When we left
off after completing the first part of our kitchen renovation, life was good and
there were no health issues on the horizon (as far as we knew). How things
change in a year.
As you may
know we’ve had a lot of challenges in 2022 and in spite of all that we finally
completed the kitchen renovation in January of 2023.
When we
paused the renovation, we still had a few things to do to complete the kitchen.
We still had to paint the cabinet doors and switch them around so that the flat
shaker style profile would be on the outside, then there was building the curved
hood vent and installing cove moulding along the ceiling.
I am happy to
report (so that your mind will be at ease) that everything on the list has now
been completed, not only to my low standards but to the much higher standards
of the foreman who goes by the name of Rose.
The range
hood was the first item on the list that we tackled and I actually found that
it was a fun challenge. I designed it in such a way that the curve developed
into what we wanted as I put it together. Not having done anything remotely
like it in the past, we needed to let it speak to us of the organic shape that
felt most natural to it.
Just kidding,
the foreman did most of the talking and she’s the one I was trying to please,
not the range hood!
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| The finished Range Hood |
I built it
around a fairly inexpensive white metal range hood that will easily drop out if
it needs to be changed in the future and then I used 2” flexible wood slats
that I bent into shape and then I fastened
a thin plywood skin over the top.
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| Working on getting the curve right |
Lots of
filling sanding and painting later, and it’s super smooth and looks great. Rose
is still thinking she might want to do Venetian plaster over the top in the
future but that’s up in the air for now.
The next step
was the cabinet doors. We were fortunate to have the inside of the doors in a
flat profile that is a more modern look and we were able to flip them over and
install them with the old rounded profile on the inside where you don’t see it.
We used matching pulls from Ikea and I did a little tinkering with some cut up speaker wire behind the pulls to make them sit flat, trying to mount them on the rounded inside profile just didn’t work so after a little head scratching, voilà .
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| Attaching speaker cable behind the door pulls |
Rose tackled the sanding of the cabinet doors because it was
just after my heart attack and I was in no shape to do sanding and I just left
her to it.
My lovely wife is more than a little gung ho sometimes and
after a few days of her sanding, I took a look at the doors and found she had
sanded them down to a nub, leaving the supposedly squared off edges more than a
little rounded. Oh well, if the foreman did it, did it really happen?
I did a little magic with some wood filler and tape and we
patched them up as much as we could and they look pretty good.
The real head scratching started when I began contemplating
the cove moulding that we ordered from Wayfair after searching around Edmonton
trying to find something locally.
We only had about 3” clearance above the Ikea Pax wardrobe
cabinets that we had used and were unable to find anything suitable so we
ordered these ones online. The name should have given it away, who knew
Durofoam mouldings are made from foam? Actually they worked great, the only
problem being figuring out how do you cut these things without ruining them?
They are very soft and easily dented or scratched.
I tried a few things, watched a few YouTube videos and
settled on a mitre box and a very long bread knife and that actually worked
great. I took a little flak from Rose about using her good bread knife but I
convinced her that if that thing can cope with the crust on her no-knead bread,
it can handle a little foam moulding!
I took those moulding strips out and stared at them
contemplating how I was going to go about it at least 4 times before I figured
that I couldn’t avoid starting the job any longer and of course once I did
start, it went pretty well. If you’ve ever cut crown or cove moulding before
you may know what I’m talking about.
I would watch a video, make some notes, imagine it in my
head, hold pieces up to the wall and think some more and then after all that I
would end up cutting it wrong, AGAIN!
The only thing that worked for me on this particular inside
corner was to cut some various short example pieces and hold them up to the
corner and that eventually allowed me to get it right.
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| The famously difficult inside corner |
Hopefully, I will never be called upon to do that again!
But I must say, after all of that work and expense, it looks
great and I am very glad that I came up with the idea to renovate the kitchen
in the first place. And with my amazing design eye, ingeniously creative
carpentry skills, and decorating panache, the foreman seemed to be mightily
pleased with me and said she might even keep me on, permanently!
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| The finished kitchen - South wall |
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| The finished kitchen |
If you are wondering how much the whole project cost, we
were all in at around $3200 plus of course around $20,000 in free labour, but
it was fun (I keep telling myself) and there’s nothing like the sense of
accomplishment that you get from doing something yourself, along with your
partner/wife/foreman of course!
So that’s it, the last renovation project that I will ever tackle is now complete (I don’t believe that for a minute) and I am just going to relax and enjoy our beautiful new kitchen and all of the delicious food that comes out of it!
