At some point early in the process, our contractor stated to us that they had “never had a kitchen project take longer than three months.” We started on April 2. So on Monday, it will have been three months. I suspect they’re not quite gonna make it.
Last week I wrote about three significant work items before we can declare the kitchen done, namely the pantry door, the backsplash behind the stove, and the finish coat on the floor. This week, we saw partial progress on two of these three items: the pantry door is hung but its casing is not yet applied; and the tile backsplash has been set but not yet grouted. The floor finish is awaiting completion of the other two and of the baseboards. Oh, and we still have two cabinet doors that don’t have their knobs yet. We made some progress on all these areas this week, but we had hoped they would just be done. As I said last week, we can’t move into the kitchen for real until the floors are done (dust & smell). What’s worse, the stove is pulled out from the wall so the tiling can get done, so we’ve actually taken a step backwards in functionality. I don’t know what the holdup is, and it’s frustrating. The progress we’ve seen this week (on the kitchen, and on the sunroom) is good, and the end product is going to be exactly what we wanted, but it’s agonizing to be this close to done.
On the sunroom front, the three sliding glass doors went in this week, as well as the framing for the back stoop (holding off on decking until later; it’s just got plywood right now). And the lattice — vertical 1×3″ PVC matching the front porch — is installed on one of the three faces. I keep meaning to take a new picture of the outside; it’s too dark out now, but I’ll try to post a picture tomorrow.
The cedar shingles (siding) got patched in sufficiently this week to be worth my while to haul out the ladder and the other exterior painting supplies. The area around 2 of the three new kitchen windows is now house-colored again; there’s shingling work to be done around the third one still, and where the sunroom meets the existing house. I also painted what’s almost the last of the woodwork in the kitchen — there’s a short section of baseboard by the pantry door that still needs to go in, and the shelf in the coat closet; I’ll need to paint those too. But this weekend’s major accomplishment is that I manufactured the tabletop for our kitchen table out of a maple butcher-block blank that I had ordered some time back. I can’t recall if I’ve talked about this on the Remodel blog or not. The tabletop is currently in the basement, with a coat of polyurethane drying; I’ll try to post a picture of it tomorrow as well. I also installed a ball catch onto the top of the French doors betwen kitchen and dining room, onto the door that doesn’t have a doorknob. This door already has a pin that slides into a hole to keep it shut, but the ball catch is more convenient.
This coming week we certainly hope to see the official end of the kitchen project, though with the July 4th holiday in the middle of the week I’m preparing myself for the possibility it still won’t be done.