• WELCOME
• THE HOUSE
• THE GARDEN ↓
  • DESIGN
  • POND
  • BONSAI
  • GARDEN SHED
  • TEAHOUSE
• EXTERIOR ↓
  • FOUNDATION
  • ROOF
  • WINDOWS & DOORS
  • SIDING
• INTERIOR ↓
  • GENKAN
  • KITCHEN
  • BATHROOM
  • LIVING ROOM
  • BEDROOM
• MECHANICAL ↓
  • WIRING
  • PLUMBING
  • HVAC
  • ENERGY EFFICIENCY
• INSPIRATION
• SPECIFICATIONS

Kitchen Design

Like everyone else in America (or so it seems), we're remodeling our kitchen. When trying to decide on anything for a kitchen these days, we're faced with so many choices it's nearly impossible to decide the direction we want to take for style and finishes. With all the styles available, we decided early on to simplify and just concentrate on the basics: get appliances, layout the cabinets, wiring and lighting, and don't worry about the finishes and colors until we really need to. Another way to narrow down the daunting array of design choices is to determined what we don't want to do. Despite the design direction we're taking on the rest of the house, the traditional daidokoro Japanese style kitchen of the late Edo period is not something in which we have any interest in trying to re-create.

Some of the kitchen design decisions were made very early in the renovation project, since installing windows and re-building the utility room and old screen porch had a direct influence on where walls and appliances would end up in the kitchen. In order to make progress on the old screen porch, new appliances were purchased in the Fall of 2006 (and the dishwasher is still sealed in the carton) so we could get the refridgerator "cubby" built. With the fridge and a couple cabinets temporarily installed, the kitchen was largely ignored until late 2008. It was when I needed to figure out the exact location of the new kitchen window in the Fall of 2008 when I had to finally make some real decisions about the kitchen and start working on it.

We had pretty much determined that we'd go with stainless steel appliances, natural wood cabinet faces, and a dark grey or black countertop just to have some basis to work from, but that left many, many details to address. I guess we'd call it a contemporary or modern style if we had to label it, but mostly we're just interested in a well lit, functional kitchen that's not too "busy" looking. For cabinetry we selected all Ikea® "Akurum" units, since the price can't be beat. The Ikea® cabinets aren't the same quality as solid wood custom cabinetry obviously, but if you just put them together and install them, they are pretty rugged. The trouble comes in if you do a lot of handling of the assembled units - those little particle-board fasteners they use can't take much tweaking of the case before they fail (I found this out the hard way, and had to re-assemble the free-standing pantry unit with glue and screws after I tried to move it alone one too many times). We haven't made the final decision on the cabinet doors, and I'm not too worried about it - we'll just pick something that's in stock for now. If we decide to get fancy later on, I can build my own doors without too much trouble.

Lighting the new kitchen has been a primary concern for both of us, since we've been living with our extremely poorly lit kitchen for so many years. As I'd come up with new lighting ideas and show them to the lovely bride, she became a little concerned that I was getting carried away (and if you look at the plans, you'll see there's a lot of lights in such a tiny room). My take on lighting a work area is to put in plenty of lights, then control them with dimmers and multiple switches. If there's "too much" light, just dim the fixtures down, or don't use all the lights all the time. It's certainly much easier to install abundant lighting when the walls and ceiling are open than it is to find that areas of the room need more light after everything is finished. An extra $10 for a recessed fixture here and there is no big deal - tearing into finished drywall and installing additional wiring when the room is done is not something I want to have to do.

The lighting we installed includes a basic CFL flush-mount ceiling fixture for general room light (which took a really long time to pick out - there's some awful light fixtures out there), five non-dimmed 4" recessed Halogen fixtures over the counters for task lighting, a pair of dim-able 6" recessed fixtures for ambient light (these are part of a circuit of recessed fixtures that will run around the perimeter of the living room as well), wall-switched GE® Xenon under-cabinet lighting which can also be dimmed at each fixture, and a loop of wall-switched LED rope light that runs around the inside of all the base cabinets. Now that the lighting is in and working, I've had no complaints from the homeowner about "too much" light - and in case of medical emergency, we've got better lighting than an operating room if we turn everything on at the same time.

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Building the New Kitchen

The Fridge "Cubby": Fall 2008
The first job, after a bit of planning work to get the window appropriately centered in the room, was to finish the East wall that separated the kitchen from the utility room. I installed gypsum wall board (GWB), a few layers of plaster, then primed and painted. These walls didn't get any texturing and glazing, since that entire wall will be covered with cabinets or hidden by appliances. The next bit was to deal with the floor under the fridge "cubby". The floors in the kitchen (and the entire house, for that matter) all run downhill from North to South at a pretty good pitch (about an inch for every 10 feet - scary), and I wanted to try and get them a bit closer to level. After some discussion we decided to go with natural gauged Slate tile for the kitchen floor, but I didn't want to try and put that stuff under the appliances and floor cabinets since it's so uneven. We picked some porcelain floor tiles with a color and texture that closely matches Slate, then used those in all the out-of-sight areas to provide a smooth, maintenance-free floor covering under all that stuff. The porcelain is also a lot easier to get level (and install in general) than gauged stone tile, since it's all uniform thickness.

With the "cubby" floor and walls finished, we hung the wall cabinets for that space, put in the re-built pantry unit, and rolled the fridge into its permanent home. The next task would be the ceiling and walls, but we also had to deal with some plumbing issues before we got too far along. I had installed cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) tubing for all the water supply lines in 2006 when building out the utility room and working on the heating system under the house, but we hadn't done anything about the old cast iron waste lines at that time since replacing those would have required gutting the kitchen and bath. Now we were finally ready to do just that, so we set a date with the neighbor / plumber to remove the cast iron and install new waste lines and vent stacks. Most of the work would take place in and under the bathroom, but we also had to relocate the kitchen sink drain that went through the floor into the back wall, as well as move the main vent into the wall between the kitchen and bath. To prepare for plumbing, I stripped the T & G panelling off the remaining kitchen walls, then turned my attention to the bathroom for a few weeks.

Wall & Ceiling Framing: Winter 2008/2009
A few weeks turned in to a few months, with some delays in the plumbing, and then most of my efforts focused on getting the bathroom in to semi-working order. We also took a relaxing trip back to the Midwest for the holidays and spent some long overdue time with both our families. It was nice to get out of the house for a while and stop worrying about the projects for a couple weeks. When we returned and went back to work, my next task was to deal with the old kitchen ceiling and ready the walls for GWB.

The first order of business was to get all the new wiring into the framing, and as mentioned earlier, there was plenty of lighting circuits to run, as well as a couple of circuits for multiple wall receptacles along the countertop. I had installed the new wiring circuits a couple years earlier when we installed the new service panel, but I had just left extra wiring for the circuits coiled up in the attic close to where I was planning to drop it into the walls. It was nice to finally get the boxes mounted and lose the extension cords hanging from the ceiling that we'd been using to run kitchen electrics. The homesote ceiling was removed and replaced with poly sheeting, then I insulated the back wall and got some poly over that while I figured out how to make a level ceiling for the kitchen without having to replace all the ceiling joists.

The ceiling was out of level to the tune of about 3 inches from one corner of the room to the other, and I didn't want to spend the money on a load of 10' 2x6 to attach to the sides of the existing joists, so I came up with a cheaper alternative. To level the ceiling, I used a bunch of inexpensive 1" by 3" furring strips that I attached to the existing joists to create a sort of drop ceiling support system that would hold the new GWB finish ceiling. To prep the strips, I attached a series of 6" long pieces of 1x3 perpendicular to the face of the long strips with screws and glue on 8" centers (they sort of looked like someone had cut a wooden ladder in half, except the "rungs" were 90° to the way they should have been, if that makes any sense). When the glue had dried, I then dabbed each "rung" with a bit of construction adhesive, and clamped the strip in place along the side / bottom of the joist. I'd level the strip along the length of the joist, then attach it with a couple more screws into the side of the joist through the "rung". Once the first strip was up and as level as I could get it, I worked on the joist next to it and used the first one to level the next until I'd gotten the entire ceiling furred down. I then installed and connected the light fixtures and electrical boxes, filled the joist bays with R-19 unfaced fiberglass insulation, and re-attached the plastic sheeting.

The wall behind the sink didn't need any special attention, other than some careful sealing of the vapor barrier around the wiring and plumbing penetrations. The wall between the kitchen and bath was a little more complicated, since there's a good amount of stuff going on in that wall. As mentioned earlier, I tried to minimize the amount of physical contact between the framing members of the kitchen side and those of the bathroom side to eleminate sound transfer. I still had to make some attachments so the thing would be solid, since it's going to support the microwave and wall cabinets on the kitchen side, and the oversized medicine cabinet and counter on the bathroom side. There's also a lot of blocking in the wall to support electrical boxes for receptacles and switches, as well as plumbing fixtures on both sides of the wall. We also placed the main vent stack within the wall cavity, which meant we had to make the wall thicker. To make the wall thick enough for the main stack, I used 2" by 3" framing members, glued and screwed to the existing top and bottom plates along the kitchen side of the wall. This had the added bonus of providing enough material at the top plate to properly anchor the top of the wall into a ceiling joist (since it was a non-bearing wall, I found it was just sorta flopping around when I stripped it, and the only thing that had been holding it up were a few 8d toenails through the bathroom acoustic tile furring strips).

Gypsum Wall Board: Early Spring 2009
With all the framing completed and hopefully all the wires and PEX in the right place, I was finally able to get some GWB installed in the kitchen. The ceiling is covered with normal 1/2" thick paper-faced GWB, and will eventually get a textured, stucco-like plaster finish. For the wall coverings, I tried a fairly new material from Georgia-Pacific called DensArmor Plus® High Performance Interior Panels (also known as "paperless drywall"). I'd never heard of the stuff until a few years ago when I was working on the entryway and grumbling about dealing with the paper backing while making complicated cuts in standarad GWB. The lovely bride had apparantly over heard my Yosemite Sam impression ("Rassin' frassin' drywall varmits...") and sent me a link the next day about some information that she'd found on the 'net about this new paperless drywall stuff - chalk one up for the homeowner! This stuff is absolutely fantastic. The basic concept is that mold thrives on moisture, and the paper backing on GWB holds moisture like a sponge. Take away the paper, and the mold doesn't have anything to feed on, at least according to the GP propoganda. I didn't find any signs of the nasty black blight in the walls while tearing down the bath and kitchen, but I figure why take a chance at this point. I was eager to try the stuff, so I picked up a dozen 4 x 8 sheets to use in the kitchen, bathroom and behind the laundry in the walk-in closet. I may end up using it for everything else in the house, even if there's no plumbing in the walls.

DensArmor Plus® does have a bit of a learning curve if you're used to dealing with normal paper-faced GWB. To begin with, it's more expensive: a 1/2" thick 4 x 8 sheet is about $12 here, whereas regular 1/2" stuff is about $8. It's faced with a very thin layer of fiberglass, so gloves, long-sleeves and a dust mask are highly recommened. It's heavy - a 1/2" sheet of DensArmor Plus® weighs about as much as a 5/8" sheet of standard GWB (or a 3/4" sheet of plywood). That might not sound like much, but the weight difference is enough to make solo handling of full-sized sheets nearly impossible. When hanging the stuff, great care must be taken with the counter-sink depth of the drywall screw heads - the fiberglass face is thin, and much less forgiving than paper if you've got the screw gun set a click or two too deep (you do use a dedicated drywall screw gun, right?). It's very easy to blow through the face so practice with a few scraps until you get the depth just right. Now for the good news. It cuts SO much easier than that nasty paper faced stuff that you'll actually look forward to hanging GWB! You still cut it the same as usual: score a line through the face, then fold and score the back... fold again and snap it in two. The better news is you don't actually have to cut the back with this stuff. Do the normal face cut and fold business, but then just fold it back and forth a couple times, then sort of close the face cut by folding the front back on itself and the backing will snap cleanly along your line. The first time I did this, quite by accident, I was shocked at how clean both sides of the cut were (try this with paper backed GWB and the paper just crumples and peels off, making a useless mess of the sheet). This method is especially nice when working solo, since I can make all the cuts from one side of the stack of material I've got leaning up against a wall, rather than have to pull each sheet into an open space so I can get at both sides for the cut (it doesn't take much room behind the sheet to work the fold back and forth enough to get the backing to snap). The other nice thing about cutting this stuff is there's no balled-up bits of paper hanging off the cuts after you dress the edges with a "sure-form" (you dress all your cut edges, right?). Finally, another thing I noticed was that I never changed the blade in my utility knife - I didn't even flip it around - and this was after doing 9 full sheets, including all the little cuts for electrical and plumbing. The fiberglass facing doesn't chew through blades the same way the paper does, or perhaps I should say it doesn't care if you use a dull blade on it the way paper does. All in all, I'm perfectly happy to spend an extra $4 per sheet to enjoy the ease of working with this stuff.

Ceiling Finish & Wall Cabinets: Fall 2009
Once the GWB in the kitchen was up and I got the room back in semi-working order, I turned my attention back to the bathroom for the Summer, working on the bathroom panelling for the walls and ceiling. I eventually got back to kitchen work in the late Fall, after taken care of some odds and ends under the house before the weather got too bad. We had spent a few hours last Fall going over the Ikea® kitchen catalog and figuring out which cabinets were going to go where when we started tearing up the kitchen, and as Thanksgiving approached (with my brother and his family coming for the holiday), I thought I'd pick up the cabinets then try to make a little more progress on finishing the kitchen before the holiday.

We had spent the Summer of 2009 with the microwave sitting on the living room floor, pots, pans and dishes in plastic bins, and wires sticking out of the walls in the kitchen for under cabinet lights. To clean that stuff up, I'd need to get the ceiling and walls painted so we could hang some wall cabinets to hold the microwave and perhaps empty a couple storage bins too. I'd like to get the base cabinets installed as well, but I don't want to move them around too much after they're assembled so I'll need to tile the floor before those can be set-up. The ceiling in the kitchen would get the same textured, faux-stucco finish as we'd already used in the genkan and bathroom. I made a big plastic tent to keep the dust out of the living room and the appliances in the kitchen, then used the same technique to apply the finish and paint as explained in the bathroom textured wallboard section. It went on over the course of a few days, then it was ready for primer.

The kitchen walls are going to get covered with tile, so I merely gave the existing first coat of joint compound a light sanding to get rid of any big bumps, then I primed the walls and ceiling all at the same time. The sections of wall below the counter top level were painted with ceiling white paint after the primer had dried, while the ceiling was given a coat of Valspar's Interior Latex Eggshell in "Drumskin", number 7003-10. The next day I applied a glaze to the ceiling with just a hint of Valspar's "Caraway Seed", 3005-9C in it for little darker tint to enhance the texture. The final step was to add a little of the original "Drumskin" paint to a fresh batch of glaze and apply it to a few spots as highlights. We really like the look of the texture and glaze combination, and while it may prove challenging to keep clean, it's certainly more interesting than the typical smooth, flat white ceiling.

With the ceiling finished, it was time for wall cabinets. When designing the kitchen we opted for lots of light rather than lots of wall cabinets, so the largest section of the kitchen wall is occupied by the 6-foot wide window over the counter. That still left some wall space around the "fridge cubby" area (see above), and the wall between the kitchen and bath, behind the stove. For that area, we selected a 24-inch wide by 30-inch high cabinet for above each side of the stove, and a 30-inch wide by 15-inch high cabinet for directly over the stove to hold the microwave. I had to do some "customization" of the cabinet over the stove (I shortened it by about 4-inches) to allow adequate clearance between the microwave and the cook top, as well as do some cutting to make space for vent ductwork and electrical connections inside the cabinet. I also did a little extra work when assembling all these cabinets by sanding off the finish with some 60-grit paper between all the joints, then I glued the joints during assembly (in addition to the fasteners supplied by Ikea®). To attach the backs, I used glue and medium-crown staples from a pneumatic stapler, instead of just the little brad nails that come with the cabinets.

I already had marked the walls with layout lines for height and spacing of the cabinets when I finished installing the GWB. After each coat of paint, I'd refreshed the lines, so now it was a simple matter of figuring out where the hanging rail would mount that holds up the cabinets. Rather than try and measure, I found it much easier to just hold the cabinet in place, then mark the wall where the mounting hardware would land. Once the 6-foot long rail had been shortened by a few inches, I attached it to the wall with 1/4-inch by 2-inch long lag screws. When building the "thicker" wall, I had added a 2 x 6 along the top so I didn't need to worry about finding studs or using wall anchors. I installed a fastener about every 12-inches, and we were ready to hang cabinets. Between the play in the fastening rail hardware and the large mounting holes in the cabinet, there's about 3/4-inch of "wiggle room" to get the height just right, so the once the rail is up hanging the cabinets is very easy. Once the two tall cabinets were loosely fastened to the wall (and the hardware in place between them for the center cabinet), I hung the center cabinet, aligned it with the centering marks on the wall, and tightened it down. I then slid the side cabinets up against either side and snugged up the fasteners for those.

Next I attached the microwave mounting plate on the wall, which was done with the same 1/4 x 2-inch lags, and cut a hole in the ceiling for the exhaust vent duct. Again, knowing ahead of time what I needed behind the drywall made this installation very simple, as I'd already run a pair of vertical studs for mounting this unit when I'd built the wall. With some help from the lovely bride, we lifted the microwave into place and snugged up the hardware. Everything fit nicely the first time, and we finally got our microwave off the living room floor. The last bit was to mount a couple 24-inch GE® Xenon hard-wired under-cabinet light fixtures under each of the tall cabinets, and we were ready to make Thanksgiving dinner!

Tile Floor Installation: Winter 2009
With the Vanagon full of the rest of our Ikea® kitchen cabinets and hardware, getting the tile floor down so I could get those cabinets installed was the next kitchen project. As discussed above when finishing the 'fridge "cubby", we selected a "slate look" porcelain floor tile to run around the perimeter of the room underneath appliances and base cabinets, but the main part of the floor would be gauged Indian Multi-color Slate. I wanted a semi-random look for the floor tile pattern, as opposed to trying to maintain perfect grout lines in the floor for a straight criss-cross pattern. After browsing some patterns on-line and in tile books, I couldn't find anything I that really appealed to us, so like the genkan, I designed my own pattern to work from for the kitchen.

Once the pattern had been determined, I could figure out how many tiles I'd need to put together the pattern then start the floor prep work. First I purchased the tiles, which required a little trial and error - Home Depot and Lowes both carry multi-color Slate for about the same price, but Home Depot's Slate comes from China and after looking through a few boxes in the store, only about half of each box were useable tiles. The rest were either in pieces, or flaking apart very badly. The Indian Slate from Lowes looked to be in much better shape, and Lowes also carries pre-cut boxes of 6-inch square tiles, which would save me a good deal of time at the wet saw (even though I'd still need to trim the 6-inch tiles down to 5-7/8-inch square to allow for grout). I bought all the tiles according to the plan, plus an extra box of both the 6-inch and 12-inch tiles to allow for breakage and just plain ugly tiles, then set up the wet-saw.

Cutting & Cleaning Tile
I probably could have saved a few days of outdoor work if I'd purchased the tile from an actual tile store, but a box of 10 Slate tiles from Lowes cost about the same as a single slate tile from the tile store - I'm not in that big of a hurry. The problem was going to be the weather, since el-cheapo Slate is a mess right out of the box so all the tiles would need to get cleaned and rinsed before I could think about installing it. Also when I cut a tile with the wet saw, that applies a fresh coat of mud to the tile as it's cut. Very messy business, and not something I was looking forward to doing in the snow. Luckily we were enjoying a fairly mild winter so far, so with the weather in the upper 40's I set up the saw on a few old 2 x 4's over the compost bins, and started cutting. I set the saw-fence to 5-7/8-inches, then cut all the 12-inch halves first (plus a few extras), then ran through the 6-inch tiles on 2 sides to trim those down to 5-7/8-inches square. By cutting all the tiles slightly undersize, I'd have enough space in between the tiles to allow a 1/4-inch grout line when they're installed. Once the tiles were all cut, I washed them all in a mortar tub with a little dish soap and a natural bristle scrub brush to remove the cutting slurry, and gave them a good rinse. I did the cutting and washing in the morning, then laid the tiles out over the compost bins to let them drip-dry a bit while I worked on the rest of the floor prep. Each evening, I'd bring in that days batch of cut and cleaned tiles to allow them to finish drying inside the house.

Installing Tile Backer-Board
After I'd cut a batch of tiles in the morning (I simply didn't have enough room outside to spread them all out at once, so I had to do them in batches), I'd spend the rest of the day inside getting the floor ready for tile installation. I'd already removed the old linoleum tile and 1/2-inch plywood substrate from the kitchen floor when we first tore the room apart, and put down layer off 1/4-inch Luan plywood with subfloor adhesive and ring-shank nails to give us something even to work from back in the Fall of 2008. The next step was to install HardiBacker® tile backer board on the floor, as well as get some sealer on the tiles once those were dry.

As I'd already done with the siding, I used the Porter-Cable cement board shears to cut the HardiBacker® to size (no nasty silica dust with the shears), then attached the tile backer to the floor with Buildex Backer-On™ 1-1/4-inch square-drive screws. Because the floor is way out of level, I also did a little extra work to try and bring it up a bit closer to level when installing the backer board. Rather than just spread a "normal" layer of thinset on the Luaun with a 1/4-inch x 1/4-inch notched trowel then screw the backer down, I first installed a screws in the subfloor every 6-inches or so, but left the screw heads sticking up about a 1/2-inch to provide spacing under the backer for mortar. If I'd just tried to pile a bunch of mortar under there without the screw "spacers", it all would have squished out the edges of the board when I put in the hold-down screws. It was fussy work, but I thought it would be a lot easier to deal with trying to level the floor when installing the backer boards, rather then when working on individual tiles later in the project. I still ended up having to use extra mortar on the tiles along the "low edge" of the floor, but pre-leveling the backer board certainly helped.

Pre-Sealing the Tile
Once I had a few sheets of backer board down and had taped the seams, I turned my attention back to tile prep. Slate tile is very porous stuff, so before I could start installing it I wanted to pre-seal all of it to help prevent mortar and grout from getting stuck in the tile face during installation. I spread the tile out on some kraft paper rolled out in the genkan floor (again working in batches since some of the tile still needed to get cut and cleaned, and I only had so much space to work with), then applied a couple coats of TILELabs® SurfaceGuard Penetrating Sealer, made by Custom Building Products . The Penetrating Sealer goes on very easily - just spray it on, give it a wipe with a tile sponge to remove any excess, then leave it be to dry for a couple hours. It soaks in and doesn't change the color much, but it helps seal the porosity and readies the tile for the next step. After a couple coats of Penetrating Sealer, I then applied three coats of TILELabs® Matte Sealer & Finish. The Matte Sealer is brushed on with a sponge, and allowed to dry a couple hours between coats, then over-night after the final coat. The Matte Sealer does darken the tile a bit, and leaves a very nice low-sheen finish on the surface that's easy to wipe clean with a damp sponge.

Installing the Tile
Tile installation started with the selection of a few tiles to go along the border between the "main" kitchen floor and the porcelain tile that was in the "fridge cubby" area. The floor took a bit of a step in this area, since this is where the main house connected to the old screen porch. The tiles along this border ended up with about 3/4-inch of mortar between the tile and the backer board, while there was only about 1/8-inch of mortar under the part of the tile the was directly adjacent to the porcelain tiles, due to the step-down. It was a little tricky, but with a stiff mortar mix I was able to get this first set of tiles in place and fairly level. Because there was so much thinset under the tiles along this edge, I thought it best to leave these first few tiles to set before continuing the installation.

That evening when the lovely bride came home from work, we went through the rest of the tiles and figured out which colors and textures would go where. A lot of the floor will be covered with cabinets or appliances, but since we're not planning to use toe kicks under the cabinets, most of the tile will still be somewhat visible. After a bit of trial and error, we arrived at a final color layout for the main part of the floor, and I continued installing tiles the next day. Because the floor was still a good bit out of level, I was using a lot of mortar under the tiles at the living room side of the floor. My main concern was to get the individual tiles level, while trying to avoid big steps from one tile to the next in the areas where we'd be walking when the floor was finished. I also wasn't too worried about maintaining perfect 1/4-inch grout joints so just lined up the tiles by eye as I laid them, rather then using little grout joint spacers. It would be nice if the joints were perfect, but the Slate has such a variety of textures from one tile to the next, I kind of like the varying grout joint width to go with the imperfect surfaces of the tile.

Laying the Slate took quite a bit longer than working with porcelain, since each Slate tile needed to be "back buttered" and fussed around with quite a bit after the thinset had been spread on the floor. I was also working with pretty small batches of mortar, since the stuff would dry out quickly when working on the heated floor. I realized about half way through the project that I'd been using the wrong mortar too - I had a few bags of white thinset that I'd been using for the tiles, and I'm not sure why. I'd purchased the white mortar to use when attaching HardiBacker® to the subfloor, and just got excited to install tile and used the white for that too - I could have saved a good deal of time by using grey thinset instead, since I had to carefully clean the bright white thinset from the edges of each tile as it was installed. If I'd been using gray mortar, I probably could have just left all but the biggest chunks alone since I'd be applying grey grout. Ah well, when I needed more mortar for the kitchen I purchased the grey stuff and things moved along a little quicker.

After a couple days of plodding along on the Slate, I decided to work on some of the porcelain tiles along the back wall. Each day I had to try and figure out what sections I could work on, and still keep the kitchen useable that evening to make dinner and clean up. On the last day however, I had to un-hook the stove and get that out of the room, so we had take-out that night. After six days, all the tile was down and we were ready for grout.

Grouting the Tile
After giving the floor a day to fully cure, I started the messy business of grout work. I used a mixture of 2 parts "natural grey" and 1 part of a darker grey "platinum" grout to get a dark gray grout color, mixed in very small batches (again, the stuff would dry out fast working on the heated floor). Grouting is tiring work, with all the shoving and scraping of a pile of mud around on the floor, but I got it all applied in a day. I finished it just in time for the home owner to arrive home from work (which was the plan). Rather than try and wipe the floor clean using a sponge in a bucket, I kept three sponges in constant rotation - me on the floor taking a swipe with each side of the sponge, and the lovely bride stationed at the sink rinsing and wringing sponges and handing them back to me. It took about a half an hour of this carrying on to get up the majority of the grout from the face of the tile. After all that pre-sealing business, I wasn't convinced it had done any good. The tile had dried grout in every minute nook and cranny, and the damp sponge wasn't doing anything to take it off. Since I'd never grouted Slate tile before, perhaps the pre-sealing had helped and I just didn't know any better, but I wasn't impressed.

To remove the remainder of the grout that was imbedded in the tile face, I turned to some heavy duty cleaner in the form of Sulfamic Acid crystals. The stuff is dissolved in warm water, then applied to the tile with a nylon brush, allowed to sit for a minute or two, then wiped up with a damp sponge. You're supposed to wait ten days for the grout to cure before using the acid... I waited two. You're supposed to use a nylon brush... I used a stainless steel one. And a putty knife. And an awl. I won. I spent an entire day going over the floor, one tile at a time, picking out bits of grout and letting the acid dissolve any remaining haze. It all cleaned up nicely, but what a pain. The good news is I learned that grout must be cleaned off of the tile almost as soon as it's applied - On the porcelain glazed tile it wiped right off even after a few hours, but with the Slate stuff I shouldn't have waited at all. After the acid cleaning the tile was looking a lot better, but I did need to go back and touch up a few spots with additional grout where I'd been a little too enthusiastic with the wire brush and putty knife. The second time around I was very careful with how much smearing around I did, and cleaned the tile immediately after applying the grout. Much easier. I gave the floor a couple more days to cure after the second grout application, then went over the entire thing with two more coats of SurfaceGuard Penetrating Sealer, followed by three coats of Matte Sealer & Finish for the final sheen.

Base Cabinets Installation: Winter 2009 /2010
With the tile installation completed, the next step for the kitchen was to get ready for base cabinet installation. Because we'd decided to not use toe kicks on any of the cabinets, I wanted to get some baseboard trim around the room (even though I don't think it'll ever really be seen). I also had been going over the cabinet plans and determined we needed a few more "cover panels" and other little extras from Ikea® (and one item had been back ordered from the first trip there for cabinets), so I made another trip down to Stoughton just before Christmas to get the rest of the stuff we'd need. Before installing the baseboard trim, I went around the entire perimeter of the room and picked out any remaining grout or mortar between the floor and the walls, then applied a second coat of paint to the walls just to clean them up a bit. I then applied a bead of siliconized acrylic grey caulk in the little gap between the tiles and walls. The room was ready for baseboard trim and the first base cabinet.

More photos and updates to follow as work progresses...

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© 2009 Jeffery A. Kester and Kimie M. Kester. Some Rights Reserved.   Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.   For purposes of attribution, the work available at , was created by Jeffery A. Kester. Digital photography by Kimie M. Kester. Shimogamo kamado photo by "Fg2" (Fg2).