My Old House
Kitchen Remodel phase 2, plus Wiring this Old House for Sound and Video!

Greetings All !

Well, the wheels of progress are once again turning in our kitchen.

Shortly after Christmas, I had searched the Internet for reproduction tin ceiling manufacturers, especially any one that could recommend somebody to install one for us. (I just didn’t trust MasterCraft to do the job correctly and I certainly do not trust myself on this.)

The people we would choose to go with would not only be giving our kitchen ceiling a makeover, they’d also be installing a tin backsplash in the kitchen as well.

I found American Tin Ceilings. The referred to ZERO installers in the state of Missouri, so I checked Kansas… and found Scott and Lisa Runnels of “Nani’s Impresa” in Lawrence, Kansas.

I left them phonemail, saying that I didn’t know if they’d work with somebody that was an hour’s drive away from them, but we needed somebody to handle the ceiling / backsplash project. Within a few days, they got back to us and arranged to come take a look at our situation on a Sunday.

When they arrived, we were slightly surprised with how young they were (in their early-to-mid-20′s), but I was impressed with their energy and the way they questioned my wife extensively, to get a good idea of exactly what we wanted. They also had a lot of samples of the tin, plus photos of what various installations might look like.

And therein lay the dilemna: Since Mastercraft had already put in 4-inch crown molding above all of our new cabinets, this presented a difficulty in determining how to install the tin ceiling crown molding in a way that…. well, that wouldn’t look stupid !!

We had two choices: use a flat tin crown molding…. or take the white 4-inch wood crown molding from the cabinets and extend it all the way around the kitchen, enclosing the tin crown molding.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but we ended up going with the idea of white crown molding enclosing the tin.

Now came a bit of a monkey-wrench in the works: contacting MasterCraft to order the EXACT crown molding that they used. Lisa said she would do this for us, as my wife had had about enough of dealing with Charonjeet, the owner of MasterCraft. (Not that he was unpleasant to talk do… but rather, we were tired of the slow, half-hearted response that we’ve received from the company since starting this kitchen remodel.)

A few days later, Lisa called. I was home and my wife was not. She said that Charonjeet of MasterCraft insisted on coming out and looking at our situation with her, before he would order anything or give Lisa any info about the crown molding.

At the time, I thought this was just him butting-in, trying to get some extra money out of this project. (I should also note that we still had not paid him the final payment for our previous contract, as we are still waiting for 4 custom cabinet doors… plus we are waiting for his company to repair some damage to the undersink cabinet that was made by the granite countertop installer.)

However, when MasterCraft and Lisa Runnels came out, they apparently determined that all of the newly-installed cabinet crown molding would need to be REMOVED… and then reinstalled AFTER the tin-ceiling was installed. This is so that any rough edges of the tin ceiling could be hidden underneath the wood crown molding. And currently, the wood crown molding just doesn’t provide a “gap” all the way around… a gap that might allow us to slide the tin underneath it.

So, yes, fair warning to anybody considering a kitchen remodel that includes a tin ceiling: Do the ceiling first and THEN the cabinets…. or at least figure out what your crown molding is going to look like as a very early step in the project.

We received our estimate from Nani’s Impresa last night. It is reasonable (about $2700 for materials and labor on both the tin ceiling and the backsplash). However, we’ll have to add $1000 for MasterCraft to come out and remove the wood crown molding from the cabinets and put it back again.

My wife has already ordered and received some wallpaper that we intend to put into the kitchen. This paper will apparently have to be installed BEFORE we can kick-off the tin ceiling installation. So now we’re trying to figure out if we have the time to install that wallpaper ourselves or not.

WIRING THE HOUSE FOR SOUND (AND VIDEO)
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You know, I can’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned this in this blog… but I’ve been slowly working on incorporating some technology into our home.

Over a year ago, I had purchased a small FM transmitter off of Ebay for about $60. My music output from a small computer in the basement goes to this transmitter. So, theoretically at least, I thought I’d be able to listen to the same music anywhere in the house!

Well, the reality wasn’t quite as good as the dream: The transmitter is in the basement. But I could not get small stereos on the second floor to pick up the transmission cleanly. There was a lot of static, plus, since the transmitter restricts me to channels within the 106-108 FM band, I was getting a lot of interference from metro area radio stations. This happened even if I moved the transmitter up to the second floor; the first floor then would have trouble picking up the transmissions.

So, after posting over at the Homeseer.com forums, I decided to try a different solution. Yes, I’m starting to physically send wires throughout our old house. But I’m doing everything I can to avoid drilling new holes!

First, I looked for pre-existing “gaps” in the woodwork, where I could send wires from the basement up to floor #2 . I found several such gaps between the heating ducts and the walls. However, when I would send fish-tape up those gaps, they would always run into the bottom of the second floor and stop! Meanwhile, the heating ducts they were next to would then make 90-degree turns and continue onward…. yet there was no such turn in the gaps, so I could not follow.

Next, I at least rigged up what I could in the kitchen on the first floor. Since we were already remodeling in there, I already had access to a hole in the wall that the workers had accidentally made. It wasn’t a huge hole. It was something that could easily be covered by a switchplate. So, I went to Independence Audio & Video and purchased some 4-conductor speaker wire (yikes! It’s hot-pink in color!). I ran this wire up to the kitchen, where I installed a Leviton switchplate that included two left-channel and two right-channel ports for speakers to be hooked up to. I also installed a Cable TV jack as well, after fishing both the speaker wire and some Cable TV cable up from the basement. So now, the kitchen is wired for music and sound!

(I should also mention that I used pre-existing holes in the floor in the living room to wire that up for sound several months ago. Plus, I’ve also hidden a single speaker under the bench in the foyer. That bench opens up underneath it… and there’s basically access to the basement under there. So it was very easy to run some speaker wire up to that area.)

So this still left me with the problem of how to get wires up to floor #2 ? Well, I tested an idea in my second floor home office. I decided to try to drop a wire down through the heating duct itself and remove the wire from the duct in the basement right before it makes a 90-degree turn and goes into the furnace.

It took a good hour for me to do, but I was able to do this. But I’m delaying on finishing off this cable-drop, as I want to drop not only more of that 4-channel speaker wire, but also some telephone line and some “CAT-6″. (No, not CAT5… I’m told that CAT6 is the way of the future, with higher bandwidth capacity than CAT5.) This will resolve two problems I have in that home office: no phone (!!) and I’m tired of a slightly-flaky wireless Internet connection (I get lots of hang-ups while trying to FTP… yet I get no such hangups FTPing from/to the exact same sites from work.).

So, I’ve ordered some CAT6 off of Ebay and I’m waiting on that before I can finish off sending wires up to my home office.

My wife has been begging me since we first moved in to wire Cable TV up to our bedroom. That’s next. I may actually get around to fishing the Cable TV and speaker wires to this room today. (It already has a phone line running to it. Oddly enough, this pre-existing line takes a snake path from the basement, up the stairwell, through the 2nd floor hallway, over nooks and crannies and into the master bedroom. But I worried that if I had followed this same trail with additional wiring, the whole mess would look very unsightly.)

Well, sorry such a long post, but I guess I’ve been bursting to tell you all of this.

Thanks!

-= Dave =-