Happy 4th!

Mike & i spent the 4th of July...renovating, of course! In fact, a 3 day weekend was much needed for this phase of the renovation.

On Friday, we fixed all the sheetrock bits and pieces and installed the corner bead and basically prepped the wall for mudding. Then we went to Home Depot (ahh...our favourite place) and bought everything we needed to finish the job up until tiling. Or so we thought.

It took us 3 hours and a sketchy rig on the roof of the car (10 pieces of cement board) before we came back and then we went for dinner with some friends. It has been our style of renovation that our life really shouldnt intrude on it. Of course we are giving up a lot do this on weekends but if we want to see family and friends, we feel it is important to continue with a modicum of a social life.

On Saturday we started early (for us) at around 9am and mudded all day. It took forever because (a) we are amateurs and (b) we're amateurs. We were accompanied by the loudest music from the neighbours which was a little dispiriting because if we have a bbq anytime after our renovation we would have to deal with that godawful music/noise. It happens every Saturday but yesterday it went much later and louder. I'm glad the founding fathers fought so hard for our neighbours to give them the right to blast their music such that our walls were practically shaking.

At around 6pm, we ran out of joint compound and had to do an emergency run to HD. Just as well since we forgot a few other things anyway. This time, armed with a 5 gallon bucket, we mudded till about 10pm and let it dry overnight. As it is, we have about 1/4 of that left.

Several web videos advised different things so we decided to go with our instincts and sanded the next morning. It was dusty work, mostly Mike's doing. I did laundry and other household chores. It took him about 2 hours then we cleaned and re-mudded.

While the 2nd coat of mud was drying, we examined the floor to see how we could level the thing. Since we are expanding the kitchen slightly there is a great disparity in height between the kitchen and the parquet floor. We decided to lift up all the old subfloor and extend the plywood base. It also involved pulling up floorboards under the pantry. There has always been a slight sag in the floor just before the kitchen and we fixed that too (plywood was over a 2x4 that wasn't really connected to anything. We are cutting a new piece to bridge the 2 joists)

Now that our floor is essentially level (well more or less) next weekend we are putting down cement board and tiles. I will rent a wet saw this week and we are also going to do some midweek work - Mike is going to mud some areas a 3rd time (those that need it about half the work we've been doing) and we are going to take a crack at assembling some cabinets.

The only time stress I've had so far is Ikea. It's not the fact that my tenants come back on the 22nd July. It's the fact that my return date for these cabinets is 21 July. I know we have certain cabinets we definitely won't be using (cos we changed the design of the cabinets last minute and I added cabinets but did not take away the old ones) so I estimate about $700 of cabinets I wont be using. If we pass the date, I wont be able to return them and we would have burned that cost. So that stresses me out a little.

We figured since that's the only time crunch we have, let's at least take a look at these cabinets mid week (not impeding the normal weekend work) and see if there's anything damaged or missing or unnecessary. Once we lay down tile, we have a jump start on the assembling and next week mid week i can return the stuff. They delivered these cabinets almost 3 months ago! We havent even looked that them once!