a kitchen transformation

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it’s been a very bittleston couple of weeks. misha and aja were visiting. (left) on thursday reirin picked leonora and evamarie up from the airport on their way home from panama; they stopped by for a short visit. (right) misha gets a big hug from leo.

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on saturday i painted pink plaster weld on the long kitchen wall and sanded the cabinet doors and gave them another coat of paint. i can’t remember what mathew worked on that day… electrical stuff? but i did get photos of him as he discovered the joys of chipping paint off the kitchen wall. suddenly he understood why i couldn’t stop chipping away at the bedroom walls.

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on sunday my parents came over to help. (left) my dad removed the wallpaper above the cabinets while my mom (right) painted primer on the wall and i painted pink plaster weld  on another wall.

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it’s been a while since we’ve all worked in one room together. mathew thought it was funny that my dad was telling jokes all day. (left) the long kitchen wall before plaster. (right) mathew begins the plaster.

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(left) next my dad worked on removing the wall paper on the ceiling at the entrance to the kitchen. (right) my mom and i re-attached the cabinet doors then drilled holes for the new handles.

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(left) mathew tried to get away with only one coat of plaster but realized there’s a reason for the two coats.

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(left) later that night i applied plaster washers and mesh fiber tape were my dad had removed the wall paper, it is now ready for plaster. (right) the cabinets with their new handles.

a colorful weekend

last weekend was labor day weekend. and how did we celebrate? with a house full of people and plenty of labor!

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saturday morning started with quiet picture rail filling and trim masking.

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(left) then the plastic door went up and mathew started painting the walls. (right) mathew’s brother misha is visiting from new york! he put his clothes on inside out and helped with painting.

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(left) i spent the entire day painting kitchen cabinet doors in the garage. when the sprayer noise finally stopped i ventured upstairs for a peek. i was shocked by how pink just the reflection of the wall color was. and when i walked into the room it was PINK. it’s actually darker than the photo (if you can believe it.) my grandmother loves pink. last year we painted the living room a very pale “i love you” pink. the plan was to paint her bedroom a slightly darker “valentine’s day” pink, but for some (insane) reason we decided to be bold and paint two walls “pretty pink.” my parents say that my grandmother painted a house this color years ago… we hope she likes it..!

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misha’s friend aja is also staying with us and she’s a personal chef! so, you guessed it, we’ve been eating yummy food. we appreciate her sunny presence and patience while misha helps us and we work late into the night.

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on sunday my parents arrived. my mom was raving about the new cabinet color and wondering if they needed sunglasses in the pink room.

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(left) my dad sanding the wood surface in the built in hall cabinet. (right) mathew priming the picture rails.

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(left) while laughing uncontrollably i took this photo of my mom, amazed at her dedication to the project. i certainly hope no one will ever lie down and check to see if the underside of the swivel cabinet door is painted, but if they do, they will be impressed. (right) painting the cabinet doors with a roller and latex paint (instead of oil paint and a brush) makes the project fly by! i even felt a little guilty for keeping this fun and easy project all to myself.

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(left) my dad admiring our new porch lamp. (right) here i am painting my “sistine cabinet.” it was now my mom’s turn to laugh at me.

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(left) misha, back with inside-out clothing to give the cabinets a second coat. (right) mathew cleaning the shower tile, prepping it for grout sealer. another late night.

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(left) monday morning. my mom, up a ladder painting picture rails with semi-gloss. (right) my dad touching up trim paint while enjoying a cool breeze.

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(left) mathew and my mom attaching the bathroom vanity door after it has been painted. (right) misha and mathew carefully moving the (HEAVY) glass shower walls and door up from the garage.

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(left) my mom chipping away at thick ugly grout where it shouldn’t have been. (right) here i am continuing the painting of the picture rails where my mom left off.

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(left) misha installing the window hardware. (right) mathew and the completed shower enclosure. it was another late night. i was in the garage giving the cabinet doors a second coat and then stripping paint off the bathroom door. for the first time in the two years since we’ve been working on this house, mathew came down to tell me he was done for the night while i continued working.

i hope everyone had a nice long labor day weekend!

another busy weekend

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my mom was painting. my dad was filling and painting.

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mathew was stripping trim, prepping for paint and i was up on my ladder finishing the picture rail prep.

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filling. sanding.

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sanding. sanding. sanding.

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painting. painting.

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before paint.

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(left) mathew sealing himself into the room with the paint sprayer. it’s a smelly noisy process but so much faster than brushes and rollers. mathew sprayed the entire room with primer and the following day he sprayed the trim with semi gloss paint. (right) after paint.

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as nice as the trim looks in natural wood, it would take a lot more time to prep and polyurethane it to make it look really nice. so everything is white again, but this time it’s clean and smooth and lead-free.

to strip, or not to strip

last weekend more quality time was spent with the rented wallpaper steamer. we were determined to remove the remaining stubborn wallpaper in the kitchen. some people wondered, “why not paint over it?” “why not just tear out all the plaster and replace with gypboard?”

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1) painting over the wallpaper was what had been done by previous owners and in most places the paint just didn’t stick well and chipped off easily in large sheets. plus from the way it had browned and aged, we’re guessing the adhesives were not archival and would probably show through the paint over time. 2) and as with the rest of this remodel/restoration project, being as environmentally conscious and keeping as much out of landfill as possible was a big concern. tearing out plaster from all the rooms would require a large dumpster. removing old paint and wallpaper, produces just a few small garbage bins worth of waste. and the old plaster is so much more beautiful and durable than gypboard!

(above left) mathew is removing the door frame for the door that was removed and blocked off leading from the kitchen to the bathroom. (above right) after the trim and wallpaper has been removed.

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when the kitchen was almost done i realized “coffee and a kick in the pants” had gotten damaged. all that remained on the wall was “kick in the pants”, “coffee” had somehow gone missing! it’s silly that we got so upset, but it was a clipping given to us by mathew’s brother misha, and it has been with us for 10-12 years! i eventually found “coffee”, it was trying to blend in with the discarded wallpaper on the floor.

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around 8pm on sunday night mathew decided we should tackle the second entry/hallway. his only experience with wallpaper removal had been the kitchen and that WASN’T fun. the paint and wallpaper in this hallway flew/melted off the wall and mathew understood what my experience with my mom had been removing wallpaper in the bedroom. the plaster on this wall was in fairly good condition with only a few cracks. it looked like the previous owners had used some sort of red stain/paint on the bare plaster.

next mathew decided we should work on the opposite wall (not shown.) this did not go as smoothly and when removing the top layers the smell of mold surfaced. basically we were trying to remove paint and wallpaper from moldy gypboard and eventually decided to just replace the gypboard.

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and in my free time i knit.

help!

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.

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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…

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Then John showed up and fixed all my messes. He patched in tile where I’d broken it out.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here are a couple of photos of the old wallpaper in the kitchen.

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