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...

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…

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...

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)

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...

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...

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!

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…

Sorry about the delay in the update.  There’s been a lot going on to distract me from the kitchen.  First there was the week in the mountains -which was great.  Nothing like a little hiking, canoeing, 4-wheel driving to get your mind off of your “several months behind schedule kitchen project.”  Then there was work.  That week off was great, but then I had a weeks worth of work to catch up on.  So after all that was out of the way, I managed to sneak in two days of vacation to call in the inspection.    Well, I called in the inspection request, but apparently too late, because I tried to schedule it for Tursday, but it got setup for Friday instead.  Well that was great because we had a mini birthday celebration for Sarah that evening anyways.

So the fateful day arrived.  I woke up and started getting ready.  First was the gas line pressure test.  I unhooked the service, and pressurized the setup, and low and behold -it worked!  Next was the sewer line test.  Just plug up the sewer line to the sink, go up on the roof and fill the line with water -simple!  Well I filled it up (the plugs gave me some problems, but that got sorted out), and surprise!  A leak!  It was 8:00 AM, I had one hour before the inspector would arrive.  Down to Home Depot I went.  Got the parts and had it all apart and glued back up with time to spare.  However I later found out that the inspection had been rescheduled for the afternoon.  Another nice break.  The glue needed a little more time to dry anyways.  Two hours later I filled it back up and no leaks!

So he shows up.  It’s not Craig!  Another break!  Nice guy.  Takes his time and goes over all the changes I’ve done.  He’s shoots off a few questions.  I throw a few out myself.  So here are the results…

Rough Framing:  PASS

Mechanical:  PASS

Rough Plumbing:  PASS

Rough Electrical:  FAIL

Well It wasn’t a bad fail.  All I had to do is add two more outlets within 24″ of the sink.  It’s already done, and he said that it’ll be signed off next time he comes by -not a bad deal!

I’ll write more in the next week or so about what’s next.  Hope to have some pictures too.

So I thought I’d do a dry run of sorts on the whole inspection thing.  I’m not too worried about the plumbing part.  The pipes don’t leak, and I’m confident that when I stop up the drain pipe and fill it with water, it won’t spring any leaks either.  However I wasn’t so confident about the gas lines.

Now all my experience with gas lines is either with minor stuff, or second hand, but I had confidence I could get through this.  The gas line test involves putting a pressure gauge on the line, and pumping it up with air until there is at least 10 PSI in the line.  There has to be no discernable pressure drop on the line for 15 minutes or for the duration of the inspection.  How hard can that be?  I had heard that the old gas shutoff valves would probably not hold 10 PSI and that they would need to be capped.  Well there was one valve that was a shutoff for both the water heater and the dryer.  I figured I’d just throw two new ones right at the appliances -Killing two birds with one stone.  I’d have shutoffs in the “proper” locations, and I’d have two valves that wouldn’t need capping during the test.  So I put in the new shutoffs, and ended up capping the furnace line (just to make sure that one wouldn’t give me problems).  I slopped soapy water on the new joints and everything looked good -no leaks.  Now the gas was shutoff again and the pressure gauge was on the system.  It was time to pressurize everything.  I hooked up the bicycle pump to the gauge and pumped away.  After a few minutes of pumping, I realized the air was leaking out as fast as I could pump it in.  After walking around a little with a puzzled look on my face, I came to the conclusion that the service gauge was letting the pressure out of the system (some sort of back-pressure protection).  I unhooked and capped the house line from the PG&E gauge and re-ran the test.  It pressured right up, but over the next hour the pressure dropped by about a quarter pound.  Not a lot, but I couldn’t ignore it.   I checked all the joints I could get to without going under the house and found nothing.  Next, I went under the house and crawled the whole length of it, checking every joint with my soapy water, paintbrush, flashlight, and mirror.  Didn’t find a thing.  This was depressing.  Unless I found a leak, the only place left to look would be under the sidewalk on the side yard, and I really didn’t want to dig up my sidewalk!  I sat down on the step next to the water heater in the garage and pondered my fate.  After a few minutes, I looked down at the old gas shutoff valve.  It no longer served a purpose now that there were two new valves further down the line, but maybe it was the problem?  I picked up the brush that was sitting in my now dirty soapy water cup and dabbed it on the top of the valve -not at the threads where you’d expect a leak and I had already checked (twice), but on the top where the valve lever was.  After a several seconds, the top of the valve looked like a snail with salt poured on it.  I’d found the leak!  It was small, but it was there.  I’m guessing when operating under the normal gas pressures of about a pound, it didn’t leak, but at 10 pounds -it leaked.  So I hit Home Depot this evening and got the parts to replace this bugger.  I’ll do it as I get time this week.

That little guy to the left is my tormentor that made me crawl under the house!