paper much more water resistant, so steaming in the kitchen went very slowly. The special scoring tool would cut right through the wallpaper and damage the plaster, so it wasn’t much help. Sanding the wallpaper helped a bit. Below right shows the kichen cabinets back up, and the new under cabinet lights on.
Here are a couple of photos of the old wallpaper in the kitchen.
