Coffee’s On!

Our coffee machine is finally here and installed. Happy days!

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And we have appliances!

We are one step closer to having a functional kitchen!  The appliances are here. Now to get them working 🙂 I think the one below is going to change my life, and the life of my house guests – who wants to come over?

Our coffee machine!

The kitchen is getting closer to being ready

Kitchen update

Our countdown is on….2 weeks left.

I’ve been assured this is when the magic happens.  Everyone works together to get all the big and little things done. And I believe it.  We have come a far way and while there is still a lot left to the untrained eye, it is getting there. This week we saw the cabinets start to take shape and got our first view of the blue cabinet covers. The boxes are in place and the plumbing is ready. The floor is down and the appliances are here. Now to put the cabinet doors in, the backsplash on, the countertop cut and installed, the workplace desk and shelves installed…really not much. OMG, maybe it won’t be ready.  Billy?

Let’s Check in…

I was feeling a bit nostalgic today with all the big changes I saw at the condo this week. I went back to my original post and looked at my “must have” list. Wow, things have changed. Let’s take a look.

Our Must Haves:

1. Open concept kitchen with an island √
2. Replace the hardwood floors throughout √
3. Expand to two full bathrooms √
4. Have a great play area for the kids
5. Update the design to suit us  √

We are slowly but surely ticking things off our list. We haven’t decided completely about the kids play area yet, but we are looking into a few storage options. Stay tuned for a post about their bedroom and playroom. The girls are very excited about it.

But what else has spiralled out of adding a bathroom and tearing out the kitchen?

Our new additions:

1. Open the stairwell to let in light
2. Change the glass to a floating glass system throughout the stairwell
3. Change the glass on the loft balcony to match the stairwell
4. Add new lighting throughout the house/add recessed lighting ceilings
5. Add heated floors
6. Add a workstation for homework and crafts and adult work at home days
7. Add organizational systems to the closets downstairs
8. Open up/widen the doorway between the kitchen and living room
9. Add AV and electrical to make it a “smart home” since the walls are already open
10. Paint everything!

I always heard that a reno is more like a living organism than a static project but now that I reflect on it, it is really clear.

There She Blows!

We have a hole in our kitchen floor! It’s taken 3 separate formal application processes, 3 formal approvals and a phone call half way around the world, but we finally have approval to cut through 8 inches of reinforced concrete slab. Here is the result. I’ve never so happy to see tubes coming out of my floor. It’s starting to feel real! Wait until the cabinets come next week…

Our new kitchen island plumbing

And a snag…

It had to happen right? We had our approvals from the stratas and the city. We had the plumber in after the floor was taken up to assess where the plumbing needed to be moved from the side wall. This involved ultrasounding the cement floor.

http://www.fugro-aperio.com/builtenvironment/ industrialfloors.html

Since I get ultrasounds on people all the time, this was pretty cool to think I would need to ultrasound my house too. I imagine it looked something like this. It would have been fun to watch. I wasn’t there but found these cool markings on the floor later on. Unfortunately the ultrasound didn’t came back as easy as we hoped.

The place we wanted to put the plumbing in the island was too close to an electrical conduit (or some other equally unknown to me term). That meant that the plumbing would have to be moved by a foot.  That doesn’t seem like a crazy request, except that the plumbing may be in our floor but it’s also in a commercial site’s ceiling. We had authorization from the first location owner and strata but moving a foot moves us into the site of a different owner. Now we needed to start at square one again and ask for authorization. This potentially means a huge delay and uncertainty if we can do this at all.  We may have demolished the kitchen to find out that the plumbing is not movable.

Kitchen Floor Ultrasound

I was devastated. The strata told us the owner did not live in North America and it would be difficult to track him down and get a quick answer. But Billy and Amber were on it and told me to keep on my rose-coloured glasses. They would make it as easy as possible to get the authorization and make the work as simple as possible for them to say yes. We can’t move forward on anything in the kitchen at this point though. If the plumbing doesn’t work out we will have to rethink the layout and the cabinets. At least the engineer has signed off and given their approval. One step down. Let’s hope the other steps aren’t too difficult. Oh my, please cross your fingers for us!

Demolition day!

The day we have been waiting for!

I can’t believe how much pre-work has to go into planning a renovation on your own home. First finding the right people (that part was easy – Amber and Billy are second to none). Then applying for strata approval. In our case we had to apply to a residential and a commercial strata – fun times. Then after the strata gives approval, the city application is due.  So many steps. Luckily, my team did all the work in writing and securing the applications and proposed plans. That was a welcome surprise. I thought I would be dealing with the approval process.

Then just when you have conditional approval from all parties, you need to wait for the city inspector to come. That was actually the longest part for us.  The city was amazing in getting us the building plans within 24 hours, then getting the application approved within a week – big shout out to Vancouver City Hall!  Things were moving along at a good clip. Then we were told the inspector would come in the next week. I was flabbergasted. Where were all the horror stories of delays and crotchety people who won’t even look up from their papers? Then we waited for the call for the confirmed time for inspection and… it never came.  We waited and waited and called and waited and tried to be polite, and then after 2.5 weeks, the inspector came and gave his stamp of approval.  Yeah!! We can start tearing this place apart!

It feels so good to know we can do the reno we want to do. I did have a lot of worries that either the strata or the city would say no.  It is a big deal to core into the cement floor and the ceiling of the business downstairs, but everyone said yes. Someone is looking out for us for sure 🙂

Positive thinking

So Billy got the good news on a Friday night and got his crew ready over the weekend and was ready to rock and roll on Monday. They didn’t waste a minute and had the place wiped clean in just 2 days. It was time consuming and needed a lot of planning during the days to get it done right and within the regulations. There is a yoga studio below us and apparently jack hammering interferes with savasana and ujjayi etc… Who knew . So Billy was only allowed to jackhammer for 15 min every hour. Not disruptive at all.

But with the crew’s hard work and determination. It was done.  We were cleared to come look at it now that all safety concerns were out-of-the-way. And here it is. I can’t honestly say that my first thought when I walked into the space wasn’t “OMG, what have we done!” But after the first few seconds of panic, we were so excited to see the clean slate and get ready for the next step.  Bring it on!

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The kitchen

This is my dream. A chef’s kitchen. Not that I am a chef, but I love to cook and entertain. And that is really hard to do in a closed off galley kitchen. It’s one of the reasons we finally decided to stop renting and look for a place to buy.  The kitchen and bathroom were always going to be deal breakers for us. At first, we only wanted to look at places that had a finished kitchen. We looked at some really cool ones too, but they always had a hamartia. The best one we saw had 2 full fridges, 2 dishwashers and infinite storage. The fatal flaw – an itsy-bitsy oven. Not even a small cookie sheet would fit in it. How are we supposed to have our annual Christmas misfits’ turkey dinner with an oven like that? So we decided we needed to find a kitchen that needed updating and we could make our own. Our new condo is just that. Great space, but could use an update. We ran the idea past the previous owners and funny enough, they had wanted to do the same thing but just hadn’t gotten around to it. No one likes to live through a complete kitchen reno it seems.

We have big ideas for our kitchen. We want to flip it on its head. Here are the before pictures:

Side view

Front view

It’s totally livable, but after cooking in a galley kitchen for 10 years, I really want to open it up.  I want an island, I want to stop bumping into another human every time I open the fridge or the dishwasher and I want my gas stove back.

I also very much dislike track lighting. Always have, always will. I want to smooth out the ceilings and put in recessed lighting. Just small adjustments 🙂

Here is what we are thinking of transforming it into. Click the link immediately below to look at Amber’s rendering from Mak Interiors (she is also an amazing artist it seems).

Kitchen Sketch

Amber’s design has all the cabinets coming flush around the corner of the kitchen (2/3rds of the previous U/C kitchen design).  The peninsula will be gone and a large island will run parallel with the long row of cabinets and extend into the windowed area. This has the advantage of more storage and counter space as well as tying in the space in the corner that we couldn’t figure out what to do with. It’s too small for a banquet with the post there and it’s too big to let it be empty space.  In the end it is going to be a work station for the kids to do homework or us to do work work while the other is cooking or baking. Hopefully this setup will let us spend more time as a family as the kids get older. It also lets us actually entertain our guests while we are getting ready for one of our big meals. This is the thing I am most excited about!

The new lower cabinets will have large drawers and a magic corner (I hate my non-useable corners now). The uppers will have sliding doors (very cool throwback). We are thinking glossy white for the upper cabinets and bright blue for the lowers and the tall cabinets at the end. We are going to use grey granite on all the counters. The tall cabinets closest to the windows will have a bunch of fun features that I hope will be used as much as I expect right now. It will have an appliance hutch with a pullout shelf for our blender and toaster and other small appliances. This keeps them out of site with less clutter but still very accessible as “we use them every day“. The side of the cabinet will also have a space for platters and cookie sheets. Very functional, right now they are all on the bottom of the back of our non-usable cupboard. All of this customizable cabinetry will be done by Billy’s crew. I can’t wait to see it in person.

The appliances are the next step. The owners had just purchased a new fridge and dishwasher. So those we didn’t need. The fridge looks awesome. It has an actual working water tap and ice machine (unlike what was supposed to be in our current rental).  Little joys.

Here is the fridge:

We do need a new range though. Right now there is a full gas slide-in range but the burners are on the blink and I don’t trust gas to cook turkeys and other casseroles or cookies; actually almost anything. So since we are changing the peninsula into an island, we are going to change the range as well. We really struggled over getting a 30″ or 36″ since we get to start the kitchen with a clean slate. I would love to have 6 burners or even 4 burners and a griddle but do we really need that much cooking space. I want a duel fuel range, so our options are pretty limited. We went to the showroom and tested out a bunch of ranges. I really liked the Wolf range, but it may just be for the red buttons – don’t judge me. Actually, I need the red buttons – they match my kitchen plans and… I love red! After much discussion we decided the 36″ range would overpower our kitchen. We would lose much-needed counter space and cupboard space for the sake of 3-4 big family and friends’ cooking adventures per year that would need the 6 burners. I can always buy the big iron griddle to put over two burners if I really need it for Shrove Tuesday or saturday mornings.

Here’s a picture of the range we want. My only nagging thought is that Miele is coming out with a new range in the spring that sounds really fantastic. But timelines always change and I don’t want to move into our new house sans oven.

Amber also found this amazing red faucet to bring in more red accents. It totally goes with our midcentury style and it’s red. How can you not love it. It’s from a great store called Vola. It will be perfect with the under-mounted, oversized sink. The only worry is that by changing the position of the sink that the plumbing must be cored under the concrete floor to get it to the island instead of coming straight out of the wall into the peninsula. This is going to be the tricky part, but I have faith in my team. Go Billy and Amber!

Vola Faucet in Cherry Red!

Our biggest splurge though is getting a built-in fully plumbed coffee machine. We drink tonnes of coffee and we are always running late to work. This is going to be a God-send.  This Miele machine has something like 20 different personalized drink options that can be ready on a timer in the morning. I am so excited!

So hopefully, everything goes as planned. It’s a big transformation and anything can happen when you have to change plumbing.  The next step is to tear up the hardwood and ultrasound the concrete floor to figure out the plumbing changes and get the structural engineer on board. Keep your fingers crossed for us!