One Room Challenge – Major Kitchen Renovation // Week 5
Let’s face it…the deadline for the One Room Challenge will not be met.
Starting off week five I had high hopes we would only be a couple weeks past being finished in six weeks. But as everyone knows in remodeling, things don’t always go according to plan. Especially with so many moving parts!
To see the process of our kitchen renovation thus far, click on the links below for the previous weeks.
Things are still humming along, lots of progress is being made, and I even took three days off work to get more done!
Well all that came to a halt, or so I thought at the time.
You see, the support wall for the island was framed in and secured. It was awesome, it felt great, it was…maybe too big. We stepped back for a couple minutes to admire the work and to visualize the space. Could the 10 foot island be overkill for the space?
The main concern was the small size of the two walkways that lead out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Technically they are a half a foot larger than the minimum clearance needed and posed no problem. They just look like a tight squeeze next to the giant island.
We decided to sleep on it. Though, we couldn’t sleep because of it. Four in the morning we were up trying to reconfigure our cabinets to shave some inches off the island to make the walkthroughs larger.
After a lot of math and double checking everything including new pendant and exhaust fan placement, we had a solution. It gave us four more inches on each walkway, but scrapped two cabinets. In the end, we decided eight total inches was not worth the time, headache, and money involved in changing it. We would press on!
The main focus of the week was the electrical.
The work started on Tuesday and it was a long list of tasks for our guy. It included moving, adding, and updating plugins as well as light switches to go with the new kitchen layout. On Friday the electrical passed inspection. Now the cabinets that have been sitting in the dining room for weeks can go in! I am really looking forward to seeing the new cabinets in place!
Also checked off the to-do list this week was cutting the hardwood floor back by a couple feet on one end of the island. This will help make a cohesive look for the new floor tile.
Let’s not forget we still have a little bit of sheetrock/plaster to fix, tile to be laid, cooktop gas line to be plumbed, and countertops to be installed.
But, in all the chaos…all is well.
I am so glad that progress is not waiting on me! It is now time to let the professionals do what they do best. I will still be doing my general contracting duties, but as for the manual labor – I am pretty much finished!
All my upfront coordination and planning before we even touched the kitchen helped our timeline not get pushed significantly back. All of the appliances, cabinets, fixtures, tile, and miscellaneous items are all accounted for and ready to go.
There will still be weekly updates even though we will not be completing the One Room Challenge on time. Check back next week for some more progress. We will soon be finished!
While you’re at it, take a look at the designers and other guest participants here. They are wrapping up their challenge and have done a great job!
