It's Great To Be Home

Nothing Can Just Be Easy

May 20, 2013 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 4 Comments

You guys, I’m going to complain for a minute. Or maybe vent. Or bitch? Not sure what the appropriate verb is.

This flip is taking f.o.r.e.v.e.r.

And the worst part? We’re at least partly to blame.

This is the first flip that we’ve contracted ourselves. That’s right, the buck stops with us on this one. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying (although we’ve gotten past most of the terrifying parts).

We bought this sucker right before Christmas, when we thought we’d be working with the contractor that helped us with our last flip. Weeks passed, and we were still waiting on final bids – it was like watching paint dry. So, we made sure our ducks were in a row and then we decided to just contract this flip ourselves.

Everything was chugging along AMAZINGLY well until sometime in February (my timeline on all this is a little fuzzy, bear with me). I made a rookie mistake on a Friday and made the last payment to our framer for 100% of the work when I should have held 5% back until he completed a few little projects. You know the drill, “It’s Friday and I need to pay my guys! I’ve worked with you before, we’ll be back.” Against my better judgment, I paid him in full and we never saw him again. We got a text message at one point saying he had been hospitalized, which I hope wasn’t true because I’d like him to be okay, but that was the end of things with him. A total bummer, and I thought we’d had a really great working relationship. At least the work that he did do was pretty awesome.

So, it took us about a month to finally accept that the framer really wasn’t coming back and that we needed to find someone else to do the little leftover framing projects. We finally did that, and things were back on track.

Then, two weeks ago or so, the electricians came out to do their finish work – installing light fixtures, switching out outlets, etc. It was the same company we had been using for the whole project and we’d been really happy with them and their guys. Jason and I showed up on our way to a foreclosure auction (I owe you guys a post about that!) to walk them through everything that needed to be done, and instead of our regular electricians there were some seriously sketchy-looking dudes* in their place. We went ahead and walked them through everything and then left to go to the auction. When I checked back in on the flip the next day . . . nothing had been done. Like, NOTHING. They had installed one ceiling fan and put face plates on a couple of outlets (while leaving behind a jillion fingerprints on the freshly painted walls). Since the finish out was supposed to be a one-day project, I was concerned. I called the main office, they were wonderful, and they basically said they were firing the guys. (It was later confirmed that they were let go.) That’s all well and good, but we still needed our electrical work to be finished so that the plumbers could install the appliances, etc and so on. A whole domino effect. And our regular electricians couldn’t come back for a week and a half. Ugh. That meant every single other thing on the schedule had to be pushed back by a week and a half.

*These dudes were sketchy to the point that I felt the need to change the code on the lockbox once I realized that they had bailed on our job – it was just too creepy.

In the meantime, the vent hood over the range was installed, and the installers had to chip out a tile. That now needs to be fixed.

As of today, most of the electrical finish-out has been completed. So the plumbers came to install the stove and the dishwasher…and couldn’t complete either task. We need 1/4 inch of the countertops to be ground down so that the stove will fit, and we need a piece of trim installed under the countertop to screw the dishwasher into so that it won’t wobble. Luckily, these jobs can both be completed by the tile guy (who is also our countertop guy) when he comes back in a few days to fix that single backsplash tile.

The HVAC guys are almost totally finished, but they can’t install their last ceiling vent until some sheetrock is fixed.

We’ve also had other run of the mill delays along the way, but for some reason these delays today just got to me. Even thought I am completely in love with how this flip is turning out, I’m tired of the minutiae and I’m ready for this sucker to be finished!!!!!

Consider this bitch-fest officially over. (I decided that was the appropriate verb, after all.) :)

And since you deserve a progress photo if you’ve made it to the end of this post, here you go!

The Big Box Kitchen Series: These Cabinets are Awesome

May 17, 2013 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 9 Comments

I owe you guys lots of updates on the flip – it’s been chugging along behind the scenes and I’ve been meaning to fill you in as we go along (I’ve shared a few updates on Instagram), but I’ve been slacking.

So much has happened! I planned on doing one giant “catching you up” post but there’s just too much – so let’s check out the cabinets first. I guess that warrants a “Big Box Kitchen Series” tagline.

If you’re new to the series, the Big Box Kitchen Series shares every step of our experience using Home Depot semi-custom cabinetry in our 6th flip. Click here and here to check out the first two installments.

You may recall that the last time you saw the flip we had sheetrock, wood floors, and tile in the bathrooms – click here to see that. Then, after much anticipation, the cabinets were delivered!!!!!!!!! (And you can catch a glimpse below of how the much-debated fireplace surround turned out. More on that in another post.)

It was exciting to see the cabinets looking all gorgeous and finished right out of the box. That is a definite perk compared to custom cabinetry (like we’ve used in the past), which is typically delivered unfinished and then painted or stained on site.

Hello, giant pantry.

We opted for flat trim at the top of the cabinets instead of crown molding – it was the clean, modern look we wanted and it was also a little bit cheaper. You can see it being installed below. The installer did a great job scribing the trim so that it followed the line of the ceiling exactly (as you know, most ceilings aren’t perfectly flat).

You can’t really see it in this photo, but there was a slight gap between the top of the cabinet and the ceiling above the refrigerator box – we bought a few pieces of screen molding, had them painted to match the cabinets (thanks, Martha, for selling matching paint!) and installed to hide the gap. To keep things looking even, we had it installed around the tops of all of the cabinets.

I don’t think I have any photos of the screen molding at this stage, so I’ll just have to post some for you later. Can you handle the anticipation??? Ha. Also, you can see in the photo below how the toe kick is installed separately, and how the insides of all the cabinets (including the fridge box) have a birch-looking finish.

That’s a lot better than how the kitchen used to look from this angle, don’t you think? To support my claim, here’s a “before” photo:

Click here for more scary “before” photos – oh, and here’s a comparison of the before/after layouts:

Before:

After:

A few of you expressed an interest on a more detailed discussion of how we came up with the changes to the kitchen layout, so I’ll do a more in-depth post about that later!

This is the only shot that I have of the handles installed on the cabinets – we went for horizontal pulls all over, and I’m really happy with how they turned out. Love! (Please ignore the missing handle above the fridge, that has since been remedied.)

And here’s the guest bathroom, in a slightly lighter shade of gray:

We chose stained cabinets for the master bathroom, and the vanity turned out really great.

So how do I like the cabinets now that they’ve been installed? In short, I love them.

Pros:

- The finish on each and every cabinet is completely flawless – no drips or rough spots or any of the weird things that you can have with cabinets that are finished onsite.

- Every drawer and cabinet is soft-close (something I don’t think we’ve ever had before), and all of the drawer glides work so smoothly.

- Each set of cabinets comes with a sort of paint pen to touch up the cabinets (in case you scuff them in the future).

- It’s super easy to add extra trim (like we did) or other custom add-ons to the cabinets with the “painted” finish because Home Depot sells the Martha paint line with the corresponding paint colors (so no color-match guesses).

- The installer did a killer job, and was good at troubleshooting along the way with us.

- The interiors of the cabinets can be customized down the road with roll-out trays, lazy susans, etc.

- If you have any extra trim, etc. that hasn’t been cut down you can return it for a refund.

Cons:

- If something is missing or damaged once you open the box, you have to wait another few weeks for a replacement to arrive. This didn’t exactly happen to us, because we opted to buy screen molding on the day of the install when it turned out that there was a gap above the cabinets rather than ordering trim through Home Depot and waiting for it to get here.

- The inside of the cabinets are the birch-looking finish, which is quite nice, but I wish it matched the exterior of the cabinets. This really only matters to me because we sell our flips without refrigerators, so that birch finish is kind of glaring, but it wouldn’t matter at all once a fridge is installed.

- When you pay for Home Depot’s installer to install the cabinets, it’s a one-shot deal. We have since noticed a little issue with the trim on the side of the fridge box, and I’m not sure they’ll come back out to fix it. It’s on my list to check with them but I’m not hopeful. But maybe?

- The colors/finishes are limited – but of course that’s to be expected. I wish they had a different option for “white” cabinets – prefinished white cabinets tend to look very stark (and cheap) to me, and Martha’s “white” cabinets are no exception. It would also be fun if they had some other on-trend colors besides gray. A navy or another fun color would be awesome.

What questions do you guys have about Home Depot cabinets, or the Martha line, the process, or how we like the cabinets? I’d be happy to do another follow up post to answer any questions that you have. Later gators!