Kitchen Faucet - Installed

And here is the Kitchen faucet reveal. It looks even better than I imagined. The color and style fits perfectly with the rest of the house, but still has wonderful modern (well, modern compared to 200 years ago) features such as the sturdy sprayer and 180 degree turn radius of the faucet. If I had to give one complaint about the faucet it would be that it is slightly too high. I like it being so high, because it's perfect for washing large pots, cookie sheets, platters, etc, but when washing smaller things it does cause a lot of splashing. I'm messy in the Kitchen, and that includes washing dishes, so I'm used to the front of my shirt getting wet when I'm cleaning up, but I'm finding that this faucet splashes more than others. The sink isn't deeper than usual (it's 9" deep I believe), so if the faucet was maybe 1 or 2 inches shorter, it would have been perfect. But... I'm not complaining. Like I said, it'll be nice to be able to wash things without having to struggle with the faucet being in the way!


We're having a hard time adjusting to there being running water in the Kitchen. We keep finding ourselves walking to the bathroom to rinse a dish or our hands. After all, we've been in the house for 3 1/2 months now without any use of a Kitchen sink.


The Kitchen is really starting to come together and I'm 100% pleased so far! Hopefully it'll be ready in time for Christmas cookie baking!!

Kitchen Garbage Disposal

I've never lived anywhere that didn't have a garbage disposal. It's just second nature to me to throw food waste into the sink. So of course we had to get a garbage disposal.


Because we don't anticipate abnormally heavy use of the disposal, we went with a lower HP model. We chose the InSinkErator Badger 1. Purchased at Home Depot for $90.

Not only are garbage disposals convenient, they are also green, which isn't something everyone immediately thinks of. By using a garbage disposal, you're eliminating waste that would have gone into a dump. They are extremely efficient, using only about 5 kwh of electricity a year and 1 gallon of water a day on average.

Kitchen Sink

At work we always specify Franke sinks. However... Franke sinks typically have a price tag that is out of our small budget. I looked at a lot of sinks at Lowe's and Home Depot, but they all looked or felt cheap. Or they were just ridiculously expensive and I could not justify paying that for a Kitchen sink. Not when there were so many other things I needed!


That was when I discovered a small sister company of Franke. Kindred. They're basically Franke sinks, but with slight differences, such as the stainless steel gauge. I found this one at Lowe's, but unfortunately our local store didn't have any in stock. That lead me online, where I attempted to find the best deal.

I ended up buying the sink from www.homeperfect.com for $105 (including shipping). Lowe's had it listed for $292 (plus tax)! So glad I looked online! The sink arrived in perfect condition (so glad, after the faucet debacle), and we handed it off to Renaissance Stone for installation. Renaissance did a great job installing.. leaving a perfect overhang of granite over the sink. In our apartment we had granite countertops and an undermount stainless sink, but it wasn't installed correctly. There was a stainless steel lip that was visible between the granite and sink where dirty food gunk (for lack of a better word) would loge itself. It was nasty and very hard to clean.

Here's the specifics on the Kitchen Sink:

Manufacturer: Kindred
Retailer: HomePerfect.com
Model: Single-Basin Stainless Steel Undermount Kitchen Sink (USSK100-18)
Finish: Stainless Steel Mirror Finish
Price: $105
Review: This sink is gorgeous! The mirror finish gives it a nice shine. It seems so much bigger (wider and deeper) than I had imagined! I love it! And you can't beat that price... $105 for a huge sink! Kindred offers a lot of additional products that fit the sink such as strainers, cutting boards, etc. that I may take them up on. 

Lesson I learned with this purchase? Always shop around!

Kitchen Faucet

I haven't uploaded any new pictures of the half-complete Kitchen yet because it's so dark when I get home and the pictures just don't do the room justice. The best time of day in that part of the house is in the morning... it's just overflowing with sunlight. So the pictures will just have to wait until a weekend.


But....
Because I'm so excited about my new Kitchen, each day until then I'll share with you a part of my Kitchen. Today, it's the faucet.


The house has most of it's original door hardware, which is black. To match this, any new hardware we're adding is oil-rubbed bronze (ORB), which I just happen to love.  The new deadbolt and door knob in the Kitchen is oil-rubbed bronze, and I decided that the cabinet hardware will also be ORB. So when it came to looking at faucets, anything else just didn't look right. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find a reasonably priced ORB Kitchen faucet!


I found some at Home Depot and Lowe's that I really liked by Price Pfister. They were very simple, ORB, and had good prices. This one is the Avalon.

I had never heard of Price Pfister before, so I wanted to do some research on them. Couldn't come up with ONE GOOD REVIEW! They all said that they were cheaply made, broke all the time, the soap dispenser never worked, the sprayer has no pressure, it leaks constantly, etc. etc. etc. No way I'm spending $180 for a faucet in a brand new Kitchen that would break after using it once! But I did really like the color, and the option of a soap dispenser.


Long story short... couldn't find another reasonably priced colonial-looking ORB faucet with a pull-out spray or soap dispenser. But I did find this faucet both on the Home Depot website and Amazon. They didn't sell it in stores, which was a little upsetting because I like to see it in person and play with it before purchasing. But, we needed a faucet, so I bought it from Amazon for $125. This faucet is the Glacier Bay Lyndhurst Bridge.

The faucet arrived a couple days later via UPS. The box it was packaged in had the faucet laying down, in hardly any packaging (there was a plastic bottom shell it laid in, and the faucet itself was in a plastic bag). The box was completely beat up... holes, dents, tears, stains. Half a roll of packing tape had been wrapped around one half of the box, as if to repair these beatings. It took me 15 minutes to just get the box open. The faucet looked great! But as soon as I took it out of the box to show R I realized that the bottom piece of each base was cracked and broken. I was heartbroken. I couldn't install a broken faucet! And the granite company needed the faucet the following day for templating, so I couldn't even send it back!


R convinced me to give the broken faucet to the granite installer, telling them that it was being returned because it was broken. Then I ordered a new faucet from Home Depot this time, so that if it also arrived broken we could at least return it to the store easily. The faucet from HD arrived a couple days later in great shape. HD had the small white box inside a large thick cardboard box, which was delivered via FedEx in perfect condition. Kudos to HD on their great packing job! And on top of it all, I had $75 worth of HD gift cards, so the faucet only cost me approximately $58 including shipping!


It's no easy task to return a faucet to Amazon though... I have 2 options. I can return it myself and pay for shipping or I can request Amazon to set up a UPS pick-up. But it has to be picked up where it was delivered... so I can't have it picked up at work, where I am all day. It's a big pain in the butt... so the faucet is still sitting in our Living Room, waiting for deliberation.


I'm so glad I read those bad Price Pfister reviews... otherwise I would have bought/installed a faucet that didn't look nearly as nice as the one I ended up getting and was more than $50 more expensive.


Here's the specifics on the Kitchen Faucet:


Manufacturer: Glacier Bay
Retailer: Home Depot
Model: Lyndhurst Bridge Kitchen Faucet with Side Spray
Finish: Oil Rubbed Bronze
Price: $123
Review: Looks and works great! This faucet adds a perfect blend of colonial and modern aspects to our Kitchen. It was very simple to install. The faucet is raised very high, which is great for filling pots and washing large dishes, and also turns 180 degrees, which is great with a large sink. The sprayer has great pressure, and is not cheap at all! It is very heavy (both a good and bad thing), so I have no worries that it'll break or wear down over the years. I would definitely recommend this faucet. Gives the looks and feel of a very expensive faucet, without the high price tag. 

Second Bath Faucet

These faucets were actually one of the first purchases for the house. Immediately after closing we went to Home Depot to buy a bunch of things (most importantly, new locks/keys). While there, we bought these two faucets, intending to use them in the upstairs bathroom. However, once we got back to the house, we realized that the bathroom was in worse shape than we remembered while at the store. So for 2 1/2 months the faucet boxes were used as door stops. I kept meaning to return them... we weren't remodeling the bathroom, so why keep them?  I'm glad we didn't return them, because we decided to re-do this bathroom after all, and they look great! My only complaint about them is that to get the water coming out at a good pressure/decent amount, you need to turn them as far as the handle will go. I know that this is a problem with the faucet, not our plumbing, because this didn't happen with the old faucets. But for $20, I wasn't expecting the world.

Manufacturer: Glacier Bay
Retailer: Home Depot
Model: Constructor 4 in. 2-Handle Low-Arc Bathroom Faucet
Finish: Brushed Nickel
Price: $20

New Toilet

The major purchase for the bathroom was the toilet. After a lot of discussion at Lowe's, we settled on the Jacuzzi Maxima White Elongated Toilet for $179. We had an elongated toilet in our apartment and fell in love with it. We just couldn't go back to a round toilet, even though they were slightly cheaper. It came down to the Jacuzzi or an American Standard. The American Standard was $5 cheaper, but the Jacuzzi looked so much nicer. And for only $5 more, you might as well go with the nicer looking one right? Guys just don't understand stuff like that..


There are a couple negative reviews online about this toilet, regarding the flushing and amount of water involved. It's a water saving toilet, so it doesn't use very much water. Duh. We've had the toilet for about a month and a half now and haven't had any trouble. Once. Once R had to flush twice. Not bad when you consider how little water it uses. And the box claimed it's clog free... and so far it has lived up to that.


We had a little trouble installing it, because we had to slightly raise the floor. Even the extra jumbo wax ring R got from Lowe's wasn't tall enough. But luckily he found one at a local plumbing supply store. Other than that, it went in pretty easily!

One Day Bathroom Remodel

We've been using the upstairs bathroom to shower, and the downstairs bathroom for everything else. And just the ten minutes I have to spend in the upstairs bathroom every day has given me major headaches. I've had them since the day we moved in and nothing relieves them.

So Ryan decided that we should use our one work day this weekend to remediate this (I think it was mostly to shut me up about my headaches). We could do some simple cleaning and cheap fixes to the bathroom to make it usable. 

First was removing the carpet. Surprisingly there wasn't a forest of mold underneath it. There was a disgusting black pad though that had basically become one with the plywood subfloor though. That thing was not coming off, no matter how hard we tried. So we decided to put down 1/4 luan plywood right over it. We'll tear it up when we redo the bathroom correctly in a couple years, but for now, it just wasn't worth it.

Over the luan we put down some inexpensive vinyl tiles. It's not the most stylish floor, but it's about 300 times better than what was there.

We then painted the walls and ceiling with Kilz 2 to help seal in some of the bad smells and stains on the plaster. The walls were in pretty bad shape and it was amazing to see what just one coat of Kilz did. I also painted the vanity cabinet with Kilz... it went through an amazing transformation! This picture shows the nastiness that was the cabinet right next to the newly painted cabinet.

The existing yellow toilet looked really old. We know that the last people to renovate the house did so in the mid 1950's, but we were still surprised to find out that the toilet was manufactured in 1956. A 54 year old toilet. They just don't make them like that anymore.

We bought the toilet at Lowe's, which I would not have done if this were a more permanent remodel.  We decided on the Jacuzzi Maxima Elongated Two Piece Toilet. It was only $5 more expensive than our other option, an American Standard, and this one looked a lot nicer. 

The existing sink faucets were also replaced with some inexpensive Home Depot faucets. Nothing fancy, just better than what was there. A repainted vanity, new cabinet hardware and new paint on the walls, and we're done.


A brand new countertop was not in our budget for this room. Like I said, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this because I'm planning on re-doing in the entire room in a couple years. So rather than spending $80 on a new countertop from Lowe's I re-did it for a mere $2. How you ask?

Kitchen Demolition

Today with the help of my dad and uncle, we demolished our Kitchen. It felt great! I tell ya... if you're ever having a bad day and need to let off some steam, pick up a crowbar and tear down drywall! Great stress reliever! My uncle brought his saws-all and went a little crazy on the cabinets, so we had the nastiness out of the house in about an hour!

Of course, we found a couple unexpected things. The first being the open electrical box that was behind the dishwasher, with live wires sticking out of it. Lovely. Luckily we have an electrician coming in this week, so he'll take care of that for us. The dishwasher wasn't even hooked up to that.. it was hardwired through the floor (as was the stove). Again, it'll all be taken care of, thank God. Electrical stuff scares me.

Another minor problem we found was the floor beneath the sink cabinet. Not only was it disgusting and filled with dirt, acorns, toys, food wrappers, bottle caps, and BONES (mice and other larger somethings...), but the plywood was completely rotted. So we made our first Lowe's trip of the day and got some new plywood.

Next came tearing down the drywall. My dad kept trying to talk me out of it, but I'm glad I insisted on tearing it down. In all of the other rooms we've been leaving the plaster and/or drywall and just painting over it for now, due to our tight moving-in schedule. But in the Kitchen, the wallpaper was fused to the drywall and would not come off. No matter what we tried. And it was old and yucky, and I'm sorry, but Kitchens need to be clean (ok, according to me, everything needs to be clean, but Kitchens especially). There isn't a ton of drywall in the Kitchen because there are so many openings and the huge fireplace, so it wouldn't be that bad. As soon as all of the drywall was down and out of the house, everyone agreed with me. The horrible smell that had been in the Kitchen was now completely gone. The smell was probably a mixture of moldy drywall, mouse poop in the cabinets and the rotten floor. All of which are now in the backyard in a portable dumpster. And we got the pleasure of seeing what the walls in the Kitchen used to look like.... very very wide, very very detailed wood panels. Yet more proof of the Wilcox's wealth.

Old wallpaper, also showing where the original wall was (the back half of the house was originally split up into three rooms).

My backyard

And this is when we hit the major snag of the day. Electrical outlets. There weren't enough in the Kitchen, both for code requirements and for S's small appliance requirements.  So we had to call an electrician to run some new wires for a bunch of new GFCI outlets as well as outlets for the dishwasher, microwave/hood and stove. And why not throw in some new wall switches while we're at it. So here's the problem. It's the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. We're not going to get anyone in this weekend. So this ruins our plans. We had 3 days straight to work on the Kitchen and get it done, but now we have nothing we can do. We can't move forward with anything until the electrical is done (No drywall, no floor, no cabinets, no paint, no trim, etc, etc, etc).

So, you ask, what did we do? We found stuff to do (not hard to do in a 239 year old house). Today we decided to replace the one old window in the house. It was left, most likely, because it was a taller window, and the Kitchen cabinets had been installed right in front of it. Turns out, it was also open, letting in more smells and mice. Woohoo. Enter Lowe's trip #2 of the day. My dad and I went in search of a matching window, but in a shorter size, so that it would fit above the base cabinets. All we could find in that size were windows without an mullions, or with a 4/4 grid. I can't do that when the rest of the windows are 6/6 and it would be very very obvious if this one was different. So I set off wandering around the store looking for someone to help me (which never happened... one guy said the window guy was on his lunch break, and he'd send someone else over to help. No one ever showed up). On my way back to my dad I noticed a window on a cart in the back of the store. No label, but it appeared to be the correct size. After arguing over the windows some more, we decided to go look at doors instead (to replace the back door that is impossible to open). Now my dad sees the window, and discovers a tiny price tag on the top. It was a special order that was returned. Originally $239... we get it for $50! Now that's a great deal!

Before

After

The Kitchen at the end of the day