Our Home Renovation

Since we’re planning on completely renovating the kitchen sometime in the future (probably at least a year from now), we’ve been trying to do as little as possible to the kitchen for the time being. But, like all things renovation, there is the classic “Old House Scope Creep”. OHSC is what happens when you want to do one simple little thing and it turns into something much bigger. (Credit for the term goes to House in Progress)

A classic example of this was our replacement of the hallway light. It was early on in the renovation and we decided late one evening to put the new stained glass hall light up. Simple enough – take down the old fixture, put the new one up. Then, we decided that we didn’t like where the light switch was (at the far end of the hallway) and since the backside of the bathroom wall was already removed, it would be easy enough to put a switch there, which was within one step of entering the hallway, no matter where you were entering from.

So, the project became a little bigger. We had to run new wiring to the switch and while we were at it (and since we were working on upgrading all the wiring in the house) we figured we might as well run a new line to the light as well. Then we took down the old light and discovered that it wasn’t mounted to a junction box, so we had to cut a hole in the ceiling (through the lathe and plaster), mount a junction box there, run new wiring to it and to the switch, then put up the light. That is OHSC. Anyone who has done any kind of project like this is undoubtedly familiar with it.

The kitchen has been affected by this, too. The sink was too disgusting to live with, so we were able to get a nice used kitchen sink that would suffice until we’re ready to renovate the kitchen. If we were going to be taking out the old sink (we already re-did all the water supply lines), we might as well re-do the waste lines under the sink, and we should put in a Dispose-All (or garburator for those who call it that) at the same time (which requires electrical work, too). And if we were going to be doing all that, we might as well at least look into how much a new kitchen countertop was going to cost.

The good news is that the countertop (laminate) will cost less than $100 total. And the sink and faucet were free (thanks mom and dad!). So, the project isn’t going to cost us much and in the end we’re getting much more than we had hoped for, but it’s taken a lot longer and evolved into a much bigger project than we had originally planned on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 10:03 am and is filed under Kitchen, Our House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.