Saga of the Refridgerator

The refrigerator is now plugged in and keeping pizza leftovers cold!  It’s been sitting in the dining room for a while while we puzzled the conundrum of getting it into the kitchen… We used a deep well bottle cooler (visit this website for commercial refrigerators) kindly provided by our friends for a while, till we got it.

We purchased at LG single door, bottom drawer refrigerator in white.

We looked at a LOT of refrigerators. We really liked the samsung sigle-door, bottom drawer but it has been discontinued. We also looked at a large number of french-door refridgerators. The problem is, that in order to access the drawers, the doors have to open more than 90 degrees.

You can kind of see in this picture that the doors have to really open in order for the drawers to clear the organizers in the door.

Since we are putting the fridge in the corner of the room, the right door will not be able to open much more than 90 degrees. We thought about taking the door organizers off the right door but the fridges are designed in such a way that the door is the only space for milk-jugs and 2-liter bottles. So, until we come up with a better solution, the single-door fridge is the only way to have a fridge in a corner.

We also didn’t want the water-dispenser in the door. With the bottom freezer, you end up having to have a second freezer element for the ice maker and that ends up taking up a large portion of your fridge space. The tap water is also extremely good tasting where we are so it didn’t make much sense for us. There is an ice maker in the drawer and even that isn’t super necessary since the tap water doesn’t get hotter than about 55 degrees.

Back to the saga, the fridge is 33″ wide, a standard-ish small-ish size. It is 30″ deep plus another 3 ” for the handles. Problem…the door to the kitchen is only 28″ wide. So the fridge was delivered with much excitement..then much disappointment..then resignation. We stashed it in the Piano Room/Formal Living room until we figured out what to do. My initial thought was that we would have to take it out the front of the house, down the driveway, up onto the deck, and in through the back door which is slated to be replaced anyways. So, we’d tear out the door, get the fridge in, and put a new door back. First of all, that is a lot of destruction to get a fridge into our house not to mention how would we ever get it out! Secondly, there is a dumpster currently blocking the aforementioned path down the driveway to the deck.

The fridge lived in the piano room for a week or so and then the cabinets come, fully blocking the path of the fridge. Stefan did some research and developed a plan. If you take the doors off the refridgerator, it is 27 3/4″ wide. The door is 28″ wide. That should be enough. This past Monday, we inspected and re-arranged the cabinets and removed the doors from the fridge. With much finagling we got the fridge lined up with the not 1 but 2 door-frames it had to slide through to get into the kitchen. With 1/8″ clearance on each side, we managed to force the fridge through perhaps the narrowest doorway possible.  I wish I had pictures of the feat but I was too busy guiding to snap any photos.

In the end, the fridge looks happy and healthy in his corner, keeping leftover take-out chilled and fresh for our next evening of house-work.

Sarah

Kitchen Floor Extravaganza

This weekend, we managed to install the entire kitchen floor. That’s over 250 square feet of 2 1/4″ flooring. It took us about 18 hours total. Not bad considering we had never done it before. We borrowed Stefan’s family’s floor nailer and we got some great things from the carpet stores Melbourne to finish the flooring. Stefan has 2 old brothers (10 and 12 years older) and between the two of them and Stefan’s father, they have quite the collection of tools. We got floor refinishing tips via gettysburgflooring.com.

We bought the floor from Lowes. It is Bruce Maple Cappuccino in 2 1/4″.

$73.60 per case. We purchased 15 cases but we used just over 13 of them. We will be adding a a pantry from Pantry Installation in salt lake city ut at some point so we’ll use the remainder of the flooring on that. I love the floors. I had to navigate to this website to select some of the best fits for the floor we had. It looks just like the picture. Lots of variation. Dark but not too dark. Most of the boards were strait enough though we did have a few problem boards. Lots of length variation but heavy on the longer lengths which was really nice. Definitely a high quality product at a good price.

We started on the far wall. It made the most sense to start there because of the layout of the room. If we started anywhere else we would have had to lay flooring backwards at some point and you can’t really lay tongue and groove flooring backwards.

The dotted line is the stairs. We recently removed the ugly wall banister and the whole room has really opened up.

We started on that far wall and worked our way across. It took most of friday afternoon just to get the room cleaned and prepped. Here I am doing some final nail removal.

The first 2 rows of flooring have to be top nailed. There isn’t room for the floor nailer to work properly. After that, we use the floor nailer.

This great tool is an air-assisted tool. You use a specialized hammer to hit the tool and the nail is air assisted into the board. It makes for a quick and easy job. The tool has a special groove that sets on the tongue of the board and aligns the nail. Technically, you can use a finish nailer and manually align the nailer to the nail groove but we did that on a couple rows where the floor nailer didn’t fit and let me tell you, not fun. A couple downsides to the floor nailer though, at the end of the room, when you are flooring towards a wall, you have to stop using the nailer fairly early. You need hammer swinging room or you will put holes in your walls…which we did…a couple times.

Here is a good picture showing proper use of the floor nailer. I was having a little too much fun with motion shots.

Occassionally, a nail won’t seat properly or the hammer will slip and not drop quite enough force on the tool. In those cases you can either use a nail set to set the nail, use a crow bar to try to remove the nail, or use a trusty dremel to cut the nail off.

Watch out, it sparks!

It was a great two person job. I laid out the rows while Stefan used the nailer. It was much faster to lay out the rows and cut the ends than to nail so I also helped speed up the process by setting each board into place. That involved some gentle hammering on the ends to get each board properly seated before Stefan came by with the nailer.

After we were done, we swiffered the whole thing and laid down ram board which is a thick cardboard floor protector that you can find at Home Depot and the like. It is heavy-duty and kind of pricey but it works great.

There is so much dirt and debris in the rest of the house that tracking dirt around is inevitable. I’d just prefer it didn’t end up ground into our nice new floor hence, the ram board.

We also set that disgusting old stove on the cardboard form a flooring carton along with the shop vac and trash can. Watch out for those shop-vacs on new floors. After rolling around in the dirt for a month, the wheels do a number on hardwood. We keep it on the cardboard for now.

And TA-DA, a new floor. It’s so exciting to see a plan start to come together.

It still hardly looks like a kitchen but a little TLC and we’re going to have it looking good. Stay tuned! Next week: Project Back Deck part 2!

Sarah