Kitchen Reno - Part 5

The wife is happy: we bought a dishwasher. We ordered it from Sears ($644 including delivery) on Monday, and it will be delivered next Tuesday (when the cabinets are being installed). There isn’t much selection when it comes to 18” dishwashers (the standard size is 24” wide). You can basically choose your colour. We went to the Brick on Sunday, just to check around. So why is it they hump your leg when you don’t want to be bothered, but when you have a questions, no one is around. Then we get pawned off to the old guy who “doesn’t know” if they have an 18” dishwasher, so proceeds to surf Brick.com to check. Thanks but no. That is the second time we’ve asked a salesperson this week if they have something in stock, and they proceed to surf the interwebs for 5 minutes.

We picked up the flooring, TUNDRA white, last Sunday. We got all 7 packages (about 150 sq.ft.) and the underlay in the car. It was “free”; we used the gift cards we got when we purchased our kitchen cabinets. Otherwise, it would have been about $300.

We also finally went through all the boxes that contain our kitchen, and everything was there. (The wife actually told this to our contractor on the phone, and he was surprised; he said most people don’t do that.)

The plumber comes tomorrow and is going to rough-in the dishwasher, in addition to installing valves. The electrician was out yesterday to rough in the dishwasher. I didn’t realize we need a permit to do this; an inspector from the city is coming out on Monday to inspect the work. The electrician was $380, which included at $120 city permit.

The wife is having a hard time finding someone to paint and/or tile. One lady was supposed to come out last night at 7pm. Finally at 8pm, we left a message on her phone to not bother. The guy that came out earlier in the week gave us a price of $600 to paint four walls, and $1200 to tile the back splash. Seriously. We may be doing this ourselves.

Kitchen Reno - Part 4 - 100 Easy Pieces

IKEA delivered our kitchen on Tuesday. They called us a few weeks ago saying they had received it at the Calgary warehouse. They will store it up to 10 days, but after that they start charging you something like $20 per day.

We were surprised at how little stuff there is. Our whole new kitchen (not including new flooring, baseboards, and dishwasher) is in that room. It weighs 1000 lbs. And we have 7 days to confirm that everything was delivered. I started last night and I guess there is more stuff than I thought.

Next week and the countdown is on. The plumber comes next week to install shut-off valves on our sink. This will allow our contractor to install our sink when he installs our cabinets. The only concern I have is our water lines come in from the bottom of the cabinet (not from the back, like most sinks). We’ll have to drill holes in the sink cabinet bottom shelf and then lower it down overtop of the lines. We will also have the plumber get things ready for the dishwasher, which we will order this weekend.

The wife has a contact for a painter for our kitchen. After the bathroom, I don’t think she will ever paint again. We are going to try and match the blue on our IKEA dishes. It is a robin’s egg, or maybe powder, blue. The only problem we have is the front room and kitchen share a wall, so there isn’t an obvious place to stop painting. I think we’ve decided just to stop it at the edge of a doorway.

The last remaining question we have is whether to strip our floor before we put the new one down. There are two layers of vinyl floor in the kitchen, but one doesn’t go underneath the cabinets. When the new flooring is laid, there may be a bump near the new cabinets.

Kitchen Reno - Part 3

The contractor came over last Wednesday. He built all the showrooms at the Ikea store in Calgary (which gives me confidence). He quickly measured up our kitchen and gave us some suggestions. He agreed to do our flooring install, but doesn’t do plumbing, electrical (for the dishwasher hookup), painting, or tiling. He does haul all the crap away, which is awesome.

We booked our install for Aug. 31 through Sept. 2 (3 days). He figures it will only take 2 days but put another in to be safe. He noticed we don’t have valves on our sink faucet lines. He said if we have a plumber come in and put the valves in, he can install our sink. We’ll need the plumber to come in the next day so he can attach the drain (and dishwasher).

We got confirmation of our “pre-measure” from the contractor the next day. We need this to bring to Ikea so they can process our order. On Friday, we went to Ikea to actually buy everything.

They have discontinued the SOLAR white wall cabinet doors (which sucks because they don’t require hardware), but they do have the SOLAR beech base cabinet doors. We chose APPLÅD instead, which look exactly the same. The girl helping us was great, even when she screwed up and gave us LIDINGÖ instead of APPLÅD wall cabinet doors. (I think it was because her hyperactive coworker kept talking to her while she was trying to enter our order: DUDE, you can show her how far a pencil goes up your nose later!) Karen discovered this before we left the store but after we paid. So we had to go back upstairs, get a new order with the right doors, go to returns and have them void the transaction, and then have them ring in our new order. It wasn’t too bad; it gave us a chance to pay for home delivery.

So the total bill was $2800 and we got $400 in Ikea gift cards (which should cover the flooring). The only question left is: where do you store 800 lbs of cabinets and countertops in our little home?