Kitchen/Dining Room Renovation - Part 3

The ceiling is finally done! With the help of my son-in-law, all of the bad drywall sections on the ceiling were patched and I learned to mud them by watching videos and through practice.  Not bad for an amateur but it could have been better.  I'll probably hire a professional the next time I need any drywall taped and mudded. I'm sure I could get better but as infrequently as I will be doing that, it just doesn't make sense. Unless it's a small patch, I would recommend hiring a professional to anyone who may be thinking of doing it themselves.

Almost ready to mud

After tape and plastic

 I thought about spraying the texture on the ceiling myself after the first place quoted me $250 to do it. Since I had taped and put up plastic around the whole kitchen and put plastic and paper on the floor, this seemed a bit exorbitant. Fortunately I found a guy who would do it for $150 and I hired him. Plus points for me because after watching him do it I realized that was one job that was definitely out of my comfort zone. He did a great job! If I had to do it again, I would have made one change and would have had him mix Kilz 2 in with the texture.

There were water stains on the drywall that wasn't replaced and after the texture dried, those stains bled through. He told me to wait at least 48 hours before painting it so on Sunday I applied Kilz 2 to the entire kitchen ceiling. The results were excellent! I added a new LED light fixture to the ceiling and was almost done.

Ceiling complete!

After the repairs, you could feel the heat radiating from the attic at the points where the drywall was replaced due to the lack of insulation in those areas. About ten o'clock last night I climbed up into the attic crawl space with a roll of insulation and took care of that issue. Not fun. No, I mean REALLY not fun. I'm sure it was the equivalent of a couple of hours in a sauna.

We couldn't sand the cabinets in the house due to the wet ceiling so on Saturday we sanded the cabinet doors in the shed outside. With the help of my eldest daughter and my son-in-law, we were able to finish sanding them in just a few hours.  Hard work but the help was sure appreciated! One of the best uses of some of my budget money was the purchase of a Dewalt Heavy-Duty Random Orbit Sander. That doesn't link to the exact one I bought since mine doesn't have the hard case but it is close. I would highly recommend buying something similar if you have to do a lot of sanding.

Here is the picture which probably best shows what the ceiling looked like before I started. I wish I had taken some of just the ceiling but this was not a "planned" part of this project. LOL

Kitchen/Dining Room Renovation - Part 2

Several people have asked me for an update to the renovations I'm doing so here goes:

After getting the cabinets cleaned out and the doors, drawers and hardware removed, I started looking at the ceiling. If you notice in the picture from Part 1, there were these "decorative" beams with luan board above them. I've always hated them but was afraid to mess with them for fear of damaging the cabinets. I decided now was the time to see if there was sheetrock above them.

I removed one of the incandescent light fixtures and sure enough, there was sheetrock above. Bad news was, I didn't know what kind of condition it was in. Whoever put the ceiling up ran the electrical between the board and the sheetrock and twisted and taped the wires. I couldn't leave the electrical like that so the beams and boards had to come down. This project just got a lot bigger.

After removing the beams, boards and furring strips I was disappointed to find water damage to the ceiling.

  

I hate to admit it but this put me into a bit of "analysis paralysis". It took several days of mulling it over before I knew I had to make a decision and get back to work. I couldn't decide if I wanted to tear it all down or try to patch it. I am not a fan of acoustic aka popcorn ceilings but they do help to cover up imperfections. Since a ceiling of new sheetrock (professionally mudded) was not in my budget and since I did have SOME sheetrock on hand, I decided to patch, mud it myself and then put a popcorn ceiling back up.

My son-in-law had offered to help with the kitchen project once he was back in town and since he was, he came over to help tonight. This was awesome because this was definitely NOT a one person job at this point. Through a bit of trial and error, we got some of the damaged areas cut out and replaced. One more big patch tomorrow night and several small patches and we will be ready to mud the ceiling.

This is a shot with all the damaged areas removed

The biggest area partially patched

The hole over the stove patched.

Hopefully we'll have the ceiling finished this weekend and I can finally continue with the original project of sanding and painting the kitchen cabinets. LOL

Kitchen/Dining Room Renovation - Part 1

Although I had removed the contents from some of the cabinets before my wife and daughters left for the Philippines on Thursday, I count today as the official start of the renovation since I actually started demolition today. Originally the demolition was to consist of removing a couple of the cabinets my wife wanted removed, removing some UGLY paneling from the seventies or eighties in the dining room and removing some weird wood accent piece from above the stove.

Here is the "before" picture:

Anyone who has ever seen the television show "Renovation Realities" KNOWS this changed once I got started.

The cabinets to be removed actually came down without much problem even though I am working by myself. The melamine back splash (at least that's what I think it is) was more difficult but the melamine came off and left the glue on the wall without tearing the drywall. Some sanding should take care of that without too much difficulty. Wow, this was off to a rocking start!

Here is how it looked after the cabinets were removed:

Since the melamine was glued on and since I know the previous owner's modus operandi, I was afraid the paneling might have been glued on to the dining room wall as well so I decided to try to remove a piece and see. It was only nailed and was fairly easy to remove at the top so I figured I would remove the quarter round and the baseboard and remove it all the way. The quarter round came up easy but the baseboard was a different story.

The wood flooring was put down AFTER the baseboard so it was jammed between the wall and the floor. It's a good thing I planned on replacing the baseboard with something newer looking because I had to rip the old baseboard apart to get it out. After getting the old baseboard out and finishing removing the paneling, I was left with what has to be some of the UGLIEST wallpaper ever used in a dining area.

As you can see, the floor needs patching after the cabinet was removed. Fortunately I have some of this flooring stored away so hopefully that won't be too big an issue.  It will have to be built up so it's level because there are at least three floor coverings under there!

The kitchen ceiling is strange and I decided to see if there was drywall above it. I was hoping it would be easy to remove and go back to the original ceiling. I'm afraid this is where my nightmare begins! More on Tuesday. Can't work on it Monday night since I have pool league!

Political Correctness Madness

Wow! My nephew was creating a new football team for NCAA Football 10 for the XBox 360 at TeamBuilder.com and found he couldn't use his last name in the game. His last name is Dykes. Seems the people at EA Sports won't allow usage of a valid last name because it coincides with a derogatory term for a lesbian? Gimme a break! This has gone beyond all rational thinking into the land of stupidity.

I thought at first he was just pulling my leg but when I went to create a team for one of his brothers to use, I encountered the same stupid problem. I understand EA not wanting derogatory terms to be used in their product but to ban a legitimate name because it might also be used in that fashion seems to cross the line of all reason. I decided to investigate a bit farther.

Seems "Queen" is fine however anyone named Richard who goes by "Dick" is out of luck. If your last name is "Pus" then no problem but if your last name is "Puss" you can't use it. Looks like "Acock" is alright but I hope Ms. M. Pussycat from Massachusetts doesn't try to use her last name in the game. Interestingly, you can be John Gay but not John Dykes. Better hope no Asians with the last names of "Wang" or "Dong" try to be a coach in TeamBuilder because that's just too bad.

I searched PeopleFinder.com and WhitePages.com to make sure there were people with these name so please don't think I am making these up but the following legitimate last names are a no go: Nipple (over 100 results returned); Titus (oh for heaven's sake!); Fag (three returns); Negron (over 100 results returned); and the list goes on. *sigh*

I find it interesting that they put up a disclaimer concerning the possibility of inappropriate content when you download a team built in TeamBuilder but then lock it down to the point where MANY legitimate names are unable to be entered to begin with. If you saw the disclaimer and downloaded the content anyway only to find it was truly inappropriate, wouldn't EA be covered? I am surprised many of these people didn't push a class action lawsuit for denying them the right to use their name in the game.

Then again, lawsuit abuse is a topic for a different day.