Well, it’s been a full four weeks since this project took off, but we are finally done! (Actually, I’m still missing one drawer pull, but I’m not counting that.) Our kitchen has been gutted and turned around into a clean, bright, white space. We had some minor setbacks, but all in all, we finished on time.
The final piece of the puzzle was the tiling and the mounting of the shelf brackets, which we did on our own. The tile started out fine, but we quickly realized we under estimated how much time it would take. We ended up having to rent the tile saw for two days and rushed it back to Home Depot at 7:45pm last Sunday night, minutes before the store closed.
We also had many debates regarding the open shelves and just how we were going to get them to stay on the wall with such heavy objects on them. Some google-ing and another trip to our lovely neighborhood Home Depot later (we really should buy stock in HD), we experimented with three brackets for the bottom shelf. It looked a little “over engineered” so we went with two brackets a piece for the top two shelves. We used wall mounting screws that hold at least 50 pounds a piece, cumulatively. At minimum the shelves should hold 300 pounds, so we figured that would be enough! The screws that came with the brackets (bought through Signature Hardware) stripped almost immediatly. Two of the screw heads just fell off entirely, so another late Sunday night trip to Home Depot later, we had new, stronger screws and we were back in action. We also pre-drilled the holes in the shelf, which seemed to help a lot. In the end, the kitchen came out exactly as I had hoped and looked a million times better than it did when we bought the house almost 2 years ago.
It was a real test for our D-I-Y skills and patience. Not having a functional kitchen and the endless parade of contractors and mountains of dust were harder to deal with than I expected. Tiling took up an entire weekend, sunrise to sunset. But we learned a lot and will put that to good use on the next project. We’re just not planning that next project anytime soon!
Kitchen Before (July 2011)
Kitchen After (March 2013)
Kitchen Before (July 2011)
Kitchen After (March 2013)
The Desert Farmhouse 