Update on the kitchen lighting: everything under the cabinets is installed, and the old garbage has been cut away and tossed. I’m using heat shrink butt-weld connectors to join the wiring up with the speaker wire they ran behind the cabinets in 2004, which doesn’t thrill me, but given the low voltage these LED lights demand I’m not as worried as I might be. Something that is shocking, though, is how BRIGHT these lights are. They outdo the old halogen bulbs by a factor of about five. I wasn’t able to find lights by that manufacturer in black, so some plastic spray paint had to suffice. Four of these go at the top of each of the glass cabinets, and I still have to put those in.
The next project is to replace the wall heater in the half-bath downstairs. The thermostat on this thing barely registers, so you can crank it all the way to 10 and it’ll have a long hard think about things before it decides it might kick on. This should not be the case, because the porch areas are generally 10˚ cooler than the rest of the house in the wintertime. And nobody enjoys a frozen toilet at any time of year. The trick with this installation is that the heater went in before I put the headboard on the wall, so it’s going to involve some careful deconstruction of the heater unit to avoid ruining the woodwork. I did inquire into what a replacement thermostat would cost but found that the part itself cost as much as a new heater, and that there were so many different versions of this heater produced I wasn’t sure if I was going to find a compatible part.
My ribs are feeling better after a week of low-impact activity. I’ve learned to pull my knees up to my chest and pivot my entire body when I’m rolling over in bed as opposed to using my core to do the work for me. Stupid stuff like pulling the handbrake on the OG-V , pulling on my socks, and taking stairs two at a time are still out of the question, but I’m not as stiff as I was last Friday. Sneezing still sucks, though.
Friday morning I drove up to the Towson library, loaded a file onto their 3D control computer, hit START and reviewed hundreds of applicants for a graphic design position based in Africa as two new dealer badges printed in a slightly larger size. After the fiasco with my first silicone mold attempt destroyed the first badge and the second printed too small, I needed a couple of examples to work with. Luckily I was able to reserve a block of time long enough to print one decent example, abort a second misfire, and print a third excellent example slightly larger than the original. After work I sanded down the rough edges, built a proper mold box out of foam core and hot glue, and mixed up a new batch of silicone after I’d let it warm to room temperature. After pouring it, I set it on a seed starter mat to keep warm overnight. Saturday morning, the silicone at the top is hard to the touch—unlike my first attempt, which took five days and a heat lamp to finally set.
The next step is to go and find a cheap used pan at the thrift store and melt a lump of lead-free tin I bought from Amazon. This will get poured into the mold and, hopefully, provide me with a metal version of the dealer badge that will stand up to heat better than the plastic will.
The under-cabinet lighting in our kitchen has been dimming and dying for several years now, especially after I switched the annoying halogen bulbs out with LEDs. They are small round unmarked pucks connected by wire snaked in and behind the cabinets and connected with a bespoke two-prong plastic coupling, making their removal or replacement impossible—there is no manufacturer information to trace back to to match the couplings. So I’m resigned to swapping the 20-year-old pucks out with new LED units and splicing the old connectors onto the new units. This does not thrill me, but LED carries very low voltage (the original lights go through a big brick of a transformer, while the LEDs plug right into the wall) and I’m confident in my soldering and splicing abilities. It’s just going to take a lot of time and crouching under cabinets, which is going to be murder on my ribs.
We redid our kitchen back in the fall of 2005, when we were newlyweds and it was still a relatively good idea to walk into a Sears to buy Kenmore appliances. And for the most part, the appliances have held up. We had to replace the fridge a few years ago, but our stove and combo oven are still humming along. The dishwasher was beginning to worry us, however. Already a loud unit, it was getting louder and washing less with every week. It gets run pretty much every day, and due to Finn’s distracted method of loading it (skipping the step of scraping food off the plates first) it had to work extra hard. I’ve disassembled the screen and chopper several times, and mopped food sludge out of the bottom repeatedly. We weren’t surprised, then, when it stopped working last week: the light on the front flashed on startup, which meant that the computer was confused. I found a couple of reset codes on the internet and tried them all with no luck. I cleaned out the drains and the chopper. After another reset, I restarted it, but the light continued flashing sadly, as if to say, “that’s all, folks.”
So we hit the Home Depot to shop for a new one. We’ve got multiple relatives and friends who all swear by their Bosch, so we took the chance on German engineering and laid our money down on a 500 model. The 800 model has wi-fi for some reason. I guess it emails you when the pots are in the wrong rack, or to tell you when it piddles on the floor. They are all super-quiet and have a third tray on the top for silverware. Apparently we need to watch a video, take a quiz, and be licensed to load it properly. We had to settle for a stainless-front unit, as the black units are special-order and apparently trapped on a container ship somewhere. I’m going to see if I can get a black replacement panel and install it at some point, as we like the way a black unit blends in with the cabinet better.
Two guys showed up today and traded the old for the new in about an hour. I guess 17 years isn’t too bad, all things considered.
Here’s where we stand in the kitchen right now. The grout is sealed and ready but there are two plugs in the corner that aren’t working for some reason—they were fine before I put the tile in but I can’t get them to work. I replaced both of the outlets with new units; sometime GFCI outlets fail over time, but I can’t for the life of me understand what’s happening with these. Strangely the one in the back corner works fine because it’s on a separate circuit. The other big update is that I replaced the rope lighting above the cabinets. Over fifteen years the original filament unit had slowly died, so I pulled that out and replaced it with an LED version. It looks strange in the photo because the under-counter lights are bright white LEDs while the rope is warm light, but in person they warm up the whole kitchen dramatically.
Jen and I were talking this morning about how much brighter it is in there during the day, due to the light reflecting off the shiny white surfaces. It could all be wishful thinking, but I know there’s a big difference when I walk in there every day. Best $200 spent this year.
A few weeks ago, Jen was at Lowe’s shopping for something and stumbled upon a tile pattern she liked. She sent me a picture and we talked it over, and I bought a few to bring home and test-fit. You see, we’ve been thinking about a tile backsplash in the kitchen since 2005 when we had the whole thing redone; we just never decided on what we wanted back there.
This is a large (2’wX1’w) tile with a repeating wavy pattern, sort of a knockoff of the large architectural panels that were popular 10 years ago. It’s meant to be sort of a subway tile for an entire wall, but for our purposes it was perfect: a minimum of grouted area to have to clean, an organic pattern to break up all of the right angles, and a shiny surface to reflect under-counter lights back out into the room.
The big problem was the number of outlets we have surrounding the counter and how I’d cut holes in the tile to bring them all through. I did some digging and found an Italian-made sawblade designed to fit an angle grinder that got stellar reviews for cutting small holes, so I ordered that from Amazon and then bought two boxes of tile.
Saturday morning I rented a wet tile saw, cleared the counters off, and got to work. For the most part it was easy going, and after I figured out the best way to cut outlet holes right the first time it went smoothly. The corner by the range was the only place where things got tricky, but I found a way to make it work and proper application of grout should hide any sins.
There’s a full size tile on the bottom and then a ~2″ slice around the top edge that meets the underside of the cabinets. With some creative engineering I was able to get a medium-size tile saw to cut an oversize tile exactly how I needed.
So, next up is grout; I’m already planning to get a tub of white grout to fix a small stain in the new bathroom floor (one of the cats knocked over a can of purple PVC pipe primer, and that shit stains everything) so I can use some of the remainder to grout the kitchen.
For a grand total of ~$200 and a full Saturday, I’m pretty pleased.
We did a round-trip into Ohio over the weekend for a funeral, one of Jen’s extended family. His name was Floyd and he was a funny man, extremely nice to me when I met him, and he and his wife always sent us Christmas cards. While we were there we saw Jen’s sister Annie and her son Scott, as well as her father and the larger Ohio contingent of her mother’s family. It was a long trip out and a long trip back, my second in a month, and I don’t think I need to go to Ohio again for a while.
While that was happening, our refrigerator decided it was going to go wonky (probably in protest of the small upright freezer Jen bought and installed in the basement). Jen had emptied and defrosted it after moving a pile of stuff to the new freezer, but when we plugged it back in the temperature in the fridge section wasn’t staying cold enough. We packed up a bunch of food and brought it to our brother and sister’s spare garage fridge the night before we left; hopefully we haven’t lost three dozen eggs and two gallons of milk. On our return from Ohio the fridge was cooled properly, if not slowly, so we did some recon on the tail end of the Labor Day sales to see what’s out there.
Most of the new model fridges have things like TV screens and cooling drawers and lights that come on when you knock on the window (yes, they have windows). Most of them are bottom-freezer designs, which I like. They are larger, taller and deeper than ours because they were made for modern kitchens. Ours is a smaller traditional top-freezer design. It’s hiding out in the old hall closet under the stairs, tucked into a hole hacked in the wall. Because of the angle of the stairwell above, I’ve only got a certain amount of width and height I can work with, and the closet is only so deep. Most modern units are 70″ high by 36″ wide, and I think I can make a hole big enough to squeeze one in there. I would have liked to have the weekend to cut and trim the walls to test my theory before making a $1500 purchase, but didn’t have enough time, so we will miss out on Labor Day sales. I’m betting our fridge will probably last another couple of months, especially now that the heat and humidity has left, and we’ll look at a new one in late winter when money is more plentiful.
Meanwhile there’s a hurricane blowing in this week, and we have no idea what it will do to this area. I bought a submersible pool pump from Amazon for delivery tomorrow, and I’ll go out and shore up the defenses after work tomorrow night. I would also have liked to clean the gutters this weekend, but I guess I’ll deal with what I get when it gets here.
You can’t see it in the photos, but there’s a fresh coat of white paint on the basement and back doors, as well as a ton of touchups throughout the room. The shade on the back door is new, and there’s a matching shade over the window courtesy of Jen and her sewing machine.
One of the drawbacks to having multiple projects going at any one time is trying to remember where certain tools got left. Is it in the basement by the toolbench? Or is it out on the side porch with the insulation? Did I leave it out in the garage with the Scout? My screwgun is still AWOL and presumed dead, and I have an entire toolcaddy that disappeared sometime last month with my 1/2 metric sockets.
Monday night, after bathing the wee one and tucking her into bed with Ox and Teddy, I spent a half hour gathering tools from four different locations around the grounds of the Lockardugan estate and prepared to do battle with the kitchen sink. Our kitchen is fabulous, and it’s been five years of bliss since the renovation, but there’s one thing that didn’t get done right which is beginning to pose a problem: Our sink. We bought an undermount double sink to go with our granite countertops, and at first blush we loved everything about it. But after a month or two, we noticed it was beginning to sag downwards from the stone, to the point where the silicone seal was peeling apart. I looked underneath and found that the installer had used two pieces of scrapwood on either side of the lip to tack it in place, a decidedly unprofessional solution to a potentially disastrous problem. (Both sinks full of water, plus the weight of the disposal, equals 100 lbs. or more).
I started propping the metal lip from underneath with lengths of wood cut to fit, but I soon got nervous about putting pressure on the weakest point of the granite slab (the sink cutout), so I took all of that stuff out. Instead, I carved all of the old silicone out—the stuff that’s separating and turning funky colors—and replaced it with new mold-resistant silicone. After five years, it’s doubtful I’ll get any love from the company who installed the counter, but I’m going to call and pitch a fit anyway just to see what happens.
(FYI, the proper method of undermount sink installation involves epoxy-bonding metal clips to the underside of the granite which hold the sink in place).
The range we bought was different from the one we originally chose, for several reasons. We thought the Kenmore 79363 was dual-fuel (electric oven, gas range) like the one in the store, but they offer a gas-only model as well. This range has five different burners, a cooktop that makes it easy to move pots around, and several different burner sizes for simmering, hardcore cooking, and regular heating. It came with a cast-iron grilling rack that reverses to a frying surface, something we haven’t played with yet. The difference between electric elements is huge—water boils much quicker, and the heat it puts off is immediate.
The oven has a convection option, soething that came in handy for browning the turkey on Thanksgiving. It’s 5 cubic feet of space, which means we were able to fit a 20 lb. bird and two casserole dishes of stuffing in at the same time. The user’s manual is huge, and there are several features we haven’t figured out yet. It also features a warming drawer on the bottom, which we tried using for the rolls on Thanksgiving.
Overall, I’d say we’re thrilled with the range. It’s everything we wanted without a $3,000 “Viking” badge stamped on the front.