Back to work

Hi there, gentle reader. I trust your week was a good one. As always, drop me a line and let me know what is happening with you if you have the time!

The past week here has been a blast from the very recent past. The contractors were back, and they will return next week as well. The big job was tearing out the entryway and preparing the area for new concrete:

The entryway that was here when we moved in was tile over concrete. The tile was in bad shape, and it was dangerously slippery when it was wet or covered with snow. But taking it off didn’t really help, as that just left the ugly, rough mastic that held the tile down, and there was no room to cover it with anything useful. The door to the garage is set for that height, and there really isn’t a way to change that.

But even worse, the original concrete was in two slabs, and the outer one had settled by 1.5" or so, which created a serious tripping hazard. The new concrete will be properly sloped, contain no tripping hazards, and won’t sink, as the ground below it has been properly prepared.

In addition, while we had the ground open, we installed a condensate drain in the utility room in the garage. When we replace the existing boiler that heats the downstairs, we will be able to install either a new high-efficiency unit or a heat pump. Both of those have to get rid of a bit of condensed water as part of their operation, and there was nowhere for it to go. Now we have a drain for that, which is great.

The work took twice as long as was expected, and double the expected material was hauled out, but it will be much better when this is done.

The other thing they did was add a second railing to the stairway inside the house:

It still needs to be painted, but now there is a railing going all the way up the stairs on the left side. The railing on the right stops with three stairs left on your way up, which is dumb. My mother will be very happy this is finally installed, as the staircase is very steep.

I think it will get painted next week, along with some limited interior touch-ups and maybe the exterior as well. But the exterior painting depends on the weather.

Speaking of which, our contractor has at least two different weather apps on his phone, and he was looking to see whether they might be able to do any exterior painting next week. One app showed a chance of rain every weekday, and the other showed no rain at all. I keep complaining about the poor quality of our local weather forecasts, and this was another example of just how bad they are.

The other thing that’s kept me busy in the last week is an ongoing Ikea cabinet installation. I hesitate to discuss this much as it’s not that exciting, but what the heck. If you’re still reading, you already know how boring I am.

Here’s what I started with:

That’s five cabinets, doors, legs, toe kicks, shelves, trim panels, handles, hinges, the weird rail the cabinets hang on, and the countertop itself, nearly all wrapped in their own cardboard boxes. Those cabinets are going here:

The first step was the rail. Ikea kitchen cabinets all hang from a rail that is attached to the wall. I spent a full day getting that rail installed. It was easy to get it level, but the wall is bowed out (like a banana), and that made for all kinds of problems. I started with a bunch of shims, trying to get things flat, but in the end I ripped all the shims back out. The wall is so bowed that it had me worried about whether the dress panel on the near end would cover everything if I used all the shims I needed.

Why is the wall bowed when it is brand new? Good question. My initial thought was that it’s bowed because it’s built in an odd way, with the studs turned sideways. That would make it easy for them to bow. But later I discovered something else. More on that in a moment.

Anyway, here’s a photo of the cabinet boxes going into place:

Actually at this point I am attaching the cabinets to each other. They’re in and look reasonable as far as I can tell.

Now things are taking shape. The first door is on, and the trim panel on the end is installed as well. It’s that trim panel that had me worried about shimming out the rail. There could have been a substantial gap between the wall and the trim panel if I had done things wrong.

Now I have installed the trim panel at the far end, along with an additional door. That end trim panel wasn’t simple. Ikea can make many things easy, but anything that must be custom they leave for you to figure out. In this case, that looked like this, viewed from above:

I doubt that will make a lot of sense if you haven’t ever messed with cabinets, but I will try to explain it.

On the right side of the photo is the cabinet box (aka, the carcass, which is the actual, technical term) and the door. Ikea cabinets use a metal bar across the top at the front and the back to keep things square and provide places to attach the countertop to.

The cabinet ends a few inches from the wall, and that gap has to be filled with cabinet material to make it look nice, but there is no standard way to do that. They sell trim panels which can be cut to fill the gap, and that’s the thing near the centre of the photo. The piece of particle board with a black surface is such a trim panel, cut to size. The problem is, how do you attach such a trim panel to the cabinet?

I’ve used a piece of melamine, which provides a white surface, like the interior of the cabinets, and a piece of plywood. The trim panel is screwed to the plywood from the back, and the plywood is nailed to the melamine in a way that hides the nails from view. Then the entire thing is attached to the cabinet with a couple of screws from the inside.

In the end, the countertop will hide all of those details, and it will look like this:

Now, that photo might make you think I am done, but oh no. Not yet.

Remember the bow in the wall? It impacts the countertop as well. I need to make things work so that I can get a nice looking caulk bead between the countertop and the wall. That turns out to be a challenge. After much thought and consulting my contractors, I elected to cut into the drywall in the area where it bows out in an attempt to make things work out better. That makes an awful mess, but it is working.

In the process, I discovered that for some reason the guy doing the drywall mud applied a full 1/8" (3 mm or more) of mud in the area where the wall is bowed out. We have no idea why he did that, and it wasn’t obvious until I started working on these cabinets. That may be the entire reason the wall is out of line. It may have nothing to do with the studs.

Anyway, the process of “adjusting” the wall to better fit the countertop is ongoing. That last photo might make it look like things are done, but they’re not. The top is still loose, and it will be for another day or three while I get things figured out, installed, and properly caulked.

But the plan is to have it done sometime in the coming few days so Anne can put her plants back into the place they are supposed to be, and we get the storage below for a few other things as well.

If all goes well, next week might see the final permit inspection done as well. Fingers crossed!

Cheers!