Check out this lovely rumination, courtesy of BBC:
Runs about 30 minutes…worth every moment!
House & Yard
More Kitchenry
Frugal Scholar continues her discussion of kitchen renovation with tales of cabinetry discovery.
And check out Hostess of the Humble Bungalow‘s amazing remake, with pictures of the beautiful cabinetry her husband custom-built.
It’s all very interesting. One commenter at FS remarks on her pleasure at having substituted drawers for all the lower cabinets. I have to say that sure sounds like a great idea. My kitchen has two big lower-cabinet drawers. Because Satan and Proserpine took out about half of the wall cabinets to open up the space between the kitchen and the family room, the remaining upper cabinets are not large enough to to hold my Heath dinnerware. Even though the cabinetry was fairly expensive semicustom Kraftmaid stuff, they just aren’t deep enough to hold a 1970s dinner plate.
But a single big drawer not only holds the plates, it holds two stacks of bowls, the salad plates, and the bread plates: the entire set fits inside one drawer! I’d love to have drawers for the pots and pans, too.
Kitchens
Frugal Scholar is doing an interesting series about her experiences remodeling a kitchen on a budget. I love it! I seem to have spent my entire life remodeling houses, and so I’ve developed some strong opinions on the subject. Frugal proves how brilliant she is by happening to agree, more or less, with those ideas.
Kitchens and bathrooms are just about the most expensive remodeling jobs you can do, short of ripping off and replacing a shake roof. Much of it is stuff you can’t easily do yourself: plumbing (especially having to move plumbing!), wiring, gas connections in ancient houses.
Over the course of years, I’ve learned a number of things that help a little to keep costs under control:
• If cabinetry is functional, consider painting instead of replacing.
• It’s a lot cheaper to have a skilled finish carpenter build a few cabinet doors with glass in them than it is to replace the cabinetry in your kitchen because you think you’d like glazed doors in some wall cabinets.
• Sometimes less is more. If you have storage space in the garage or another room, or if you can bring yourself to get rid of stuff you don’t use much, you can open up a kitchen by removing certain cabinets altogether.
• Don’t run with the herd. Just because something is radically popular and every designer in sight is using it (think avocado green appliances…think black granite countertops) doesn’t mean it’s especially desirable.
• Try to build and design with materials and colors that will be timeless. Avoid products and colors that are currently “hot.” Something that’s stylish now is likely to cause future visitors to sniff, “Oh, she did that in 2010!” A dated kitchen can make it hard to sell a house, or to get the full price you think it’s worth.
• Hire licensed and bonded contractors. Let me say that again: hire licensed and bonded contractors! Even if Joe Handyman does a decent job, a kitchen or bathroom that is not to code may have to be rebuilt before the house can be sold.
• That said, one surprising job can be done by a good handyman or a strong, handy homeowner: installation of ready-made or custom-sized cabinets. If you’re buying cabinets from Lowe’s or Home Depot, check around. Many handymen will underprice the big-box stores’ installation fees, and the job is not at all complicated.
• Get bids. Get lots of bids. It never ceases to amaze me how widely fees vary for plumbers, carpenters, tile-layers, painters, and electricians.
• It may be worth paying to join Angie’s List for a year, if it’s available in your area. I found several excellent craftsmen through this site, including the Adirondack Chimney Sweep. Be aware, however, that many of the recommendations are redundant, and there’s nothing to stop a craftsman from putting all his friends and relatives up to sending in ecstatic (and phony) reports. Get real-world references, too.
• Pay to get mid- to top-of-the-line appliances, but pay for function, not style. Prefer mechanical controls to electronic, because the latter break sooner and are more expensive to repair. A repairman told me that the cost of appliances no longer relates to their quality or longevity: he said that all kitchen and laundry appliances are now engineered to last no longer than about seven years. Thus it doesn’t make sense to pay extra for fancy gear, which likely will say good-bye long before you sell the house. This is especially annoying if you’ve bought a stove or refrigerator because it’s the height of fashion; in seven years, that style will no longer be in production and the replacement won’t go with your carefully crafted design.
• Check Craig’s List and estate sales for building materials and late-model used appliances. The washer and dryer we bought off Craig’s list for M’hijito’s house are higher quality than the ones I bought for myself new, and they’re still running fine. At an estate sale, I scored over 1,000 red bricks for about 10 cents apiece, far less than I would have paid at the brickyard or Home Depot.
• If you actually cook (rather than microwave or reheat) and your house has gas heat but an electric stove, consider springing for the cost of having a gas line run into the kitchen. Gas is so far superior to electric—especially to those obnoxious glass-topped things—that there’s no comparison.
• Once you have gas in the kitchen, there’s little reason other than ego gratification to buy an expensive eight-burner heavy-duty Viking chef’s stove. Any stove will do the job just fine. Take a look at the ordinary stoves and stovetops at Sears, Lowes, and Home Depot. They cost enough to prove to the world that you’re not headed for the poorhouse, but they won’t take so much of your money that you’ll end up feeling foolish.
• If the house has a built-in oven plus a stovetop, leave the electric oven and convert only the stovetop to gas. Electric ovens work as well as gas for their purpose; it’s the stovetop burners that really matter.
• Keep every warranty that comes with every item you buy.
The last remodel job I did was at M’hijito’s, a 1951 brick cottage that ultimately required us to gut it out and rebuild everything. It was very expensive. Even though we cut every corner we could think of, we spent over $35,000, all told, on the interior (kitchen, two bathrooms, installation of antique doors and French doors, saltillo flooring throughout, window treatments, paint). That doesn’t count the roof or the new air conditioner. Or the landscaping.
Our biggest mistake was hiring a handyman who was not licensed and bonded. We came across him when he was working on the house next door, and the owner recommended him highly. He was doing essentially the same work we wanted done, so we imagined he could or would do the same for us. It was a huge mistake. We were very lucky he didn’t do serious structural damage when he cut large holes in a bearing wall to install the French doors. So far, that seems to have gone all right, but other jobs he did really need to be taken out and redone. Ultimately, because he was very slow and took on other work in the middle of the job he was doing for us, leaving us high and dry for days and even weeks at a time, we had to fire him and find someone else to finish the work. That was quite the little headache!
If I had it to do over, I would buy the cabinetry at Ikea or Lowe’s rather than Home Depot. Ikea cabinetry is problematic because the doors do not join the way American cabinet doors do, so you can see the shelves through the crack where the doors come together, and because the system used to attach them to the wall is idiosyncratic. You need to get a workman who knows how to install them, or else you have to be very clever and very patient at handyman work yourself. I’d never buy cabinets at Home Depot again: sales staff were slow, difficult to deal with, and on two occasions downright rude not only to us but to fellow staffers, and the cheaply built products came missing parts—two cabinets still don’t have all their shelves.
All in all, the remodel job on the downtown house produced a very nice place to live—pleasant enough that if M’hijito has to move while the recession is still on, I would cheerfully sell my place and move into that house. But it’s worth noting that after the remodel job I did on my last house, the reason I bought my present home is that the previous owners did all the remodeling…
Pool a-filling
So Paul from Swimming Pool Service and Repair dropped by the day before yesterday to drain the pool. It’s pretty simple: drop a pump in the bottom of the deep end, stick its hose in the property’s clean-out drain, and plug in the cord. The pump runs so quietly you can’t even tell it’s on, except for the quiet gurgling of water running down the drain.
Here’s the result:
Took about a day to arrive at this pass. Paul came by yesterday morning to retrieve the pump and start the hose running. It takes two or three days to refill a pool this size with a garden hose. By 11:00 p.m. it was about a third full. I turned the water off late last night, partly because the spigot makes a noise that you can hear everywhere in the house—the sound of money pouring through the plumbing is not conducive to sleep—and partly because I’d repaired a small crack in the tile grout and wanted the silicone stuff to fully cure before the water reaches the tile line. The gunk should be fine by mid-afternoon, and I’m sure the water will be nowhere near the tile line anytime before dark.
Otherwise, the thing seems to be in pretty good shape: no cracks, crazes, or chips in the plaster. Water has gotten into the light on the shallow end, which of course you can’t see in that snapshot. Doesn’t matter to me though: I never turn the light on. If I’m swimming at night, I want the pool to be dark…that’s the whole point of swimming at night! It’s quite lovely in the water late on a summer evening.
DIY: The great de-wallpapering adventure
Kyle at Rather Be Shopping is running a contest for smartest, dumbest, hardest, or frugalest home improvement projects. The prize is a fancy cordless drill with many trimmings, something not to be missed. So, here’s my contribution:
When my son reached grade-school age, we moved out of a very elegant house in a gentrified inner-city neighborhood in search of a functional school district and fewer transients. Though the new-to-us house, a custom-built 1950s rancher, was in a far tonier area than the one we left behind, all that proved was that the rich spend much of their time at Junior League and Men’s Arts Council and little of their time cleaning house or supervising their housekeepers. The place was filthy, smelly, and run-down.
After two weeks of nonstop scrubbing and disinfecting – during which the wife of one of my husband’s law partners showed up at the door and mistook me for the cleaning help – I was ready to take on the tired décor. I planned to paint the walls myself. It took three coats of white to cover the unholy navy blue the previous owners had put in the master bedroom. From there it was on to the kitchen.
Ah, the kitchen.
Strangely, whenever I walked in there I found myself feeling slightly dizzy, as though I’d had one gin and tonic too many.
The vast kitchen consisted of a large cooking and utility area plus a breakfast nook big enough to hold my mother’s dining room set, which I had recently inherited. One wall of the breakfast room was lined with cabinetry and glass-fronted shelving. The two rooms were nominally separated by an ell of the kitchen counter and an upper cabinet, which hung from a soffit. A soffit also ran along the kitchen’s front wall, supporting more upper cabinets.
In the past, some proud homeowner had covered the soffits, the ceilings, three walls, and the wall behind the shelves with busy blue-and-white floral wallpaper. Although it wasn’t obvious at a glance, the pattern had a direction. The wooziness one felt upon entering the rooms arose from this wallpaper. In the breakfast nook, the ceiling pattern ran north and south. In the kitchen, it ran east and west. As if it weren’t bad enough to have ditzy flowers all over the ceiling, the flowers raced back and forth in different directions!
No problem, thought I. We’ll just pull that wallpaper right off there. Hey – I knew how to remove wallpaper. I was good at it.
Yeah.
Except this stuff wasn’t your normal wallpaper. In fact, some question arose about whether it was wallpaper at all. The strips were narrow, about the width of Contact Paper. It didn’t appear to be self-sticking shelf paper, though: the surface was matte, not shiny, and it definitely was paper and not vinyl.
I hauled the ladder, a sponge, and a bucket of water into the kitchen, propped the bucket on the paint tray, climbed up, and started mopping and peeling.
Whatever it was, the paper had no interest in peeling off, thank you. On some sections, it would come off in small strips. In other areas-where more paper hid behind it-it sort of chipped off.
Down the ladder, out to the tool chest; retrieve a putty knife and a squirt bottle of vinegar water. Spray, scrape, and peel: this worked to slightly better effect, but it was slow, slow going.
The soffits had been papered by many previous owners. A layer of blue flowers came off to reveal a layer of harvest gold wheat. The harvest gold wheat came off to reveal a layer of brown with busy yellow and orange flowers. The layer of brown came off to reveal an identical layer of brown with busy yellow and orange flowers! Beneath that lurked another couple of layers in increasingly retro patterns.
The brown stuff put up an even bigger fight than the blue flowers and the gold wheat. It behaved like glued-down cardboard. Not only would it not peel off, it wouldn’t scrape off, either. It came up in quarter-inch chips.
Down from the ladder, into the car, off to the rental place. Rent a wallpaper steamer.
The rental guy pointed out that a steam iron would do the job: just turn it to “blast furnace,” hold it an inch or two away from the wall, and hit the “burst of steam” button. This, he pointed out, would be a lot easier for a 118-pound woman whose idea of exercise is an occasional walk to the refrigerator, for whom a wallpaper steamer represented a heavy, unwieldy, arm-aching chunk of a thing.
This was beginning to look like an iffy idea.
The steam iron strategy worked little better than the spray bottle. As a young mother, however, I was too dumb and too stubborn ever to say “I give up.” Oh, no.
Days passed as I clung to the ladder like a monkey in the jungle canopy and steamed, sprayed, scraped, peeled, steamed, sprayed, scraped, peeled, steamed, sprayed, scraped, peeled…. I paused only long enough to pick up the kid at school and park him in front of the television. Then it was back up the ladder, steaming scraping and peeling to the tunes of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers.
After the better part of a week, I had the stuff off the soffits and the walls behind the bookcases. Well…almost. Behind the shelves I came to a layer of excellent, solidly applied and still intact bright yellow lead paint. It had been applied over more underlaying wallpaper!
Luckily, I owned cookbooks, many cookbooks, all still in the mover’s packing boxes. Command decision: remove the paper from the intact paint, wash off the glue, and cover the more or less smooth goldenrod surface with new paint. Hide the result behind row on row of cookbooks.
Moving on, it was time to tackle the dizzy ceilings.
If Michelangelo could do it, I told myself, so can I.
Except…well, Michelangelo had scaffolding. Michelangelo had swarms of underlings. Michelangelo could lay on his back while he dealt with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo did not have to balance on the top step of an aluminum ladder while holding a sizzling steam iron over his head!
And if he did, you can bet one of the underlings would have been sent up the ladder.
More days passed. Neck-twisting, back-wrenching days. The neighbor came by and stared up at me in awe. A woman who had no fear of telling another woman she was nuts, she told me I was nuts. Obsessively, I steamed and sprayed and scraped and peeled.
Clearly, she was right.
After another week of steaming, scraping, and peeling, I finally got the layers of wallpaper off the ceiling.
Now all that remained was to remove an ancient nonfunctional intercom from the wall, patch the resulting 8 x 14-inch hole in the drywall, and paint. So it was that I learned how to do drywall repair. Not well, we might add.
I’d like to say that when the job was finished I was proud, I was pleased as punch.
But no. The result was OK. But it was just OK. Unlike the fine old 1929 hacienda we had left downtown with its shaded atrium, 18-foot lath-and-plaster walls, huge wood beams, and authentic French doors and windows, this house had nothing special to offer. It was just a tract house on steroids. Nothing that you did to it made it special. Far from feeling pleased, all I felt was glad a miserable job was finally done. At least the paint was clean and we no longer felt tipsy while we were making our breakfast coffee.
Smaller is better. Simple is best. Workmen are good. Hire them.