Bob: The first step to rebuilding the kitchen was to find the studs in the walls. Using a combination of tapping, a sonic stud finder, measuring, and exploratory hole drilling (and blind luck), the studs were all marked above the wall cabinet line with finishing nails.
Nan: I suggested Bob use his stud finder. It's much easier than tapping the wall with your knuckles, and doesn't hurt either.
(05/2010) Bob: I devised this technique of marking the studs with finishing nails
up high on the walls, and used it extensively throughout the house in the course of
this rehab. It ended up being a lifesaver in countless situations, and made the work
a lot easier.
Bob: For a much-needed morale boost, we decided to install the first cabinet above the refrigerator, before all the rest. Although this corner was in some ways far worse than other areas in the kitchen, the wall space above our intended refrigerator was decent. A little primer helped, too. Here, one-by-two bats to mount the cabinet are secured to studs, along with a two-by-two ledger to assist in aligning the cabinet and to make it easier to put in the screws. The alignment nails are below these bats, because the cabinet is sixtynine inches above the floor.
Nan: It sounds like he's making pancakes, doesn't it?
Bob: This is definitely an inspiration to proceed!
Nan: It was so exciting to see this first cabinet actually go on the wall. Of course,
we knew it would be a while before we'd get the others up, but it gave us a sneak preview.
Bob: I agonized over this, and for no reason. The number of changes we had planned for the cabinet arrangement dictated a change to the piping under the sink. I thought it would be difficult and expensive to have these pipes rerouted, but plumber Matt Shue assured me that I could do it myself. Here, I have crawled into the crawlspace and sawed off the soil pipe! Rerouting all these pipes will make restoration and cabinet installation a heckuva lot easier, too.
Nan: I wasn't there the night Bob removed this, but having it gone sure did improve
the looks of the kitchen.
Bob: In this and the previous pictures, you can see that we've removed the first six or seven inches of plaster from the existing lath. It was badly damaged and loose, and really wanted to go to the landfill, so we obliged it. Besides, when I have those electricians come in to run new circuits and wall outlets, they'll have less mess to deal with. There used to be seven-inch baseboard mouldings here, but they are long gone.
Nan: I suppose you had to be there to appreciate how very different just
getting the trash and gunk off the floors and walls made the kitchen look. It really
felt different, like it may actually be a kitchen someday.
Nan: Bob can't help his humor. Ya gotta just live with it. :)
Bob: The electricians have come and gone. Jim Smith and company (Cory and Andy)
have added and improved several electrical features, including two GFI (Ground
Fault Interrupter) wall receptacles near the sink area, a switched receptacle for
the garbage grinder, a new circuit for the stove and microwave...
Bob: ...a new receptacle for the Baking Center, the moving of the light switch from inside to outside the kitchen (to make way for the new Baking Center wall cabinet), plus new circuits in the pantry (freezer) and the living room (entertainment center), and a new receptacle in the dining room (reading corner). We'll show you the others on their respective room pages.
Nan: Turning on the kitchen light from the dining room was really a good idea. It's
so much easier to walk into a lit kitchen.
Bob: It feels funny to pay someone to fix something, and then tear it out yourself. Now, all the pipes are gone! This makes a lot of the rest of this rehab easier.
Nan: Each little step made a very dramatic improvement in the kitchen.
Bob: There originally was baseboard in the refrigerator corner, long since gone. The SEVEN layers of floor (The original 4/4 pine, tile, masonite, tile, tile, rubber, laminate) were mostly installed while the baseboard was in place, leaving a slot along the walls. In this corner, 1/2" plywood bats serve to fill in the missing material. Along the sink and stove walls, 3/4" plywood was needed, which brought these slots up to the level of the masonite.
Nan: Even this little strip made a huge difference in how the room felt.
Bob: Here, you see bats, dry-fitted near the chimney and under the Baking Center. This entailed cutting and trimming plywood scraps to fill in for missing floor material. I removed these baseboards, and the longest one got transplanted to the wall behind the refrigerator.
Nan: Another step toward Movin' Day!
Bob: Here, behind the stove, the edge bats have been glued with construction mastic and screwed down. This will eliminate places where things can live. ;-}~
Nan: And another step.
Bob: To give extra strength and rigidity to the floor under the cabinets, we installed 3/4-inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) along this wall, screwed down with two-inch deck screws. Yes, I took measurements for all those pipes, first! I needed at least a hint as to where to drill for them later. (You can see the marks on the wall).
Nan: This step made the kitchen look so clean.
Bob: With the sub-floor installed, the walls can be patched. These scraps of sheetrock, dry-fitted here, will do fine. Later on, I'll cut through the one behind the stove to reroute the gas line curly hose.
Nan: Another step that made a big difference in the look and feel of the room.
Bob: In the refrigerator corner, the wall patches have been installed with sheetrock screws and construction mastic to seal the bottom edges. Also, you see the first drywall mud layer applied to this thoroughly nasty corner.
Nan: I just keep saying, "It looks so much better!", but unless you actually see it
developing, it seems so small. It was another big step.
Bob: Here, the baseboard material has been spliced in behind the refrigerator. The right one is from the Baking Center wall and the left one was cut from a twentytwo-year-old pine shelf I brought from San Diego. The second drywall mudding is starting to smooth out the raw parts.
Nan: Bob says that quote is from gamer's sites. Since I don't game, I don't know it. But I'm sure Little Al will, and maybe even Al? :)
It sure did improve this corner again (the work, not the quote).
Bob: Some of the plaster over the sink was rotten. Heck, a lot of the plaster we DIDN'T repair could've used replacing, too. If we'd had our druthers, we would have ripped the walls back to the studs. However, the worst and weakest is now fixed. I've finally removed that stupid-looking vanity light, and the wiring has been rerouted higher to make it disappear behind the over-sink cabinet. The previous cabinets were installed lower than we shall install ours.
Nan: Every little step. Step by step by step by step by step...
Bob: Things are finally starting to smooth out now, but there must be ten pounds of sheetrock mud on the kitchen walls!
Nan: It sure is looking cleaner.
Bob: The cabinet wall, ready for primer.
Nan: This was an exciting moment, since it meant we were actually moving on to the
building of the kitchen, and no longer in the repair stages.
Bob: Behold, the same wall, with primer. Kinda makes a difference, no? Now ready for texture and paint.
Nan: Clean clean clean! That's how this appeared to me.
Bob: I am dry-fitting the base cabinets, for inspiration. Note the tall leveling bats beneath some of them. The floor along this wall is nearly an inch lower in the middle than at the ends, the sagging of one-hundred-year-old timbers, I guess.
Nan: Even though this was a test run to help us decide exactly what we might encounter,
it was an exciting moment.
Bob: This color is Gold Buff, and a whole lotta things suddenly look better!
Nan: We could have painted the kitchen red, but it would have clashed with my
KitchenAid which is a deep burgundy.
Bob: We couldn't resist this huge clock at Wal-Mart. It was just right. Also, I wanted a few what-not shelves over the wall cabinets, to help reduce that empty feeling up there (thirty-two inches over the cabinets.) These pine shelves will look great with golden oak stain and polyurethane.
Nan: We could have gotten one about forty inches in diameter, but we decided that
might be too much time on our hands. :)
Bob: Wall texturing covers another multitude of surface variation and all the changes to the cabinet configurations over the decades. We used sandy texture, and should have used smooth (we probably could've gotten by with drywall mud, that's almost certainly what the folks who did this before used).
Nan: We didn't get the texture right, but it looks good nonetheless, and if you could
see it first-hand, you'd not really notice the difference if we didn't point it out. It
really looks nice.
Bob: Final paint over the texture brings it all together. Remember how this used to look?
Nan: This painted lady sure is outstanding! And, once the bats are out of her belfry... Can I help it if Bob has me doing the corny jokes too?
Acutally, the bats are a very important integral part of hanging the cabinets. The very old lath and plaster walls are fragile to say the least, and the only way to hang the cabinets with any amount of assurance that they'd not come crashing down was to attach the bats to the studs. Then the cabinets are supported very securely on the bats.
Also the studs were not always in an alignment that matched where the cabinets had to hang. Ergo, the ones "poking out" from behind this cabinet. That was the only stud near the left edge of this cabinet.
Bob: And now, for the rest of those cabinets... (see
Kitchen Build Up)