Crack is Whack

During the tail end of our kitchen reno, one of the finishing details once we got the counters installed and back splash tiled was caulking all the corners.  There is something about our house and caulk... that no matter what kind of caulk we use we start with something like this:

but after a few months have this:

and this...

annndddd this.....

I'm guessing you get the hint. IT CRACKED!!!!!!! Which is frustrating to say the least and this has been bothering me for a while now.  I feel like no matter what we use it always ends up cracking.  Usually small projects like this I tend to put on the back burner until randomly one day, usually when I have 1,000 other things to do, say "hey I should be helping the hubs' with fill in the blank but I'm having a "squirrel" moment and I'm going to caulk the kitchen!"

Like I said earlier, we've tried almost every type of caulk and nothing seemed to be working.  After doing a little research at my local Menards I decided to try LOCTITE PL S40 Polyurethane Sealant Window, Door and Siding Caulk.  It's engineered to form long-lasting seals as well as expand and contact with the material it's used with.  

I started out by using green Frog Tape to tape off the area that I wanted to caulk and with caulk gun in hand, locked and loaded I got started.  

Mind me I have never used this type of caulk before, but holy crap this stuff was a pain in the ass to use.  It says to use gloves to avoid skin contact.  I tried using gloves and the only thing that happened was that the gloves got stuck trying to spread the caulk, thus making a bigger mess...so off came the gloves.  By the time the project was done I had caulk on my hands, which took a week to get off fully, on my camera, my phone, the stove, the counter, the sink faucet, door handles, clothes, hair, remote, keyboard among probably many other places in my house that I haven't noticed yet!

Another thing was that this caulk was super difficult to squeeze out with the caulk gun.  I'm not the weakest person in the world and I would use every ounce of muscle in my arms and only get out a drop.  I know I had cut the hole big enough on the tube so the only thing I can think of is that I had a dud of a tube of caulk...unless this is how difficult this type of caulk really is to get out??

What felt like forever later, I was done and able to start pulling off the Frog Tape!!  It was awesome...It was nerve wrecking (like an unveiling of artwork from behind a sheet)...but it turned out great!

.

..and presto I went from this:

to this awesomeness:  

This project was another one of those projects that I put off for a while just because I thought it was going to be a pain in the ass and I was right, it was... but in the end it was totally worth it!!

DIY Project List

To make it easier to find any projects we've done around our house here's the list:

Furniture Projects

Antique Table Redo

Disaster Dresser

DIY Office Desk

Gut Jobs:

Kitchen Reno

Upstairs Bathroom Reno

Downstairs Bathroom Reno

Painting Projects:

Painting Paneling 

Wainscoting in a Bedroom

Stairs


Painting a Porch

Bedroom Redo

Spray Painting a Vent Cover

Dining Room Redo

Kitchen Lettering

Bathroom Wainscoting

Barn Light Redo

Kitchen Reno

When the hubs and I bought our house, we knew that the kitchen wasn't very functional how it was, but loved the built in and craftsmanship done to build the kitchen, but also knew we couldn't have our cake and eat it too.  I definitely wasn't expecting to start it when we did so any plan we had at all was definitely non-existent when this project started.  When we gutted the downstairs bathroom the flooring in that room led into the kitchen and led underneath the cabinets.  The hubs and I tossed around the idea about cutting the flooring to the entrance to the bathroom so we wouldn't affect the kitchen, but that didn't happen...and the first layer of many flooring's came up.  To say the least through all the hard work we ended up with a great kitchen that I absolutely LOVE and use way more then I did before:


So to start from the beginning....

When the laminate flooring came up it left an awesome, not easy to get up, felt crap under it.  Did a little research and the internet said some hot water and a towel will bring it right up...NOT!  At this point I was feeling super overwhelmed by the notion that we would have to rip up the floors...I was ready to light a match and burn the place down.



Then the cabinets came out....and the hubs busted his ass for the rest of the day ripping up each floorboard in the kitchen...which was not an easy job since there were about 100 nails per board.



And this is what was left of the flooring:



The cabinets on the other half of the kitchen I was happy to see go.  They weren't part of the original floor plan and we think were probably put in sometime when the renovation was done upstairs in the 1950's. 



Once we got the flooring cleared out of the room the hubs went to town on the walls tearing down the lath and plaster.  We found out from gutting the downstairs bathroom that the walls the border with the exterior have vermiculite as the insulation in them.  Vermiculite is a pain in the ass to clean up so we opted to not tear down that wall.  Once that was done and cleaned up we were able to move forward with tiling and grouting the floor.  When we looked online some sources said that tiling under the cabinets wasn't necessary and frankly a waste of tile, and others said it didn't matter.  We opted to tile underneath the cabinets to in the future if owners wanted to redo the kitchen they wouldn't run into any shortage issues.

On an interesting note, if you notice the tile in the picture looks similar, we used it in the upstairs bathroom reno, but we didn't figure in that we would be short.  Obviously by the white border our calculations were off which led us into a huge issue before we decided to do the border.  We had seen the tile we bought at Home Depot for months and months, so we figured when we realized we were ONE BOX SHORT, that they would have one more.  NO.  Which is totally our luck, and sent the hubs on a manhunt at stores all around our area trying to find the one single box so we could finish the project.  It didn't happen and we eventually decided on a white border to outline, which actually turned out really nice in the end!  Who knew that a mistake would turn out to work in our favor?!




Once the floors had most of the haze cleaned off, up went the drywall, which led to mudding, sanding, more mudding and more sanding...





And then the day that we were waiting for...CABINETS!!!  We bought the standard Ontario White cabinets from Menards and we haven't had any issues with them!  We totally recommend them for anyone in our circumstances who can't reuse their old cabinets and are looking for something easy to install, clean and look nice!



Once we got the cabinets in, things seemed to go pretty quickly...we went with Numerar Butcher Block counters from Ikea, which we love and the price was super reasonable for our budget!!  We used SomerTile 11.75 x 11.75-in Victorian Subway 1 x 2-in White Porcelain Mosaic Tile from Overstock and we ordered the brushed nickle drawer pulls from Overstock too .  The drawer pulls are bubble clear glass ones that we got from World Market for $15.96/4. We also painted the walls Sherwin Williams Dromedary Camel and love how it turned out!






We replaced our appliances through American with stainless steel/black and love how much more complete they make the kitchen look.

So through all of the blood, sweat and tears of this kitchen reno here is the mostly finished results:



If you notice we didn't paint the trim around the window.  We opted not to because we decided it would look odd with the cabinets and white subway tile.  Although who knows in the future that may change when we decide to replace the windows....eventually....maybe.