Was going through some pictures on FB memories and realized I never made a build thread for this major remodel. Biggest project I’ve ever taken on. Basically gutted the entire living floor of our raised ranch. Kitchen, dining room, living room and 3 bedrooms. Tore down 2 walls, one of which was load bearing and installed some big engineered beams as well as a cantilevered beam in the ceiling downstairs to carry the load. Thankfully my good friend is a structural engineer and was able to help with the plans/beam/town approval process. We ended up having to do one post because my roof trusses were never properly sized and no matter how he designed the beam there was going to be too much deflection with snow load. The only postless solution would involve a full roof and truss tear off to install proper full trusses. Way outside my budget and the single post wasn’t that big a deal to incorporate into the island.
We went with Ikea for the cabinets after talking to three friends that did Ikea kitchens, one of which sold his house and then did Ikea a 2nd time which I thought was about as solid of an endorsement as you could get.
New lighting throughout, refinished the existing hardwood and had the existing matched into the kitchen which was the only room that didn’t have original hardwood. We did hire that job out to Nickel City since it involved every square foot our of living space and I couldn’t afford to have the house down for the amount of time it would take to DIY it myself. Now on to the pictures:
Here’s what we came up with using the Ikea kitchen design tool online. We then had a consultation with the Ikea kitchen designers (which was supposed to be in person at Ikea Burlington but got moved to virtual because of covid). For not being a designer I only missed a side panel next to the dish washer so I did pretty well.
Here’s a link to the online planning tool. Very cool stuff.
https://kitchen.planner.ikea.com/planner/#/gb/en/
Some before. I don’t have a ton of before in the album and don’t really feel like searching.
Exploratory demo seeing what kind of mess I was in for moving wiring and switches out of a wall that was about to not exist:
The wife was very happy to finally be getting her new kitchen:
One of two Ikea pallets delivered and unpacked:
The local freight company lost the entire 2nd pallet. Thankfully it was found the next day and delivered.
Shit gets real when the dumpster shows up:
So many layers of shitty floor. I spent an entire day and at least 3 gallons of sweat getting that floor up. and pulling remnants of staples and nails.
Exposing the beam/header/truss mess:
Temporary supports so the house doesn’t fall down on us:
So long final cabinets. I was able to leave the ovens and dishwasher basically free standing for much of the remodel which really helped with living through this:
Hey, I know, let’s destroy the downstairs too since we have to cantilever the load because the load bearing wall upstairs doesn’t actually line up with the steel beam and posts downstairs. At this point we no longer have a room of refuge to escape the remodel:
So many Simpson ties, strapping and lags my buddy said we should send Simpson some pictures and see if they’d send us a couple t-shirts or something:
The evening the beam was in. That moment where we went, “OMG, this is going to be a completely different house when we’re done”. We knew it would be, but man it was exciting to see the new footprint for real with the walls down.
This was also the night of many rum drinks when my structural engineer buddy had another genius idea. The coat closet in our house is at the top of the stairs, and since that’s a really inconvenient place for a coat closet we just put coat hooks and shoe racks in the foyer and made the coat closet a pantry. Brian goes to my wife, "Jen, come here, reach into this pantry. See, you can’t even come close to reaching the back. Jay, you need to cut this way back so it will open up this area around the island. I guarantee you your first big party people are going to hang out around that island and you’ll want that extra space. Probably his best idea the whole project. So, out comes the sawzall again:
Recessed LED lighting going in. All powered by Lutron Caseta smart switches.
Replacing floor sections and starting to rough in drywall since the inspector came and signed off on all our work:
Another, “Holy shit, I barely recognize this house” excited moments. No reason for the purple drywall other than having scraps from other projects that happened to be the right size:
Since we were moving the cooktop from the perimeter wall to the island and didn’t want a hood vent sticking down in our open space, we went with a pop up vent and needed to run an exhaust duct through the floor and out the back wall of the house. We also had to relocate a return from the wall that didn’t exist to an outside wall, as well as move a gas line. Much help from @Wahoo and Vantage Heating and Cooling on that part:
You can see cement board for the backsplash has gone up in this one.
The typing is starting to lag pretty bad, will continue in next post because I think I’m hitting some kind of memory limit in chrome.