Cabinets are coming!

We have lived without real kitchen cabinetry for many a season, and we've finally pulled the trigger with our new contractors to upgrade our kitchen experience to the real deal.

The project is to add some much-needed wall cabinetry, while touching up our existing island setup with new paint and new top-drawer faces. We'll also be adding hardware everywhere, which will be another welcome improvement—I've almost forgotten what it's like to operate a drawer that actually has a pull!

The new wall cabinets are custom-built maple "face frame"-style, meaning that the faces of the doors and drawers are flush with the frames they are set into. They'll be painted white to match the rest of the house, with a satin finish. The two main upper cabinets will have glass faces—we're capable of keeping the shelves uncluttered and attractive, and the glass will keep the space feeling more open.

When all is finished we still won't have a stone surface or backsplash; those are projects for later.

The job is tricky because our ceiling is not level, and varies by 1/2" or more. We've also had to scoot the fridge over a little away from the pantry to accommodate the swing of the door into the pantry and the eventual location of a barn door there.

The contractors helpfully moved our fridge and oven out of the way and set them up off in our dining room so we can continue to use a kitchen during the construction.

So far the new cabinets are all up, trim has been cut and installed, and things are getting primed and painted.

We have heat!

This is slightly old news, but .. we have heat!

The boiler, tubes, and thermostats are fully installed, insulation has gone into the ceiling, and everything is for the most part running smoothly. Our heating bill has dropped dramatically, too. The heat in the house is very comfortable, and rather quiet.

There are a few small wrinkles that we're getting the heating people to come out and address at some point. For example, the hallway is a little chillier than the rest of the house, in spite of having the same set point. We suspect there just aren't enough conductive plates, and they can add more. But it's normal for installers to follow up and tune the system a bit after you've run with it for a while.

All in all, we're super excited about finally having a home that maintains a comfortable temperature! And it's a great excuse to throw another housewarming party in the future.

The Manifold

The hot water tubes and aluminum plates have all been run successfully, including some pretty tricky parts underneath the stairs (pictured). We needed tubes against the risers as well as the treads, but the turn radius was too tight to switch back and forth. So they ran the tube down all the risers and then back up the treads.

Radiant floor heating installation seems like a pretty interesting job as far as construction goes in that can involve a fair amount of creative problem-solving. One must lay out the tubes in a Hamiltonian circuit, if you will, around the subfloor such that they can radiate from and return to the boiler. Plus, there are always obstacles, and the separation of desired heating zones must be respected. It's a neat exercise in practical topology.

Our contractor has spent a fair amount of time and effort putting together the various connections between the pipes and the boiler, and the control mechanisms that regulate them. There are a lot, as you can see. Each length of pipe had to be custom-cut to fit the particular design of the installation, which was determined by the heating needs, capacity, and space around the boiler. We don't yet know what all this stuff is for, but if I ever need inspiration for a steampunk contraption for Halloween, I know where in the house to look.

Hot Hot Heat!

Our dear readers may have written us off, but the truth is we have been on hiatus for a while. We've been taking the last many months to recover: the chronic burden of an ongoing renovation wears both the body and soul. Jamie fell ill shortly after we moved in, and we have been focusing on her convalescence.

Still, we have made some little adjustments to the house here and there, which we may recap in time. The main event occurring right now which has brought the blog back to life is that installation is underway for our new radiant floor heating!

We're very excited about this feature; we've been putting it off for a long time because (a) we initially didn't think we would need it (big mistake: winters bring us interior temperatures of 52 degrees!), and (b) it's expensive. But we've passed enough nights too cold for space heaters to warm that we finally pulled the trigger.

Radiant floor heating comes in many forms. Ours is hydronic, meaning it uses hot water tubes as opposed to electrical coils, and is being installed from underneath the subfloor. We purchased the home with this opportunity in mind, since the lower level has completely exposed, tall ceilings.

The tubes run in switchbacks along the joist bays, and special aluminum plates are fixed to the ceiling to more efficiently and evenly conduct the heat through to the floor. Notice the nails in the photo to the right: the guy who installed our flooring used nails that were too long, so they poked through more than an inch below the subfloor. This is common—but still stupid and avoidable—and meant that before installation the workers had to go around and pound down literally thousands of these nails. It was well worth paying them a bit extra to avoid having to do this ourselves.

A heating job like this calls for a good, quality boiler, and that's where a significant part of the expense is—literally many thousands of dollars. Our contractors have installed a Lochinvar Knight on the north wall of the garage, and I believe there will be a manifold controller of some kind that the various water tubes get routed through. This boiler is special too in that we can also add an attachment to supply residential hot water. This might be desirable in the future since having a tankless heater at the far rear of the home does mean a significant wait for hot water to reach the bathroom faucet.

The whole installation process is expected to take about 2 weeks. We can't wait for it to be completed!

Media Closet II

The final chapter of our closet-fest involves the media closet. We described a lot of the plans in this post; here's what it looks like now. Pardon the hooptie composite, as we don't have a wide-angle lens to fit the whole thing in one shot.

All of the shelving is now in place. For the upper shelves, which will hold extra cables, games, and accessories, we cut down some of our leftover solid shelves to fit exactly. The Elfa pieces come in fixed widths and aren't meant to be cut, but with access to a big saw and a drill it's really quite easy to trim them and then re-drill the necessary holes so they fit on the brackets. The cut side remains unfinished, but if it's up against a wall inside a closet .. meh.

The counter-height solid shelf is serving its purpose well as a charging station, and the lower ventilated shelves are now housing virtually all of our A/V components, with plenty of room to spare. At present the cabling is a bit of a mess, but we're refraining from tightening that up too much until the component arrangement is more finalized. In particular, we need to put in a receiver to hook various pieces together and output to our soon-to-be-installed recessed speakers.

For cooling, we have installed a CoolComponents VS-HFB variable-speed fan with a temperature sensor near where the hottest components are likely to be, somewhat above the baseboard level. We don't yet need to run it, thankfully (and if we never do, all the better) but it's good to have just in case.

The "door" to the closet is just a white curtain for now. We were dissatisfied with the way the proposed framing for sliding doors was going to work, and are considering other options. Top on our list is a barn door of some kind.

Office Closet

For the Office Closet, we wanted storage for all of our office supplies, a home for our network printer and paper shredder, and a little room for guests to hang a dress or suit and maybe a robe or towel. Luckily we planned ahead and had the closet wired for lighting (again, an overhead light inside the door frame), electrical and ethernet for the printer.

To figure out what type of spaces we would need for office supplies and files, we laid out most of what we were hoping to stash. I spent about two days unpacking 15 boxes of office stuff and sorting through/getting rid of items. Here’s the pile of stuff we need to find other homes for or get rid of:

And the stuff that’s actually office or guest bedroom related (some of these boxes are even empty!):

Again, most of the shelves and hanging standards we needed were left over from New York so it took just a few additional elements and some major tweaking. We knew we wanted to repurpose a drawer unit that had been acting as a dresser and because of its depth and drawer extension, it could only go one place. The diagram:

Here’s the closet mid-installation (and Greg admiring our work):

And the final product (with a guest hoodie and robe hanging from door hooks):

More detail of the drawer unit:

The top four drawers hold office and design supplies and printer paper and toner. The larger drawers on the bottom have boxes for office-related discs and cables, wedding stuff including photos, and other supplies for house projects. Every drawer and shelf will have labels soon.

Close-ups of the closet rod for guests (now holding the tux Greg borrowed from a friend), and all of our files and photo boxes:

Bedroom Closet

We have decided on final resting places for most of our furniture and belongings in the house. After going back and forth, we decided on the small interior room as our Master Bedroom (until we tackle the downstairs renovation) and the larger/brighter front room as the Office/Guest Bedroom. Photos to come of our rooms as they are now.

With those decisions made and a windfall of Container Store sales and gift cards, we were ready to take on organizing our closets. We chose to outfit all four closets on the top floor (Bedroom, Office, Linen and Media) with Elfa systems. They are pretty easy to install, adjustable, and are super strong, plus we had a number of Elfa components left over from our closets and office in New York. Overall, all four closets ended up around $200 and they would have been about $1500 without the existing elements, sales and gift cards!

Our closets all have our 9' ceilings and we tried to utilize the height as much as we could. At 22"-30" deep, we decided shelves right above the door frames made the most since as we probably wouldn't be able to access anything higher.

We wanted the Bedroom Closet to hold all of our hanging clothes as well as our nice shoes. Because we’re trying to keep our floors as clean as possible, the more casual shoes are kept downstairs in the entryway under a bench. It took a bit of work to get all of the clothes to fit with room to grow but luckily we’re constantly paring down our wardrobes and Greg only has one pair of dress shoes. Here’s our illustration/diagram so we knew what to reuse and purchase:

And the finished closet:

Everything fits in so nicely. It’s kind of a pleasure to get dressed or even put away clothes now. Some of the highlights:
•a light inside and over the door frame to illuminate everything at night.
•room to grow… an extra foot of closet rod each
•those shoe shelves actually glide out!
•the shelf above Greg’s clothes will hold boots and shoes/bags that we don’t use that often