Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Carpenter…

I’m a versatile kind of guy. When I’m presented with mystifying information, I try my best to look at it from all angles. Study possible permutations. Seek alternate explanations. So after long and careful cogitation and rumination, mixed with a copious number of naps, I’ve come to the conclusion that my wife takes perfectly good pictures with her cellphone. It must be me that’s out of focus.

It pains me to think on it, but I’ve passed on some sort of blurry gene to my sons as well. They appear to be out of focus all the time, too. There’s also some sort of dark aura or emanation all around us, causing pictures of us to look underwater. Of course, we’re only underwater financially, but something is causing it. It must be me.

So here we are installing several of the very few closed cabinets in this kitchen. This set is going over the stove, which is under that fuzzy moving blanket. If you ever have to install cabinets like this, it’s smart to attach as many of them together as you can lift, and install them as a unit. They go together hard one at a time on the wall. I’m removing the cleat we used to support the cabs while we attached them to the studs in the wall. The backsplash will eventually cover the leftover screw holes, so we don’t worry about makin ’em.

I like open shelving in the kitchen. I don’t like it around the stove. Even when there’s a range hood (coming soon), cooking fumes makes stuff greasy right around the stove. Spices and such come in so many package configurations and sizes that they display poorly out in the open. And directly over the stove cabinets don’t usually get daily use. That’s a recipe for greasiness if they’re not enclosed.

Since I’ve already maligned so many kitchen designs, I might as well keep going, and tell you I hate overlay kitchen doors. I only use inset doors when I build cabinets. They’re fussy to fit, so they’re not as popular as they used to be. I like the way they look, and the gratifying thunk they make when the magnetic catch hits home.

There she be. My poor, long-suffering wife finally has a hood with a light over her stove. It was the cheapest thing at the home store, but she still hugged the box when I brought it home. Little things like that are important in a kitchen. Good light, sharp knives, unlocked booze cabinets nearby; that sort of thing.

Working late here, I gather. Either that, or it’s finally winter, when the sun comes up just over the horizon, looks ashamed of itself, and then sets behind the mountains about four hours later. These cabinets were exactly to my wife’s specifications. Open shelves for big bowls and things on the left, All the pots and pans in deep drawers on the right. They’re just plopped there, waiting to be attached to each other, shimmed to the floor, and screwed to the wall. The inspector is hard at work, as usual.

Speaking of things made to order, Mrs. Cottage was tired of a trash barrel running around loose in the kitchen. I went out on the intertunnel and priced pull out trash cabinet hardware. Apparently, everyone but me is an Arab sheik with an oil well out back. I couldn’t believe how much they cost. Let’s make one.

We had a cabinet shell that wasn’t good for anything else, so we used that. I had some very heavy-duty drawer slides. We bought two plastic buckets for cheap. The pullout part is just a tray with two rounded rectangles cut out of its top. It’s all made with scrap 3/4″ birch plywood, which was already prefinished.

The front is just a simulacrum of a cabinet, with a honking big handle to make opening and closing it easy. Trash in the front, recycling in the rear, just like the town dump. We’ll put a proper piece of countertop on it later. Having a counter on both sides of the stove is nearly mandatory in kitchen design, if you ask me.

The other cabinets are affixed to the wall and floor now. We plopped a length of demolished countertop on them to keep the kitchen humming. We’ll find a use for it somewhere when we install the real countertops.

Of course, like everything else in the house, the wall wasn’t plumb, or flat, or at right angles to anything else, so i shimmed it and skinned it over with drywall to get ready for finishes. Purple drywall is for damp locations, of course. That location ain’t damp, but the purple color is nice, ain’t it, and we already had the piece in the house.

So I guess it must have been the fall, because my regular helper is nowhere to be found in the pictures. He must have been in class. Luckily, I had another helper to step in and hold one end of the trim while I nailed it off.

[To be continued. To help support Sippican Cottage, tell a friend about us, link to us, subscribe for our intermittent updates, hit the tip jar, or buy a book. Thanks!]

Home Depot Baklava

We’re moving right along now. If you ever have to install kitchen cabinets, take it from me, install the uppers first. It’s tough on your back to reach over the lowers to work on the uppers. Make your life still easier by screwing a cleat on the wall at 54″ above the floor, then resting the upper cabinet on it while you affix it to the wall. The 54″ measurement is 36″ high cabinets and counter plus 18″ of clearance between the counter and the upper cabs. Puts lots of very big screws directly into studs and/or blocking you put in the wall, because cabinets get full of dishware and they’re very heavy when loaded. The real problem with cabinets coming unfastened from the wall and turning all your dishes into china gravel and sending you to the hospital is generally not just the weight. People stand on things to reach high up, and grab the cabinet if (when) they slip, and they pull the cabinet away from the wall. Add that pulling motion to the downward weight of the dishware, and you get earthquake-level destruction.

To keep the kitchen humming, we made a place for dishes and glasses right away. The drawer cabinet on the left has a piece of leftover plywood covered with shellac overspray for a (temporary) countertop, but it’s full of everything to set a table and so forth:

I don’t know why kitchens have acres of cabinet doors in them. I have found that pretty much everything below waist level should be in drawers, not shelves inside cabinets inside doors. With a few exceptions that we’ll get to, all the upper cabinets should either be open, or plain shelves. Kitchens would be better with a lot fewer cabinets, with a spacious pantry right next to it to gather all the clutter in one place. Pantries show everything to you all at once when you’re looking for something, but keep your kitchen proper from being messy. The rule of thumb I use is: Can a stranger find what they’re looking for in your kitchen? If not, you have too many cabinets.

Alrighty, then. With the bad sink demolished and the wall patched up, we can move the stove to its final location. You may have noticed an unexplained elevator shaft or laundry chute or something standing in the corner all of a sudden. It’s empty, except up high as a place where the HVAC ducts make their turn to feed the bathroom. What gives?

I’ll tell you what gives. I. Hate. Corner Cabinets. Hate’m. I despise lazy susans and detest every form of pull-out folderol that kitchen manufacturers use to try to convince you that corner cabinets aren’t a colossal waste of time and money. They never, ever work. Like most problems, I solve it by ignoring it. No corner cabinet is best corner cabinet. The walls will have cabinet runs that die into them, and that’s that.

We’ve installed more subfloor as we go, but we can’t put it off any longer. The big back wall with the windows has got to be stripped down to… I don’t know what, exactly. It was a Home Depot baklava of layers. I started pulling things off and wondered if I ever get to something solid I could trust to start finishing the walls.

I’ve seen all sorts of renovations over the years, and I have a library card and all, but I had to search my mind pretty hard to figure out what I was pulling off the wall.

Way in the cobwebbed back pages of my mind, where I keep terrifying memories of homasote horrors and abitibi atrocities I have known, I ran out of bogeymen. Eventually there was this black, fuzzy membrane glued on like the devil that completely baffled me. It didn’t taste like asbestos, so I wasn’t worried exactly, just stumped. After a while, I just looked at the kid and said: Come on down to Crazy Sippican’s Kitchen! Everything must go! We nuked it from orbit, like we should have right away. We took all the horsehair plaster off the lath, and all the layers over it, and were done with wondering.

I learned to work neat many years ago. We vacuumed the lath to keep plaster dust haboobs to a minimum when you opened a door or window. This is how you stay married, people. Diamond jewelry and six-pack abdomens can only get you so far, and eventually you’re going to be required to keep horsehair out of the potato salad to keep the magic alive.

We fixed the electricity while the wall was somewhat open, and then drywalled.  We minimized horizontal seams that would need to be taped, and saved some waste in the sheets of drywall, by laying a strip at the top first, and then filling in the slightly less than eight feet below it. Or we’re just strange, and did it that way for no sensible reason. I can’t remember.

The inspector signed off on it, so I assume it turned out OK either way.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting.]

Lemonade

I’m an odd person. That oddity suggest additional oddities to people that don’t know me that well. My sister in law asked my wife if I was planning on leaving the drain pipe from the upstairs bathroom hanging suspended and exposed just below the ceiling in the kitchen. Apparently it’s in my scope of behaviors to possibly do that. Look out for me. I might lash out and plumb any which way at any time.

But we’re making practical accommodations to our circumstances. We’re not daft. The ceilings in the house are something like nine feet high, depending on how many additional ceilings have been added to them over the years. We can solve our plumbing and HVAC problems using soffits. There isn’t enough room in the floor for plumbing to be hidden in it, and there are big timbers in the walls that block attempts to get plumbing around corners where you need it. Soffits are up high where only the cat goes, so they’re not intrusive.

Here’s an important interim step. The sink and the dishwasher are installed and working. The kitchen can’t be out of action for more than an hour at a time or you’ve failed as a renovator. Look at that pleasant window with a pleasant view for my pleasant wife to wash dishes for her pleasant children, and you know, me. We plopped a piece of demolished counter on top of the dishwasher, and plunked the coffee pot on it. The refrigerator continues to wander the kitchen aimlessly. It will eventually live across the aisle from the dishwasher, but that spot isn’t ready for prime time. Prime time comes just before paint time, by the way.

When the good sink works, you can get rid of the bad sink. The wall behind it was disaster, seven ways from Sunday. There was a little miniature room in there, built to produce a flat wall for the cabinets. It looked like an opportunity.

As you can observe from the Pisa-angled 2×4 stud arrangement, dyspeptic dyslexic drunkards have been renovating my house since Calvin Coolidge was making four-sentence State of the Union speeches.  But I realized right away the hidey-hole void was perfect for getting HVAC ducts into the back of the house. Yeah, I installed an entire HVAC system soon after all this. I’ll bore you with that later. But after running up and down the stairs forty times, and mis-measuring thirty-nine times, I figured that I could run an 8″ round duct inside that wall, straight up to the unheated back office and new bathroom (yeah, I’ll write about that, too, I’m warning you). On the way by, I could branch off and heat and cool the kitchen and the nearby master bathroom. Under the floor, it was a straight shot in a joist bay to the air handler plenum in the basement. Beautiful.

We put in ducts for later, filled up at least ten percent of the mouseholes with expanding foam, filled the cavity with insulation, and drywalled it closed. We were getting to the point where we needed kitchen cabinets. We couldn’t afford any, but luckily I already owned a set. No, Really. When life gives you lemons, some people suggest making lemonade. I march to a different drummer (Joe Morello), and I say, “Tell life to pound sand and slash at it with a box cutter and squirt lemon juice in the wounds.”

Quite a few years ago, I got stiffed at the most inopportune moment by a customer who begged me to build them a set of kitchen cabinets. I got a deposit, and bought a whole lot of material, because kitchens need acres of plywood and beaucoup ball-bearing slides and hinges galore (that’s a good stripper name) and many boardzawood. I worked diligently to produce an entire set of cabinet carcases from solid birch ply. The plywood was expensive, and pre-finished with a very tough polyester resin-type coating. As agreed in our contract, when I was half done, I asked for the second of three payments. This payment was due smack dab at the outset of the great recession, and I needed it. I had already been stiffed about a dozen times in succession when this woman joined the party. She didn’t just stiff me for the second payment, oh no. She somehow got the credit card company to claw back the first payment, too. Everyone at the various credit card offices and my bank and the payment acceptance place was very nice about it. They cheered me up by commiserating with me that I was entirely in the right, but tough luck, we’re taking the money anyway. I could have sued her, I suppose. I hear lawyers are cheap.

So I’ve had a dozen or so kitchen cabinet shells ready to go since the president had a drawl. I was saving them for a rainy day. Financial rain has been falling for the last fifteen years or so, so I figured now was the time. After all, they were mine. I mixed shellac and dark walnut pigment and sprayed the interiors that would be visible if the cabinets were open. I made the frames, door fronts, and doors out of any bits of hardwood hanging around the workshop, including some stuff I pulled off the walls in the kitchen. We salvaged the cup pulls from around the house, and spray painted them a bronze-y color. The exteriors are painted with some sort of magic potion they came up with recently, water based alkyd paint. Forget flying cars, we’ve got water based alkyd paint. That’s the future.

So I made lemonade, I guess, after all. But I do have a box cutter in my tool belt at all times, should the opportunity arise.

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The It Might Still Work, But I Doubt It Age

We have to fix the floor.

Check that. I ain’t fixing the floor. I know how. I also know it’s not worth the effort. I’ve got to flatten it out some, and get a substrate down we can work on. That’s a worthwhile expenditure of a few pennies and some effort.

I mentioned creep in an earlier essay. If you’ve just tuned in, I wasn’t referring to any of my relatives. Creep is the deformation of wood structural members over time. The kitchen floor was a textbook example of creep. The span was too long, the floor slowly sagged in the middle, the joists and the occupants got used to their new shape, and eventually the floor became a permanently dished shape. This was exaggerated by the slumping of the back of the house, because the side walls didn’t slump as badly as the back wall. That made the kitchen floor dished in all directions.

It would have been a major overhaul to sister new joists under the kitchen floor after jacking it back up. No thanks. The house is all roly-poly anyway. Let’s flatten out the floor as best we can and move on.

First, we take an out-of focus snapshot of the opening where the kitchen meets the dining room. It was essentially a ramp going up. We cut out the nasty birch strip flooring, and sanded the hump at the edge of the dip with a belt sander. The floor was all patched right there anyway. Even if we could refinish the birch, it would have looked like a quilt sewn by a blind aunt when we were done.

The we installed a piece of exterior plywood we had kicking around. We lowered the leading edge at the dining room to take into account the thickness of the new subfloor we were about to lay on top of it. That took the curse off the uphill climb from kitchen to dining. We shimmed and glued and nailed it to death.

There was a worse dip where the sink would be placed. The floor basically had a trench in it right there. A million footfalls in front of the run of cabinets there a century ago was responsible, I’ll bet. A fully loaded refrigerator had stood there for decades as well, slowly tipping forward as the floor sagged away from the exterior wall. We need to deal with the dip. I went to the local lumber yard and asked for some floor leveler. They had this substance they called floor leveler, that was labeled floor leveler, and they honestly believed was floor leveler. It was all they had, so I decided to call it floor leveler, too.

Back in the day, we used to buy stuff that was basically mortar. It worked pretty well. This stuff was basically drywall compound. I kept looking at the label, and the floor, and the goo in the bucket, and wondered where society had lost its way in the last twenty years. I gave it an honest shot.

The next day, it had already started to crumble. If you know anything about these types of remodeling jobs, the bete noire of all flooring jobs is a crunchy sound when you walk over a newly installed floor. After you’ve tiled or whatever, it’s too late to fix it. It sounds like you’re walking on shredded wheat as you make your way to your computer to rip your flooring installer a new one on Yelp. I hit the patch with a hammer a couple of times, and the whole thing popped out. Then I did what I should have done in the first place. Experience is a cruel teacher, but men will learn from no other, said some famous guy who can go piss up a rope for pointing that out to me and my floor.

Let’s fill it in solid.

I laid a stick across the Cumberland Gap of floors, from high spot to high spot, and measured and marked the depths in various places, and traced the outline of the area we had to fill. The deepest part was about 3/4″, so we cut an oval piece of 1/4″ subfloor, and beveled the edges with a belt sander. Then we did it again, twice, in ever increasing areas, until the dippity-do was filled in. I glued and nailed that sumbitch to death. Then we laid sheets of subfloor over the whole thing.

The adhesive was the same brand I used to use. It didn’t smell bad, which was a bad sign. It used to make your eyes water and gave you headaches and the occasional out-of-body, transcendental vision. If you got it on your skin you’d wear it for weeks.  Now the stuff just lays there and sorta pretends it’s glue.

I know all about ages. There was the Jazz Age, and the Atomic Age, and the Information Age. I went to school in the Bronze Age, myself. Anyway, I think we should name the 2020s as the “It Might Still Work, But I Doubt It Age.” It doesn’t roll off the tongue though, so I’ll keep working on it.

I nailed the dickens out of the subfloor with ring-shank underlayment nails. It is hard as hell to bang ring shank nails into an ancient birch subfloor, so I got to do the whole thing myself while my spare heir got to stand behind me and learn how to swear by listening to me.

I see my knees have given out by this time. We’re only doing three sheets of subflooring right now. That’s 96 square feet of floor, and it didn’t even cover half of the floor in there. Victorian houses have big rooms, people.

But with the smooth, flat floor right there, we can install the sink for good, right next to the open cabinet for the dishwasher. The pex piping runs along the back wall behind the dishwasher, and up into the sink cabinet through two ready-made punchouts in the cabinet. You can see how deep the left hand basin is in this picture (the black rectangle on the left).

Reader and commenter blackwing was wondering in the comments about our building inspector:

I like the picture of your construction supervisor in the last picture. Has he/she been helping by sticking their head right into where you’re working every step of the way?

Apparently blackwing is a veteran of the cat-owning wars.

[More kitchen folderol tomorrow. If you’d like to support Sippican Cottage, tell a friend about us, leave a comment, subscribe for (ir)regular updates, buy a book, or hit the tip jar. Thanks!]