Kitchen Reno Update - Late Summer Ad Hoc Edition

Ah yes, the kitchen reno. To the casual observer, not much has happened since we started being able to use the new kitchen back in March. As you can imagine, after so many months of hard work and disorder, we felt like taking a bit of a break from kitchen stuff, and just enjoy the new space. In the interim, though, we got on with lots of other jobs that needed doing - painting the front hall, getting some guys in to paint the aluminum siding outside, and having our driveway paved (three years after it was first torn up!).

Still, since my last update, we've done lots of little jobs in the kitchen that needed finishing up - like installing a new pendant fixture in the dining room (to match the ones in the kitchen) and the last of the cabinet hardware (which was backordered and took three months to arrive). The door and window frames (some of which were removed and altered during the reno work) were re-installed and painted. But a couple big jobs got finished too:

• Paint: Argh. What a palaver. Over the winter, before the cabinetmakers came in, I painted the empty shell of the kitchen in "The Thames" by CIL - a pale green I thought I'd love. It turned out to be too minty, however. So the search began for a suitably neutral sagey-greeny-grey colour. Six test pots later, I finally found a winner - "Blue Gray" by Farrow & Ball. Despite the name, it's much more greenish than bluish! And it's very soft, as well. I was worried that grey paint might look too cold, but this one is anything but. And it goes fantastically well with our countertops, too.

We used the same colour in both kitchen and dining room. Originally, I had planned to leave the dining room with its original yellow paint, which I really liked. But as our kitchen designer/neighbour advised us months ago, once the renovation work was done we could see that with our new open-plan design, the kitchen and dining room would really look best if they were painted the same colour. Luckily, I think the "Blue Gray" looks nice in there too:

• Crown moulding for the dining room: another case in which we should have listened to our kitchen designer/neighbour. When planning the work for our cabinetmaker, she suggested that we replace the existing crown moulding in our dining room with something that would match what was being installed in the kitchen. I poo-poohed the suggestion, however, as I thought the existing moulding was perfectly nice, and at that stage I was determined to keep unnecessary costs to a minimum. So the cabinetmakers went ahead, installed new moulding in the kitchen only, and made the transition between the two rooms as neat as possible. Once the job was done, however, I could see that our designer was right, and that since the space was now essentially one big room, it would look much better if everything matched. So in April, the cabinetmakers came back to take out the old crown moulding from the dining room, and install the new one. It makes for a much neater, cleaner finish - no doubt about it. The moral of the story? When you've put so much time, effort and money into a big job like this, you shouldn't cheap out on the finishing touches.

So those were the biggest accomplishments of recent months. Still several big things left to do, though:

• Backsplash Tiling: ARGH. OK, granted, the delay on this is my fault as midway through the reno, I changed my mind about the kind of tile I wanted. But by mid-April, I'd decided on a variation of this glass tile design, from Olympia Tile:

I asked Olympia to customize this standard pattern, replacing the blue tiles with a mid/dark green. Along with the greenish-white, grey and brown colours in the pattern, it looks as though it would be a perfect complement to my quartz countertop (which has all those same colours in it). I also love the mini-brick shape (the individual tiles are 1"x2"). Being a custom order, however, we of course wanted to have a sample made, before making a final decision. Placed that sample order at the end of April...waited...and by the end of July and much hassling of our designer to find out what the hell was going on, Olympia admitted that they'd lost the sample order. (Why it took three months to find this out is another matter altogether.) So - currently, I am awaiting my sample, and hoping very much that it will arrive in the next week or two.

• Floors: When we had the kitchen floors refinished in March, we planned to have the guys come back later and give the dining room a light buff and re-coat, as it's got a few scratches. We'd hoped they'd be able to do that this month, but (surprise) there have been delays, and they will come sometime in September now. In the meantime, my buffet and hutch (and everything in it) have been moved into the spare bedroom, in preparation.

• Heating: back in June, we ordered new radiators - European-style, thin ones from Runtal. Given the tight space at the end of the kitchen (and the need to be sure that we had enough clearance to open the door of our lower oven) we couldn't go with standard radiators. However, the good thing about a custom order, of course, is that you can get exactly what you want. The three new rads arrived last week - one will go in the entryway, one under the far window in the kitchen, and one in the bathroom next door (as the baseboard heater in there has never done a good job of heating the room - it's freezing on winter mornings). So a call will be put in to the plumber shortly, to get them hooked up - and voila! We will have heat this winter!

So, that's where we are at the moment. Next time I update this reno diary, I hope I'll have pics of my new tile backsplash to post!