I'm Grumpy

I spent the last half hour typing up a long story about what we had done so far, only to have it disappear.

So to summarize:

• The kitchen was unusable
• We decided to gut in and put it back together in a weekend
• We found a window inside the wall, half way in the kitchen and bathroom. Troubling
• We found that the back upstairs patio, which is over the back half of the kitchen, was hanging in mid-air. The joists holding it up were only supported at one end. More troubling
• A leak check of the upstairs patio found that it leaked. Most troubling.
• Time to rebuild the back of the house properly. No longer a weekend job.
• Still didn't have a kitchen
• Decided to try and make the downstairs suite kitchen usable. Had to move the service panel (while live!) to do that. Scary stuff. Knocked out some walls down there to make a better cabinet layout. Scrubbed the whole area with bleach and TSP to get rid of the grease and smell.
• Wendy reminded me that using the downstairs kitchen would suck because the only way into it is to go downstairs outside. Fine for a week, no good for 6 winter months. Back to the drawing board.
• Decided to put the upstairs kitchen into use (it was originally going to be our bedroom)

Finally, after nearly 3 weeks, we have a nearly usable kitchen, minus a stove. A nice new gas stove is on order from Ikea and will be in in another week.

Hooking up the dishwasher proved to more difficult than I anticipated. We bought a used Bosch for $80 out of the buy&sell but when I tried to connect the water supply, nothing would fit it. Turns out it has a European pipe thread on it (go figure!). No one sells adaptors over here except Bosch and they want $35 for a plastic elbow. I've come up with a scheme to use a rubber hose and hose clamps. We'll see if it works.

This weekend we're going to tackle the back patio - rebuild the walls that support it, rip out the deck, then reframe with new joists (on a slope this time!) then apply a fiberglass deck over top. I've done some small fiberglassing jobs, but nothing this big. Should be an adventure.

The quality of the overall framing for the additions that have been done over the years is abysmal. I feel much better about the renos I've left behind. I've built better tree forts. I'm going to enjoy ripping this stuff out and rebuilding it properly..