Grout & Thanksgiving…

The appliances have only been a minor nuisance to this point.  Just something to throw a towel or two over when there’s going to be a lot of dust, but easy enough to slide out-of-the-way when necessary.  Well that’s not the case anymore.  Those big ol expensive travertine tiles are pretty soft, and the last thing I want to do is slide a range around over em.  Now I’m pretty confident in my tile job to this point, but I cringe every time the fridge has to be rolled around.  My nerves are shot after moving it.  Every muscle in my body is tensed up, just waiting for the sharp “CRACK” made by one of my tiles as it creates more work for me.  This rant is just for me to basically say I only got one-half of the kitchen grouted this weekend.  Actually it’s sealed too, and ready to have the appliances slid on over so I can get to the other half.  However Thanksgiving is coming and we’re heading out-of-town Saturday, and won’t be back till the following Sunday, so there’s no reason to rush things (BTW: no update next week).

Lemme start off by saying that I found grouting kinda fun.  It was easy.  Yes it took a bit of a touch to get things right, but nothing that you couldn’t learn from watching a couple videos on the computer.  I’d almost say it was therapeutic. Especially after the mini-strugle that I went through with the tile.  And I have to say -it looks pretty dang good!  Once again, I’d hoped to have some action shots of the work in progress, but my photographer took off with all the kids.   I was left all alone…  Productive, but alone.

Also, I got some primer on the stucco.  Man, it takes a lot of paint to cover raw stucco!  I also got the patio cover back on the house.  No more temporary wall holding it up.  It’s a small thing in the big picture, but it feels good to get it out-of-the-way.  Sorry, no pics of that.

You can't see it, but it is "lookin good!"

Tile is down…

It took longer, was a lot more messy, and didn’t turn out as perfect as I expected, but it’s done.  Or I should say the tile is on the floor.  We still gotta grout, but the tile saw is cleaned up and ready to go back in the box (thanks to my brother-in-law Rudy for the use of that nice tool).  The tile is laid out pretty darn straight.  The tiles are pretty flat (for the most part), and things look pretty good.  Of course, like all my projects, every teeny tiny flaw is magnified to me 100X, but almost anyone but the most critical viewer will see nothing but a nice looking tile floor.  I’d hoped to get more pictures of the work in progress and maybe even a video or two, but no luck.  I was too wrapped up in getting that mortar down before it dried, to take the time for that kind of stuff -sorry.

I got faster this second weekend, and if it hadn’t been for Maria and I having to go to my daughter’s school’s auction fundraiser that evening, I’m pretty sure I could have finished the tile on Saturday.  Instead, I had a couple hours of work to do on Sunday.  Now that wouldn’t have been that bad,  but I was a little hung over after the previous nights party (I’m a bit of a lightweight), and that made the work a little tougher than it should have been.  However we did manage to win couple Sharks tickets and a night at a local hotel at the auction -well worth the headache the next morning.

Actually, the worst part about the whole tile job (at least on my nerves) was rolling the fridge onto the part of the floor that I’d laid tile down earlier in the week.  I went as far as throwing down a thin little 1/4″ thick sheet of plywood, with a couple towels under that (I was afraid of scratches).  That fridge is fricken heavy!  I could hear the plywood splintering under its wheels as I rolled it around.  The towels made it really uneven under the plywood -maybe not the best idea.  No busted tiles, but plenty of frayed nerves on my part.

By the way.  It looks like we could have gotten by without buying that extra tile.  It looks like we pretty much had zero waste, and we’ve got a couple boxes of tile left over.  Not a bad thing if we ever need to replace a tile or two.  I gotta tell ya, tiling before installing the cabinets was the right thing to do.  I probably ended up cutting less than 10 tiles in all by the end.  Not having to cut around all the cabinet kicks was a huge time saver.  Now it’s obvious why everyone says “tile before cabinets.”

I’m sealing the tile tonight and tomorrow in prep for the grouting.  I’m a little tired of crawling around on my knees, but it’s a part of the job that needs to be done, and the sooner the better.    Here’s the latest picture of the other half of the kitchen with tile on it.

 

Tile on the floor... Check!

 

 

 

Tile Begins…

I’ll start off by saying that I am not a “tile guy” by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m slow and am having a tough time getting these tiles right.  It’s not going to be a perfect tile job, but I’m hoping it looks good when I’m done -So far I’m not too disappointed.

I started Thursday.  We layed out the locations of all the base cabinets and the range, and the fridge.  I then got going on getting the Ditra down.  The Ditra is adhered to the plywood with a thin coat of modified mortar.  The instructional video that I got from the tile store said the mortar should be a little on the loose side.  Well apparently my “loose” wasn’t as loose as they expected.  After checking how well the Ditra was adhering to the mortar, I was almost ready to pull/scrape everything up and start again, but I used a short 2×4 to squeegee the Ditra into the mortar a little better and things looked acceptable.  The second batch of mortar I mixed was down-right runny.  Apparently it was perfect.  Much better adhesion.

A utility knife is all you need to cut the stuff. BTW: Ditra looks soft, but it really hurts the knees!

Next a small notch trowel to lay your "runny" mortar...

First row is squeegeed down and done. Rows are a couple inches shy of four feet...

Finished with the Ditra...

Now it doesn’t say anything about putting appliances on the Ditra after installation, but it’s a little crushable, so some plywood did the trick.  Note to self:  refrigerators are heavy.  Get help next time.  After installing this stuff, I gotta say I’m sold.  I’ve done lots of cement board, and this stuff is easier to work with hands-down.  It’s light, easy to cut, clean, and goes down easy once you’ve figured out how to do it.  I’d use it again if this stuff works as advertised, and it’s appropriate for my next tile fiasco.

The next day I had to re-layout all the cabinet outlines so they’d show on top of the Ditra.  Then we snapped a chalk line for the first row of tile.  The room turned out to be pretty square, so no fudging was needed (thank goodness).  It still took quite a bit of time before I set the first tile.  Now my first batch of unmodified mortart was too loose.  It was much stiffer than my batches of Ditra mortar, but apparently it wasn’t stiff enough.   That first row of tile was sitting pretty low in comparison to my later rows when I got the mix correct.  Unfortunately I didn’t realize this until too late.  When this job is done, I may end up busting out a few of those tiles in the first row and getting their height right, but that’s a battle for another day.

Finally! The first row of travertine...

Now the next batch of mortar was a good one, and I squished them in pretty far, and they matched up pretty good, but not perfect all the way across.  However the grout lines looked good.  No problems with straightness or gap width.  I was using a 1/2″ notched trowel, which gave me a lot of flex in tile height.  However next time I might drop down a size.  That’s a freakin lot of mortar to throw down, and I’m burning through my mix at twice the rate I expected.  By the way:  Back buttering the tile is the way to go on big tiles like this.  I forgot to butter one, and pulled it up pretty easy to get it right before re-setting it.  A back buttered tile is a lot harder to pull up.  In fact I had to physically pry up the one or two that needed a little more mortar under them.

Now by the end of the day, I’d only used one bag of mortar, and I’d laid about 1/2 the tile I had expected to at this point, but things weren’t looking too bad.

Day one. Estimate is it took me 10 minutes per tile... Amazing!

Day two starts off pretty good.  Maria has sorted out a couple “unacceptable” tiles.  They’ll go under the appliances and cabinets.  She heads out to get two more bags of mortar and a couple more tiles since we’ll be needing more to partially tile under the cabinets (did I mention how fast I was using mortar?).  I get my first half bag of mortar mixed and away I go.  I’m making good progress when I get the phone call.  Maria has locked her keys in the car and she’s blocking the loading ramp at the tile place.  I use the last of the mortar, do a quick hose down of my tools, and load the kids (still in their jammies) into the car and away we head to San Jose.  Luckily the tile place wasn’t too far away, and since it was almost lunch time by then anyways, McDonald’s was the next stop.  Yeah, it killed a good part of my day, but it turned out OK in the end.

Back at home I mixed the second half of the mortar and laid out a couple more tiles.  It was after 4:00 by then, and that was the end of my workday -Halloween mania was overtaking the kids and there was no denying them.  Now I had planned on tiling the entire room this weekend, but after thinking it through, half of the kitchen was all that I really wanted to get covered.  There was not a chance that I was going to roll my monster fridge on that tile after only 24 hours -plywood between it and the new tile or not.  So the fact that less than half the kitchen is done at this point is almost a good thing.

Enough for now. Will finish (hopefully) next weekend...

 

Happy Halloween!

Now I didn’t mention this, but before I’d started the tile work, I had a feeling that the clearance for the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen might not clear the new tile, but I was pretty confident that the garage door wouldn’t have a problem -well they both had “problems”.  The swinging door came out pretty easily, and shouldn’t be too hard to plane down in size a little, but the garage door wasn’t so easy.  Since it’s an exterior door, and I’d replaced it maybe two years ago, it’s one of those metal clad ones.  There’s no way to shave this thing down.  So I had to actually pull the door out of the wall.  Fur the bottom of it up as much as I could (3/8″) and then squeeze it back into the opening.  It doesn’t clear the tile by as much as I’d like (enough to say put a rug down), but it’ll do.  Raising it any higher would require some major work on my part that I’m not willing to do at this point in time.

And I almost forgot to mention that the fact that the stucco is done!  I’m happy with the job.  It looks good, and it’s just one more thing I don’t have to worry about any more.

Stucco -Done!

Terrible picture, but it looks good in real life...

Scratch Coats and Plywood…

I finally got around to calling my stucco guy Antonio (unknown last name), and told him that we passed inspection.  He said great and that he’d be out the following day.  Well his guys showed up and here’s what they left.

Scratch coat around the kitchen window...

Scratch coat covering old window on the side of the house...

So this is impressive eh?  Well, I had nothing to do with this.  I spent the weekend “touching-up” my taping job.  Basically it’s become almost a plaster job at this point.  Every time the light hits it a different way, I see more stuff that needs a little more mud.  However after way too much time, I think I’m pretty much done.  I went as far as digging out two partially emptied cans of primer from the garage to roll on the portions of the walls and ceilings that won’t be covered with cabinets.  And I have to say, it don’t look too bad.

The other thing I did was put down some 1/2″ plywood on the floors.  Given the big 12″ travertine tiles we have, I’m afraid of them cracking.  So I’m trying to reinforce the subfloor by securing the plywood with liquid nails and 2″ screws.  Lots of screws!  I’m really hoping this will do the trick.

Looks a lot cleaner eh?

Now my plan was to now tile the entire kitchen from wall to wall.  Straightforward and easy, but things aren’t working out quite as I had planned.  We counted up our stacks of tiles in the backyard.  We have enough to tile around the cabinets, but not under them!  I guess I was thinking that my labor is cheap, and why should we tile somewhere where we’d never see it!  So we’ve got a big decision to make.  Finish the cabinets in the garage (as planned) and then install them.  Or, since there’s no tile to worry about, install them and then finish them on the walls.  Either way, this is a way bigger step than what I thought I’d be doing this coming weekend (tiling).  I was taking Thursday/Friday off this coming week to get the tile done, but now it’s up in the air as to what I’ll be doing.  I’ll let you know when I figure it out…

Another inspection…

As you can see from this picture, I guess I wasn’t quite done with the sheetrock.  I was running the water in the sink when I noticed all the water splashing up on all my nice new sheetrock.  That rang a little bell in my head.  I should have put in some of that water resistant rock.  Crap!  Well I was taking a sick day on Tuesday, when I decided that I wasn’t “that” sick, and I needed to go get the sheetrock finished up.  Well it was raining on Tuesday. Actually the word raining is not adequate to describe the weather that day, but I headed down to the hardware store hoping for a break in the rain as I came out.  Well there wasn’t a break, and I got soaked in the few minutes it took walk across the parking lot and load the stuff.  By the way, “water resistant rock” is not water resistant.  As I was loading that stuff in the car, the rock was nearly crumbling in my hands.  If you have a real wet location -don’t use this stuff, but I’m hoping covering it with tile, grout, mortar, and a little caulking will make it a good material for my backsplash.

I worked an evening or two and got everything done, and called for an inspection on Friday.  Craig was only at our place for maybe five minutes.  He walked into the kitchen, looked around, and scribbled his initials on our inspection card.  It was that easy!  By Friday evening around dinner time, we had our first layer of mud on the walls.   Not a pretty job, but it was done.

Friday evening I started taping and putting on the first layer of mud.  I bought a good sized box of general purpose taping compound, and used maybe a third of it.  Saturday I did a quick sand and put up the second layer of mud.  This time it took probably twice as long and I used twice as much mud.  I actually used up the entire box and had to head back to Home Depot to pick up a box of topping mud.  Sunday morning I sanded some more and put up a third layer of mud.  This one used less mud than the other two.  It looks pretty good, but I’ll need to do some serious sanding this week, and do a little touch-up.  I’m not bad at taping, but I could use some practice.

That purple stuff is the "water resistant" rock.

Here's the first layer of mud.

Two layers of mud. I'd stop here if I was any good at this...

Third and final (for the most part) layer of mud

A little dusty after sanding...

Sheetrock…

I’m done sheetrocking.  Well almost done.  I might need to go pick up another sheet (no small task), just to get a couple finished edges for finishing out around the window, but other than that, I’m done.  Things went pretty well.  Like I said, I ran a little short on materials, but it was nice to just tear though a job for once. Assuming that we pass the nailing inspection, I’ll start taping this week/weekend.  I’m not the best taper in the world, and this part of the job will probably take longer than it should.  Let’s just say there will be a lot of sanding going on in the kitchen over the next week or two.

Now my next big decision will be what to do with the subfloor/underlayment for the tile.  I’m doing lots of research and I have lots of questions right now, but I hope things become clearer as we get closer to the day when I’ll have to buy/pick-up the materials for that part of this project.

Here are a couple pictures…

Got enough outlets???

A couple patches...

Ran outta rock. Lots of joints to tape. (Too many)

The First Contractor…

Enter Antonio…

Antonio was recommended to me by Joe down the street.  Antonio isn’t cheap, but he’s highly recommended, and that means a lot to me.  His original quote to do the stucco was “HIGH”.  However after a couple iterations, we came to a price that was only mildly painful for both of us (probably more painful for me than him).  I don’t even know Antonio’s last name, but he’s already installed the stucco wire and lath on our little project.  From the looks of the job to this point -so far so good.  I’m pretty confident we’ll pass inspection.  In fact I’ve put in the last of the wall insulation this evening, and have called for an inspection for tomorrow morning.  I won’t be around, but I’m thinking Maria can handle this inspection just fine.  If all goes well, I just may be putting sheetrock on the walls over the weekend.

I hate to admit it, but I’m pretty excited about getting sheetrock up.  I mean I’ve done tons of work on this kitchen over the past several months, but to most people -it doesn’t look like too much.  Take the electrical for example.  Even I can’t believe the amount of work I’ve had to put in, just for a couple new outlets!  The work involved in sheetrocking the kitchen is trivial in comparison, but the results show impressive progress to those who’ve never done this sort of thing before.

Antonio's handiwork...

No more window...

Insulated and sealed up...

Quick update…

In an earlier post, I mentioned that with all the rebates it was only going to cost me an extra $50 to insulate the whole house -vs. just the kitchen.  Well how could I ignore that!  As usual, I ended up at Home Depot on Saturday morning.  I had originally gone there to buy  an electric hedge trimmer, but somehow ended up at the service desk.  I just wanted to find out if they delivered.   The nice girl at the counter said it would cost $75 and wanted to know if I wanted to go ahead and schedule a delivery.  What the heck!  Yeah, $75 is a little pricey, but I’m getting a little lazy in my old age.  Plus I’ve been trying to avoid any heavy lifting these days -which is really starting to help with the issues I’ve been having with my neck.  I told her I needed 11 batts of R30 and 7 sheets of sheetrock.  She keyed in the order, and then paused.  She said that I could rent their pickup truck for $20 instead and that it should only take two trips to get it all to my house.  All that, and they’d load it for me.  Argh!  I couldn’t resist!  I got on the phone and made a couple calls.  My good brother-in-law Lawrence was going to meet me at the house.  I rented the truck.

The guys were loading all my stuff.  It’s amazing how much space insulation takes in a truck like that.  They were looking at the pile of insulation bags when one of them appeared to be thinking what to do with the insulation that wasn’t in the truck yet.  To me it looked to me like the truck was full. He asked how far I had to drive.  I told him and he and his helper threw the last bags on top of the pile.  A little precarious, but I drove pretty slowly and made it home without loosing anything.  Lawrence and I had it unloaded in a couple minutes -all done in one trip!  Not a bad spur of the moment decision!

Sunday was spent on the road.  We headed up to Sac to visit Rudy & Sharon, and had a great time.  Plus it was way too hot to go into the attic that day.  Monday rolled around and I went in to work.  I noticed that the weather for the next day showed it was going to be the coolest day of the week.  I fired off an email saying I needed to take Tuesday off, and got the OK from the boss in less than an hour.  Tuesday came and I thought I’d have it knocked out in two or three hours.  Well a little over six hours later I came down from the attic.  Itchy, tired, dirty, but pretty satisfied.  The weather was as good as I could have hoped for, and my attic insulation has gone from R9.5 to R39.5 -Not too shabby.

Looking from the garage loft into the attic. A lot of insulation...

Revelation…

I was just browsing around the local blogs looking for people going through the same marathon/never-ending process that I am going through right now with my kitchen remodel project, and I’ve found a site that has basically summed up all my experiences over the past year in doing this project -in one page.  Here I’ve stocked my garage with thousands of dollars of tools, worried about where I would stack the truckloads of lumber for my cabinets, and where the finished cabinets would be stored, and don’t get me started on finishing the cabinets, tile, electrical, lighting, gas, plumbing, mechanical, permits, inspections, hiring subcontractors, granite counter tops, dishwasher hookups, molding selection, paint, Sheetrock, garbage disposals, water dispensers, hot-water dispensers,  all the mistakes I’ve done, almost loosing a finger in a saw and other trivial stuff like that!

I hate to poke a little fun at my fellow blogger’s entry (because he will get a notification of my posting a link to his page), but those who have not done a project of this scale before (myself included) always underestimate the scale of the task.

Build Kitchen Cabinets Yourself!

Finishing up stuff…

I thought I had maybe 30 minutes of work to do in the attic.  All I needed to do was button up the electrical boxes up there.  Just stuff the wires inside the boxes and close em.  Well that maybe took a little longer than expected, but I didn’t think about re-running the ducting for the forced air.  A trip to Home Depot and a couple hours sweating my brains out, and that was done.  I still have to insulate up there, but more on that in a sec…

It was a little warm up there. Maria points out that those aren't shadows on my shirt -it's sweat.

I'm just a little warm...

So I thought I was done making trips under the house after crawling around down there this weekend.  I finished up running wires for a new outlet in the dining room, and boxed up a few loose wires from the service panel (just in case).  However I was putting the floor boards back in place when I noticed a role of 1/4″ copper tubing.  Crap!  I have to suit up at least one more time to run the ice maker water line.  Shouldn’t be too much, but still!

Next thing.  I got the service panel wired up!  Here are a couple pics…

It isn't as complicated as it looks!

And I'm doing it while listening to my Hardcore History podcast!

Now about the insulation…  I thought all I had to do was  buy a roll or two of R30 for the attic, roll it out, and I’d be done.  However I’ve run into a little snag.  I’ve found that with all the rebates being offered right now, that I can insulate the entire house for about $50 more than if I just did the kitchen…  I don’t want to insulate the entire house!  The problem is, if I can do the whole house for less than the cost of one roll of insulation -I can’t really ignore it.  So my new project for next weekend will be… Insulating my attic.  I’m just hoping that the forcast is right, and it will be in the low 80’s by the weekend, or I’m screwed…