Day 395 aka Day 7 of Hotel Living

Have you seen those movies with really rich people who live in hotels? They've got a doorman who greets them every morning and swanky everything? That's not exactly the "hotel living" we've got going on. Especially when you factor in rowdy youngsters partying in the room next door until 5 am (or so I'm told…). It's actually a bit sad that this is the only large scale option for accommodation in downtown Kitchener. With its obvious water damage throughout, badly stained carpets, and hung ceiling in the bathroom being pushed up by the loopy shower head, I worry that this is the first impression visitors are getting of the city. Will they shake the mismatched tile and go outside to find so many delicious restaurants just around the corner? At least we've got a bar fridge and microwave, so breakfast and snacks are easy to take care of. And we're actually lucky that we're just blocks from some of the best restaurants in town. Not "best" as in there's a dress code and $50 entrees - "best" as in delicious wood-fired pizza, cheap pho and salvadoran, flavourful caribbean, and solid chinese food. And our commute to work has been cut down from a 20 minute walk to roughly 5 minutes. Yes, the hotel is two blocks from my office and three from Garrett's so we really can't complain. We do, after all, have a roof over our heads and food in our belly - and we don't need to worry about the cost as it's covered by insurance.

As for Farwell Manor, she's definitely having a harder time of things than we are. This is what we found taped to the front door when we stopped to get the mail last night:

Danger: Asbestos. In the words of Douglas Adams, "don't panic."

It was our first time back at the house since Garrett handed over the keys on Tuesday morning. The hotel living is a result of the house having no functional kitchen and bathroom (with both kitchen sink and vanity being torn out and the toilet removed). Thanks to the trace amounts of asbestos in the ceiling plaster, though, we aren't allowed in the house at all until the kitchen tear out is done. They set up the containment on Thursday and are scheduled to be done with that this coming Tuesday. We scoped it out last night, looking like a couple of crooks casing the joint, and peeked through the kitchen window. They've torn out the ceiling and it looks like some of the plaster walls are down but we couldn't tell if the cabinets had come out yet.

I spent last Sunday taking down all of the cabinet doors so we could save the hardware. A handy dandy little cordless drill we got as a thoughtful Christmas present made quick work of it.

Oh awesome, shiny hardware... what awesome, shiny thing can we do with you?

We were told the remediation contractor would pack up our stuff so this is the last glimpse we saw of the kitchen we inherited:

De-doored kitchen ready for demolition. I'm glad we're not in charge of tearing out asbestos-plaster but it could have been fun to take apart the cabinets piece by piece. Yes, I realize your version of "fun" is probably very different than mine.

Garrett also took off the faucet he had installed right after new years. The old faucet had been leaking so we bought this Delta one through Kijiji for $30 as a temporary replacement. It had been working so well and I hadn't even gotten around to telling you about this little change that was making life easier (No more wobbling! No more water drips!) before we had to take it down.

Our short-lived but much appreciated temporary kitchen faucet. She lives to see another day.

As for the remodelling, planning is what has been taking up most of our free time. We've been browsing cabinet and countertop options, gathering quotes and checking out appliances. The City's building office was kind enough to approve our plan the day we applied (the guy actually checked over it while Garrett sat waiting instead of telling him to come back in two weeks) so we officially have a building permit for both the kitchen and upstairs bath reno. We've made one simple change to the plan posted last time. Can you spot it?

Updated floor plan pushes fridge up against the wall and removes the extra "pantry" cupboard and accessible-only-from-the-other-side cubby.

The idea was that we could use that tall pantry also as a broom closet but once we factored in a 2-4" wide filler piece needed beside the fridge for the door to open properly, the closet wouldn't be deep enough for the vacuum anyway. With this plan in hand, we've been browsing around to figure out what we like in terms of style and colour. We want the overall look to be light and classic. Nothing too ornate and nothing too modern. It's both a blessing and a curse to start from a blank slate because there isn't any set factor that requires other pieces to match, which makes decision making that much more challenging.

Since there's a fairly large amount of countertop, that is one natural place to start from. We've bounced several material types around and are leaning toward granite. With the many open edges and corners, we can't run a rounded laminate edge all the way around and we're not keen on sharp square edges. Wood and marble are both beautiful but not the most practical (and the price of marble is a bit ridiculous). The marble look could be achieved with quartz and it does have the "no sealing required" benefit over granite but quartz is generally more expensive than standard granite. Solid surface (which could also do a similar classy light countertop look) was a contender for a while but we weren't thrilled with how scratch-able it was and how plastic-y it felt. Those countertops are, essentially, a giant slab of plastic after all. So after browsing around and going to an actual granite yard to see some slabs, we've gravitated towards a colour called "Steel Rock." It's dark but not black and the pattern isn't too streaky or too speckled.

The cabinet discussion has been going on in conjunction with the countertops. We both generally like the look of stained wood but I've struggled to find photos of kitchens with all wood cabinets that keep things light. The cabinets will have to complement the large amount of wood trim throughout the house and, if we go with that dark grey countertop, any wood stain other than the lightest tones would definitely be too dark. One idea we're bouncing around is doing the two tone thing with white upper cabinets and a different colour for the lower cabinets (kind of like this or this). Or all white cabinets on the sink and range walls - both uppers and lowers - and then a second tone only on the cabinets under the "island" (kind of like this minus the $9000 gas range). It might be weird if the lower cabinet beside the range is white and the cabinet across the way on the "island" is a different tone because the cabinets are connected by the countertop causeway - there's no actual, entirely separate island. Wherever the specific configuration ends up, it seems this is the general direction in which we're leaning:

Full photos available here, here, and here.

Most of you know that cabinets take weeks to go from an idea on a page to material in your house. No, we aren't going to stay in a hotel for the next two months. If all goes according to plan, we're going to throw up some ceiling drywall in the basement bathroom as soon as we can get back in the house and install the trim bullnose tile that just arrived this week. The shower door can then go in sometime the week of Feb 11. A toilet will get hooked up, whether the upstairs or downstairs one (we'll see which makes more sense). All that's left to have a functional bathroom is building the cabinet in the basement so the sink can go in (easier said than done) but if timing isn't on our side, the plan is to get a temporary sink set up in the kitchen so there would be at least one sink in the house. If we can at least get a bathroom going, we can move back in and possibly get a food allowance from insurance. One way or another, we will claw our way back to living in our own home as soon as possible.