Category: 1970s Shore Home

I feel like I spent half the day on the phone today. A bunch of it was getting the utilities set up down the shore. The best part of the process was getting transferred to 3 different people at the water department, only to finally learn that the water bill transfers automatically with the deed.

The house currently does not have natural gas hooked up. I’ve been looking at electric ranges and cooktops, and in order to get something I can stand to cook on we’d have to go fairly high end. Meanwhile it turns out if I get a gas range the gas company will hook it up for “free” (in quotes because they know they’re getting a customer so it’s more of an investment with guaranteed returns on their part). This is of course assuming there’s already gas in the neighborhood, which is yet to be determined. Apparently the rep I talked to on the phone has to turn that question over to someone else with a divining rod or something.

Assuming gas is available, I turn my attention to the heating system. Right now the heating system is a heat pump with a broken auxillary heating element. On the one hand, the aux heat is basically a big toaster and should be an easy fix. On the other hand the heat pump is over a decade old and those things only have a lifespan of 10 years or so. In general the heating system is pretty low on our priority list; we won’t be there much in the winter and there’s electric baseboard heat to supplement the heat pump. BUT if we were to get a gas furnace put in to replace it there are some nice rebates and incentives from the gas company. Also gas heat is much cheaper than electric.

The hot water heater was also on the inspector’s list of appliances near the end of their life expectancy, and that would also benefit from being converted to gas. I looked into tankless heaters but I’m not sold on the proposition. It’s very likely we’ll have both showers in use at the same time and it sounds like a tankless would have trouble keeping up with that.

There are so many expensive appliances to replace. None of them are urgent, so we can spread the costs over a few years, but still. The stove is the only non-negotiable thing that has to be upgraded sooner rather than later. The one in there is an ancient electric coil stove and I just can’t with those things.

The gas company’s spiritual medium, or whomever keeps track of what lines are where, will be in touch by Monday to let me know whether gas is even a legit option for us. Then I have to decide whether to start down that rabbit hole. So many expensive decisions to make.

Update: The gas company got in touch with me on Thursday. They left an inaudibly garbled message on Chris’s cell phone and emailed me a bunch of PDFs. One of the PDFs is literally a one page document that just says “For Rebate Information, visit our website” in 72 point font. At no point did they confirm whether or not gas service is available to the house. Looks like Friday will be another day of phone calls.

We’re still a week out from closing on the house, but due to the timing of the Ikea kitchen sale (now) I’m trying to line up as much as I can so we can hit the ground running and take advantage of the sale.

If you remember from the huge to-do list the kitchen currently looks like this:

It actually doesn’t look too bad in this picture, but in person the cabinets are all sagging at odd angles and the counter top is some sort of faux-stone print laminate. I’ve seen much worse but for somewhere we’ll be cooking big family meals I think we can do better.

We’re going with Ikea for the new cabinets because they hit a good spot between price and quality. I know there’s much higher quality stuff you can get, but since the house is in a flood zone I’m not about to put fancy all wood custom cabinets in it. The modular sameness of Ikea is actually appealing because should the worst happen we can just replace the damaged cabinets ourselves.

I plan on installing the cabinets myself but I’m hiring a designer to do the layout. There’s a ton of important stuff to consider in a kitchen design that I’m just not familiar with. Also the more time I spend with the Ikea kitchen planning tool the more I want to scream and run away. Reviews for Ikea’s in-house planning service are a mixed bag so I’m going with a third party designer.

At this point I have spent a ton of time on Pinterest looking at kitchens. Here’s the general style we’re going for:

For flooring I’m 90% sold on wood-look vinyl plank. I like the way wood looks but the kitchen floor extends into the laundry room and that just seems like asking for trouble. Vinyl tolerates water much better than something like Pergo and isn’t as much of a pain to install as tile. From what I’ve read  80% of the work is in the floor prep. If your floor is flat then everything is easy and it looks good for years. If your floor is not flat then it pops and warps and looks awful. I guess I’ll be spending a few weekends this summer elbow deep in leveling compound.

Not really sure what we’ll do about appliances. I hate hate hate electric coil stoves like the one that’s there. I’m debating springing for an induction cooktop. The rest of it seems fine, if a bit old. It’s tempting to move the fridge into the laundry room to use as a beer fridge and get something a little nicer for the kitchen. This is where I start to hyperventilate with the kitchen planning. In order to plan cabinets you need to know the size of your appliances, but the cabinet layout influences the appliance choices!

My next step, after closing, is to take a million measurements of the kitchen and adjacent room (which is sort of a dining room I guess) to send to the kitchen designer. Start to finish usually takes 3 weeks for design/revisions, during which I’ll remove the existing cabinets and poke around in the walls to see if there are any nasty surprises. I told the designer I’m willing to consider moving plumbing / electrical or cutting a passthrough window into the living room, but it would be a pain in the ass. All three walls are load bearing so having anything done to them won’t be cheap or easy.

So yeah. DIY kitchen installation with professional design. I know just enough to know that I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. Friends who have been though this: TELL ME ABOUT YOUR KITCHENS!