kitchen

Deck the halls

Posted by matt on Dec 1, 2011 in decor, kitchen | 0 comments

Today is the first of December…yikes! That mean’s we’re in full 25 days until Christmas countdown. I have mentioned on several occasions that MC loves decorating for Christmas. It’s a slow burn, mainly because we now have many more rooms than we had at the apartment, and now we can actually decorate the outside. Huzzah! So, between now and the holidays, I’ll try to post what we’ve done in and around the house, just for fun. The first small little area to get decorated was the little nook in our kitchen by the windows.

MC really wanted to get a mini Christmas tree for that area, and while we were in Blue Ridge Georgia, we hit up our favorite Christmas store Fezziwigs and picked up some fun decorations. We were able to find the mini tree as a set of 3 at Lowe’s, so that means that two other rooms in our house will be getting the mini tree-tment soon.

Along with the mini tree, we got this neat little advent calendar, that is a string of mittens. Inside each mitten is a small decoration that will find it’s way onto the little tree. By Christmas, this mini tree will have 25 cute little felt decorations on it.

Rounding out the nook are the slowflakes hanging in the window. We got a 4-pack at Target for $1, and hung them with some tape and fishing line.

The only down side to all this is that it’s towards the back of our house, so the only person who can really see it well is our rear neighbor, who seems like a very nice lady. We have named her “Mamma Fratelli” though, because she sort of looks like the character from the Goonies, and seems to always wear black when doing yard work. I have yet to actually meet her, but if I start chatting with her and she invites me in for ice cream, and then attemps to put my hand in a blender…well then my nickname will hold true.

Oh, and we did add one more little touch to the kitchen. We found this fun gingerbread advent tree at Kohl’s for under $20, and we liked it, so now we have like three advent trees in our house. Someone better fill them with candy so that I can eat it all. That someone knows who she is.

When it rains…

Posted by matt on Sep 13, 2011 in kitchen | 1 comment

Lately, our area has been hit with a huge amount of rain, along with other natural disasters. We’ve had an earthquake, a hurricane and remnants of a tropical storm. Last week it rained…a lot, and the ground was so saturated that the water had no where to go, causing major road closures and a fair amount of damage. Our friends, who live about two miles from us, saw part of their road literally wash away, creating a gap about 20 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. It was an incredible sight, that I failed to take a photo of. Sorry for that.

On thursday night, MC and I left work around 5:30pm, and finally made it home a little after 9:30pm. This drive, about 20 miles, normally takes us 45 minutes, but thanks to so many road closures by our house, we had to make several detours. Once we finally made it home, I opened the fridge to grab a beverage and wind down, only to hear an odd sound, a clicking noise eminating from the fridge. Along with that noise, was an odd smell, almost like burning. I also noticed that the fan to the fridge would not kick on. Our long commute home was about to be accompanied by appliance failure. As I opened our freezer door, it was evident, everything was thawing and our fridge wasn’t working…at all.

As you can see, our fridge is nothing fancy, and in fact, is relatively new, so this latest blow (after our plumbing fiasco) was just another “when it rains, it pours” scenario. I should also mention that we had just finished a massive “freezer” shopping trip at the grocery store, so watching everything begin to thaw was rather aggravating. We packed up our cooler with everything we could, a few freeze packs, and drove over to MC’s folks place, since they live nearby and had plenty of spare freezer space. We went to bed contemplating what to do next, buy a new fridge and be out a lot of money we hadn’t planned, or call our home warranty company and see if they can get it fixed. I know, it seems like a no brainer, call the warranty company and get it fixed, but we’ve dealt with them on many occasions and it hasn’t always turned out well.

Sidebar. The reason we decided to redo our entire half bathroom was because the toilet was leaking, and we had called our warranty company to fix it. The plumber they sent out came over three times, tightened some bolts each time, and the leak continued. Fed up with paying the deducible again and again, we opted to just take care of it ourselves, hence the renovation. Also, I had to figure out and fix the oven door myself because it wasn’t covered, even though that the heat resistant glass was falling out. The reason, the oven still baked, therefore it worked. Even though it was extremely dangerous, it performed it’s basic function.

Back to our fridge. We did decide to call the warranty company, and they sent someone out the next morning. We really had no idea what was wrong with it, just that it wasn’t doing the one function of a fridge, keeping things cool. Turns out, the culprit was an auto defrost timer in our fridge, that has a 30 minute cycle so it doesn’t freeze up. The timer was stuck, and constantly defrosting, thawing everything we had, and wouldn’t run the cooling fan or compressor until the defrost cycle stopped. The smell was our fridge just defrosting constantly (it smelled like freezer burn) so a new switch was installed, and we haven’t had the problem again.

In the end, the warranty company came through, but every time something breaks (which has been more frequently lately), we’re always on the fence if we should call them or not. They don’t have the best contractors associated with them, and no one really seems to care all that much about helping, they just want to make it as basic and functional as possible.

*I would like to note that the weather caused a mass amount of damage to homes, and we were lucky to escape that. I am not at all comparing our situation to those that endured massive damage, I am only making a relative story that when one thing goes wrong, it seems that more things follow. 

A Clear Mistake

Posted by matt on Jul 27, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

If you recall, after we finally “finished” our kitchen, I had one more minor detail to finish, and it was harder than I thought. You know, that trim I had to install about the cabinets in which I kept cutting incorrectly. (In case you don’t remember). Well, I am happy to say I did eventually finish the trim, and all I had left to do was caulk the seams to really bring it all together.

I figured that while I was at it, I would also caulk along the counter top since it was in pretty rough shape. Not a hard task at all, grab a caulk gun, some white caulk and go to town.

Unfortunately, when I picked up my million bottles of caulk at the Home Depot, I somehow managed to grab one bottle of clear caulk, not white. And wouldn’t you know it, that was the one bottle I grabbed to do this ENTIRE job. I bet you are saying “didn’t you notice it was clear when you started actually caulking?” Funny thing about that, it comes out white and dries clear. Funnier thing about that, it takes about an hour before it actually begins to dry. So, I started out on my caulking adventure, and I was doing a pretty damn good job of not applying too much, which is a first for me. In my confident stride, I caulked the whole kitchen in about an hour. The seams, the counter tops and even covering a few pesky nail holes. About the time I finished, I looked back at where I started and noticed that all of the seams were beginning to show again. I was perplexed to say the least…and then I glanced down at my bottle of caulk. Yup, clear.

So, all of that work had gone right out the window. I had to walk away and start again another day…and the second go ’round, I wasn’t as light handed with the caulk, which made the whole thing go even worse. My lesson here, make sure you always read what you are using, no matter how confident you are that you have the right thing, even if it looks like the right color when you start. At least it’s finally done.

Difference Maker

Posted by matt on Jul 26, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

One of the smaller projects I handled recently was (what my wife likes to refer to as) “the difference maker.” Why the term? Well, I listen to A LOT of sports radio, and they always talk about how a player is a “difference maker” on a team. At first she scoffed at the term, but now she has adopted it and used it to describe our renovation.  So, I bet you’re asking what the heck is it…and where is it? Well, let me show you a before and after shot…see if you can find it.

No, it’s not the flowers…or me making awesome pancakes (they really are delicious), it’s the long white board on the side of the fridge. I know, I know…it doesn’t look that exciting, but let me explain the reason behind it. It’s hard to tell, but in the first pic our fridge is almost 10″ from the wall thanks to a copper pipe leading to the ice maker (that doesn’t exist). The previous owners took the fridge with the ice maker and put this one in, but the copper line and huge valve still exist. So, to cover that ugly gap, we went to Home Depot and bought a long pre-painted white board that we had them cut to fit. I actually think it was an individual shelf (hence the pre-painted), but we painted over with our “polar bear” behr paint so it matched. I nailed in a stringer board behind the fridge so that I could affix the long board to, that way it is nice and solid.

Now, all that hoopla behind the fridge is hidden, and it won’t be the first thing you see when you walk in. I’ll admit, it took me a while to like it, but now that it has been in for a bit, I’m glad we did it. Here is another shot:

And yes, we love magnets that look like food. It was a small project that I think had a big impact. Tomorrow, we’ll stay in the kitchen for another “small project” that ended up taking quite a while due to a small technical error.

May I Cut In

Posted by matt on May 3, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

As I had said before, the kitchen is just about done, all I have left to do is replace the trim above the cabinets. Before there was this terrible plastic like wood trim on top, and originally I was just going to remove it until I noticed that the cabinets aren’t flush to the ceiling (or bump outs). So, I went back to my favorite store (yep, Home Depot) and picked out a ton of new trim. I measured it all out, and made my miter cuts then painted all the trim to match our Polar Bear colored cabinets.

A bit of advice, if you are going to paint semi gloss white paint, on top of a white door, don’t do it outside on the sunniest day alive. My eyes hurt so bad that everytime I walked inside, I couldn’t see a thing. It took my eyes a good 10 minutes to adjust, just in time for me to go back outside and basically stare directly into the sun again. Do it on a cloudy day, or better yet, inside.

Once I got all the cuts done and trim painted, I let them dry inside overnight. Yesterday was supposed to be the big finish, and I actually had a blog post all planned for how great it looks and all, but alas, that was not the case. Instead, I’m here today to tell you the age old adage, measure twice, cut once. It’s not that my measurements were off (okay, some of them were), it’s that my miter cuts were a bit off. I have done miter cuts before, actually MC’s Dad and I did all the baseboard and shoe molding on the first floor, and that was no problem. This time, however, I was dealing with a bit more sophisticated cuts and angles that I didn’t take the time to rough fit before painting. That, my friends, is the rub. Here’s what I mean.

Good Cut:

BAD Cut:

So now I need to go through and see which cuts I made right, and which I made wrong. This would also be a lot easier had I marked each piece of trim to it’s location. Nope, I didn’t do that either, so now I have a puzzle to put together with mismatching pieces. It’s going to be a fun day.

So, lessons learned:

1) Measure twice, cut once

2) Double check all your miter cuts

3) Rough fit the cuts together before painting

4) For the love of God, do NOT paint semi gloss white paint on a white surface when it is uber sunny out.

5) Buy sunglasses

6) Don’t get your hopes up and always be prepared to do it twice.

7) Having a beer after realizing your error makes your mistakes seem better. More beer = much better.

Garbage Disposal

Posted by matt on Apr 27, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

Before we we able to settle on our house, there were a few things that the previous owner needed to fix. One of these items was the splash guard in the garbage disposal.

As you can tell, it was a bit destroyed. Well, upon our walkthrough the second time, everything appeared to be normal and fixed, with a note from the contractor saying if we ever needed further work done, to call.

Well, I didn’t hang onto that note, and now I’m really happy I didn’t. Our first day in the house, our dishwasher went on the fritz (that’s a whole different story), so we had to the dishes by hand. No biggie, but as I was washing some silverware, I happen to look down and notice that the splash guard was all ripped up again. MC and I looked at each other and confirmed that we had seen it fixed. How odd. That is, until I looked into the drain, and pulled out a small little fake splash guard that the contractor simply had just placed over top of the broken one. Great job Mr. Contractor, way to screw us over. Well, I went online to see how hard it would be to fix this little problem, and much to my surprise almost everyone had said it was an easy 10-20 minute fix. I went to our super friendly (no sarcasm, it is seriously super friendly) Home Depot and picked up a new splash guard for under $10 and then got underneath the sink to pull down the disposal.

All I had to do was detach the white pipe seen in the back, which was held on with a screw, and the twist the ring at the top until the disposal detached. Not hard at all, except it weighed a bit more than I expected it to, so I had to hold the disposal in one hand and unscrew the bolts with the other. Well, after 20 minutes and a small workout, we had a new disposal splash guard installed, thanks to yours truly.

Sorry for the bad photos, my iphone doesn’t do the best quality in low light. All in all, it was a cheap quick fix, that for some reason this contractor tried to be cheaper and quicker meaning the job wasn’t done right…or at all in this case.