houses are complicated :-)

[cellio]

We want to make some improvements in our kitchen. The immediate prompt is floor tiles that are coming loose and becoming trip hazards, and hey, I never liked that floor anyway. The (laminate? formica?) counters are also getting pretty beat up. And I want better lighting. In other words, the cabinets and appliances are fine and we want to replace the rest. That should be a one-stop job, right?

Yeah, no. We did get a bid for the whole thing from one contractor (who came recommended), but it was full of "install customer-supplied X" and we are not interested in getting caught between "this isn't the right thing" and "we bought the things you told us to buy" and meanwhile things are in limbo while you sort it out. Also, it's hard to estimate the full price that way. We wanted to hire someone, choose materials, get a real price, and have that contractor take care of it.

It ended up being three different jobs. The counters are supposed to be installed in two weeks (they came a couple weeks ago to do "templating", i.e. the detailed measurements). This will supposedly take a couple hours on the appointed day, which seems fast to me but they're the experts not me. Meanwhile, our flooring is on order and will supposedly be a one-day job once stuff comes in, maybe in a few weeks. We decided to get through this and then tackle the lighting (and then, finally, paint).

I'm looking forward to the changes, which will be revealed one at a time.

Comments

[sine_nomine]

Houses are very complicated! Hooray for the updates... I look forward to pictures!

[ellenmillion]

That can be the fun and terrible part of home ownership! Haha. Good luck, I hope you get GREAT contractors!

[goljerp]

Cool! Good luck! We've been procrastinating doing work on our kitchen for several years...

[shewhomust]

I hope it goes well.

We are looking at our upstairs bathroom, and feeling all the misgivings you identify ...

[hudebnik]

See https://hudebnik.dreamwidth.org/446170.html and https://hudebnik.dreamwidth.org/441290.html for some lessons we learned. We've been mostly happy with our kitchen reno, but the refrigerator still has some practical problems.

By ill luck, our dishwasher died a few months before our kitchen reno, we replaced it, and so the guys who did the kitchen reno had to take it out and reinstall it, for which they gave fewer guarantees than if they were installing a new appliance. And somehow in the process of deinstalling and reinstalling, they bent the frame so the door spring doesn't work. (I've replaced the door spring twice since, and the bent frame abrades the cord so the spring is detached again within a week or two each time.) Lesson: don't try to preserve anything from the old kitchen; the workers will be happier and will do a better job if they replace everything at once.

[cellio]

Fortunately, we're not touching cabinets, and nobody expressed any concerns about the dishwasher. (We didn't think to ask about it, but the contractors didn't say anything either.) The counter people told us we need to replace the sink and disposal (fine; we were going to replace the latter anyway); we told them we're keeping the current cooktop and they didn't object. With luck there won't be problems with any of this.

The new flooring is going down over the old flooring for the same reason yours did: nobody knows if there's asbestos under the old ones and they're not willing to disturb them. (Every contractor we talked with told us this.)

We have a date for the counters; we're still waiting for flooring to come in.

[hudebnik]

Oh, and our new sink is slightly smaller than our old one, which means our largest frying-pan no longer fits in it.

There was a communication failure between shalmestere and me over on which side to put the sink's handheld sprayer, which the contractors resolved by drilling a matching hole on the other side, installing the sprayer there, and installing a soap dispenser on the "wrong" side. Which was nice until the soap dispenser fell apart (i.e. the screw threads decayed or something so it's no longer possible to screw the top and bottom together), and I haven't gotten around to replacing it yet.

[cellio]

We're replacing a two-bowl sink with a slightly smaller single-bowl one. It's a trade-off; it's nice to have the separation, but it's hard to wash large pots in our current sink. We decided to give it a chance; one can always put a tub in a sink to create separation, after all, and remove it if it's in the way.

Fortunately, with the pandemic we'll both be working from home on installation day, and we've already agreed between the two of us that we both have to approve the work and any decisions that have to get made that day. If we'd been doing this in the before-times, I can easily imagine having the kind of mishap you did -- sorry you did.

[magid]

Only a couple of hours to install the new countertops? Wow, I really should consider getting mine redone (tile with grout is what previous people chose, and I still have no idea why *anyone* would think that a good idea for counters!).

[cellio]

I find that estimate to be surprising too. I'll let you know if it turns out to be true.

We're replacing something that I assume is laminate or Formica or something similar (plain white counter, which has acquired nicks and some stains over the decades) with quartz. Backsplash is a separate step, I should have said -- they'll come back for that after the counters are in place. (I don't know why. Is it different people? Does the precise cutting of the backsplash depend on the final counter installation? We'll find out, I guess.)

Tile with grout for counters? What were they thinking?!

[magid]

I would have thought backsplash would be an integrated part. Huh.

And I have no idea what they were thinking. Beyond baffling. (Possibly as bad: my parents had a house where two rooms had wall-to-wall white carpeting, and not the flat kind, but taller and fuzzier than that: the dining room and one of the bathrooms. I can't even.)

[cellio]

Our current backsplash was obviously installed after the counter (I can see the line where it sits on it). It's the kind that's only a handspan high, not full height. I don't actually know what the proper function of a short backsplash is, but we went with "keep the current form factor on things where we don't have a reason to change them".

Oh my, tall fuzzy carpeting -- I remember that era! Real pain in any color, and white is just asking for trouble. And in a bathroom? Wow.

[hudebnik]

I think installing the countertops did indeed take only a few hours, after they were shipped from the factory, after they were custom-cut, after an hour or so of measurements on a previous visit.

Our new backsplash is prettier than whatever we had before, but doesn't lend itself to hanging anything on the wall, so things that were hanging on the wall before (a set of measuring spoons, a set of measuring cups, a sponge-rack) have had to find new homes.

[cellio]

We have a "short" backsplash now and are replacing it with the same. Full-height was an option and would have been prettier, but it would have made for some weird fits in places, so we decided not to mess with it.

We've had the visit where the contractor spends an hour measuring everything and taking lots of pictures. We're supposed to get a draft pattern a few days before they show up (I don't know why the gap between those steps is so long), and then they'll cut it and show up on the appointed day with everything ready to go in after they remove the current one.