Mom’s Kitchen Renovation

About a month ago my mom flew to Vancouver to visit her terminally ill sister who has since passed away.  During this time, it was an opportunity for me to add a new face to her kitchen. It was quite a bit of work, probably about 40-50hours, but I am so glad I did it. I have to give a HUGE thanks to Benson, who on the day before my mom came home, helped me from 9AM to 3:30AM the next day. It was crazy. Here are some pictures before I started.

That receptacle with the yellow cord hanging out was pretty sketchy. Actually, it was very sketchy. The bottom plastic outlet was completely torn off from the refrigerator which has no wiggle room in that corner. It was the bare metal with live power running. I hate going to the basement, so [idiotically] I replaced the plug with the power still on (doin’ it live!).  I managed to avoid a shock.

This tall cupboard was added a few years ago. I filled in that big space so it doesn’t look disjointed from the wall.

I scraped the stippling stuff off the ceiling. In this picture I am about 3/4 done. It was a pain in the bum, by the time I was done I was covered with a solid layer of dust and the entire kitchen was covered with little stipple rocks.

There was mac-tac/wallpaper all over these cupboards. The previous owners were too lazy to take the old stuff off when they put new on, so there was at least 3-4 layers in all the cupboards and drawers. When I finally got it all off, it revealed poor carpentry and some hella bad water damage.

I eventually filled all these little cracks in and sanded off the booger looking glue.

One morning when I went to her house around 7AM I seen these flowers in her yard and thought they were picture worthy.

More water damage in the cupboards.

To cover it up, and seal it off forever, I decided tiling this area would be the easiest and best looking way to fix the issue.

The area below the cupboard (above the counter top) was already tiled. I tiled the area inside the cupboard.

Here is Benson working on the floor after we painted the primer and final coat on the kitchen. The flooring underneath the old linoleum was in very poor condition, so I decided it would be best to leave the lino on and use a belt sander to rough it up before we stuck down the new tiles. In the end it worked out very well.

Here is me working on the final piece of the floor. It was about 3AM at this point. A few days after this I was in severe pain with a sore back. Now I see why.

Here is the kitchen in its completed form. I took all the cupboard doors and drawers home so I could router a new edge on them. The old edge was was a bumpy and square, so I rounded it off with a table router. I also put new handles on. I used all the old hinges, but I painted them black to match the handles.

I thought it would look nice if I used black receptacles and light switches to match the black and white theme, you can see one of them here. It’s crooked in this picture but I fixed that.

I painted the heat register black. It used to be a rusted brown register with some calcium on it for some weird reason. To get the calcium off I let it sit in a container of diluted hydrochloric acid.

This has nothing to do with the renovation but it’s a table I made for my mom last year and I want to show it off =P. Also, she really needs to get some new chairs.

I put new taps on and re-did some of the plumbing under the sink. The old taps were leaky.

I still haven’t put the quarter-round baseboard on to cover the edge of the flooring but I’ll do that some time.

The kitchen doesn’t look like complete garbage anymore so I am happy.