Pictures from Ian and Kat's Digital Camera: The kitchen

Pictures from Ian and Kat's Digital Camera: The kitchen
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Here are pictures of our house in Toronto, taken at various stages.

These are various renovations we did around the house.

The kitchen was really grungy when we moved in, and, in parts, disintegrating. We decided to bite the bullet and do a major kitchen renovation right away.

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Around the original kitchen. Some cabinets, easily moved if necessary.

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The only counter space. Note that the space next to the stove is useless, leaving only one accessible drawer in the whole kitchen. It turned out that drawer was broken, to boot. :-p

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The upper cabinets above the sink. Grungy, but in OK condition.

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Upper cabinets (totally not matching the other ones) above the stove.

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Fridge and gas stove.

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The back door and window. The porch light switch is hanging out of the wall.

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The bottom cabinets have no real "inside"; there's no back to them at all. It's just a layer of particle board that's mostly disintegrated at the back.

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That's because of a leak in the sink trap, which we're now catching in this bucket. Note also that the sink piping goes through the cabinet space, instead of through the wall.

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We took down the top cabinets. As we somewhat expected, the wall behind them was a total mess. So we figured we'd just take it down, and replace it with greenboard.

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First we take the cabinets away.

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Sweeping up the counter a bit before putting the plastic down.

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Action shot of Kat hacking away at the plaster (now falling).

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Ian takes a turn.

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Plaster's all gone!

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We took the range hood down. This involved some Interweb-searching for what we expected to find back there, electrically. Luckily, it was pretty straightforward. We flipped breakers until we found the one to the hood, and then it was just a matter of unscrewing various parts of the hood until we found the panel covering the incoming wiring.

We were a bit nervous to see that there was no wall at all behind it, though. What about behind the cabinets themselves?

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After removing the top cabinets. Luckily, the rest of the wall was present, and in OK shape. It should just need some spackling and cleaning, and not outright replacing, like the wall to the right.

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The (43) boxes containing the future kitchen cabinets have finally arrived! For now, they're stacked in the dining room.

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Kat starts removing the remaining tile on the kitchen wall.

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OK, the tile's gone. "Wallcheology" shows us the kitchen had been painted yellow in the past.

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And out comes the last of the original cabinets. We've now got no sink in the house at all, except for the bathroom upstairs. There's also no counterspace at all. So the kitchen is useless, and we start to eat out and order in a lot.

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Kat helps the contractor carry the old base cabinet to the garage.

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We've put together some of the new cabinets!

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Behind the old cabinet, some of the plumbing was in really rough shape. Although the rest of the house is new copper piping, this short run from the kitchen up to the bathroom was still old galvanized pipe, corroded to half its original diameter. :-(

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So out it went, and we replaced it with copper. While we were doing this, the upstairs sink needed to be taken out, so for a little while there was not a single sink in the house.

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"Floorcheology" is even more interesting; there are several layers of one-over-another flooring down there.

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The pipes are done, and the new greenboard goes up.

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Kat uses the handy sand-and-vacuum machine the contractor left with us.

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Sanded, sealed, and painted!

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The top cabinets will hang into the area where the tiles on the side wall were, so we removed some of them to make room.

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We start putting the cabinets into the kitchen. Note the wackiness in the corner of the room; we had to modify the top and bottom corner cabinets to fit around it.

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The top cabinets are hung!

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Even the wacky one in the corner.

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And the wacky bottom corner.

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We had to get our gas feed modified so that it the pipe didn't end behind where the base cabinet would be. The old fitting also required a wrench to turn the gas on or off. Now, the pipe goes out from behind the (future location of) the cabinet, and has an easy-to-turn ball valve.

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The cabinets are all in!

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The fridge has finally migrated all the way across the room, to its new location.

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A sink! We haven't had a sink in forever! Just a plywood countertop for now; we'll order a real one soon enough. [And the sink's not actually hooked up, yet.]

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The range hood is installed, and venting properly to the outside.

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The sink's hooked up, and everything else to do in the kitchen is cosmetic.

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After some cleaning up.

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Now we've got to put the knobs in the doors. Using the maxim "measure a whole lot of times; cut once", we carefully measured and remeasured to construct a metal template with a couple of holes in it.

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Along with some friends, we make an assembly line: marking the doors with the template, drilling the holes, installing the knobs, hanging the doors.

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Hanging the glass door in the corner.

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Working the line.

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Wow. All the doors are knobbed and hung. They still need some straightening, and the drawers all still need their pulls attached.

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We also constructed a little butcher-block-on-wheels for some extra moveable counterspace.

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In preparation for the installation of the real countertop, we empty out all of the bottom cabinets.

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The temporary wood countertop comes off. The sink is also gone, so we're without a kitchen until this is done. The kitchen counter installation guy gets to work, and I stress out because I don't know if he's going to do a good job.

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But he does! The counter is completed. It's cut just right to fit the curved wall and the non-right-angled corners.

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The other two pieces of countertop.

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Then we measure, mark, drill, and attach the pulls to the drawers.

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It's a real kitchen!

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Over two years later, we do some more work on the kitchen. A number of tiles were removed in order to install the cabinets. Here are some over the peninsula.

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More missing tile, over the drawers.

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Missing tile over the sink.

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The wall above the sink was in rough shape, because of the failed first attempt to place the cabinet support that didn't take into account the shorter cabinet there.

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