Our Kitchen Progress

For the past few months I’ve eluded to the fact that we’ve had issues in our kitchen. I haven’t wanted to talk about it, because it’s really consumed so much of Rob and I. We’ve never made a home-owners claim before, so we didn’t really know what to expect. At first we weren’t even sure if we should make a claim, but we decided to go ahead. With the floor buckling and the inside of our bottom cabinets ruined, we knew it would be quite an ordeal.

Well, we never imagined how bad it would or could really be. We had the plumber come out to figure out where the leak was coming from. After an hour and half and cutting a hole in the wall, he found the problem! After turning on the water, when it runs from the sink out the return, it poured straight out of the pipe!

Our house was built in the 60’s, which means they used galvanized pipes. Galvanized pipes corrode over time. Since all this occurred, I’ve researched and found that galvanized pipes usually last about 40 years before having to be replaced. Lovely!!

A look at the cabinets

We have had to eat out for most meals, but there have been a few dishes to clean…Camp style…in the backyard. FUN TIMES! Ugh!

One of the cracks in the vinyl from the buckling.

Here’s a look at the floor before.

Our insurance company recommended that Service Master come out to access the situation. They work with them…yadda yadda yadda…So they ripped up all the linoleum and measured all around for moisture. Luckily, NO MOLD! They had 3 blowers in the kitchen, a vacuum, and a humidifier in the kitchen along with a blower under the house. It was very loud and annoying! We had this equipment in our house for 7 days, which added up to a bill of nearly $2,000. I’m not even sure how much this affected our electric bill either.

Our insurance company has done an AWFUL job of telling us the process. We were sent an estimate and insurance check a week after all this equipment was removed. The amount of the check would cover the Service Master bill, but what was left was not even enough to pay for a new floor, much less anything else! We didn’t know we were supposed to get an estimate from a contractor. So I feverishly began calling around to get someone out. I’ll tell you contractors in this area don’t seem to be hurting for business. I finally got 2 contractors to come out and a flooring company.

After countless phone calls and missed appointments, we finally just had the plumber come out and fix that so we could use the sink. We had waited originally because the plumber said it would be easier to fix after the renovations, but at that point (after about 6 weeks), we were ready have a sink again.

We were about to go with a certain contractor in town, but when they told me that estimate on labor would be $600-$1800. I’m like that’s a huge descrepancy! So they said they would come back out and tell us something more difinitive, which they never showed up! At this point it’s nearly 2 months since all this started and Rob and I are about to go postal. That contractor shared that they outsource their flooring to a certain company here in town. So after deciding that that contractor was unreliable, we called the flooring company directly to see if they would do the job without going through the contractor. They agreed, we finalized which tile we wanted and the price and we scheduled a time for them to come.

Here it is right after they finished…

Another view…

So after the floor was done, we still had to deal with the mess under the sink. With all this we also wanted to go ahead and do some other renovations. And now that the insurance was going to give us the right about of money, we could afford it.

Some friends of ours had told Rob a few times that they have rental property that they are constantly having to update. He at first told them no thank you, yadda, yadda, yadda. 2 weeks before Thanksgiving, he and I decided to let them come look and see if this was a job they could handle. It was soemthing they could do so we figured out a time that they could come over and Rob and I had to do some demolition before they came. We removed the sink and countertops. Here’s a before…

Here’s some pics while J and T were working…

They replaced the main pipe that goes all the way up to the roof so that that wold not have to be replaced later. Here it is with the new back wall cover:

New floor, cabinet back and side and frame, ready for bottom part of cabinet

I missed taking pics of a few steps in there, but here’s it is with the inside of the cabinet painted and the counter top, sink, and faucet installed! Working on the disposal

We were able to have a lovely Thanksgiving meal with our “new” kitchen. A couple weeks later our friends came back to replace the bar, with a matching top to match the counters. Here’s pics

Here’s the kitchen now. We have 2 more ‘minor’ things we want to do in here, but those may or may not get done this year.

I plan to put some Before and After pics together to really show the improvements, so look for that soon.