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Kitchen reno results!

Kitchen reno results!


A very unimpressed Cooper

Well, it’s done! While I said in my last post that it would probably cost less than 4 replacement cabinet doors, it was closer to 11. Oh well! I guess a potential career as an estimator is off the table. We also didn’t end up using the handyman. Mr. Tucker managed all of the tiling himself.

We only put the finishing touches on the kitchen early this week and although it took a little over three weeks to finish, that is mostly because we have other things on the go as well. We went to Kingston overnight on Thanksgiving weekend & our kid’s activities have started up again so between meals and work and activities and social stuff, we have eked out a kitchen refresh as well. I am terribly impressed with ourselves, if I do say so myself.


Chaos reigns!

The majority of the kudos belongs to Mr. Tucker who removed the metal peel-and-stick tile (which was glued on – LOLSOB!) and then pre-prepped the wall for filler/patching, base coat and sanding. He then tiled 25 square feet of wall, painted all of the other walls multiple times (including the stairs to the basement and part of the hallway), built the island and put up new light fixtures. Meanwhile, the kids and I took the cabinet doors outside and sanded and painted them. I am making it sound so easy but quite frankly, it was a ton of work and Mr. Tucker spent most of his non-working, non-family care time working on it. But on a positive note: the cabinet doors don’t hit the light fixtures now!

We also purged and organized a lot of the stuff we had in the kitchen, relegating some stuff downstairs (holiday items like cookie tins, mason jars and a pan large enough to fit a turkey), selling some higher-end items and putting some stuff up on our local Buy Nothing group. I still need to do a few things such as sell the Ikea Kallax storage we had in the kitchen but overall we have set things up to be way more efficient than it had been.

With new closed storage of the island, we now are able to hide things that once looked like it was overflowing from baskets and piled on surfaces. We also bought some Ikea organizing pieces – such as a few knife holders for a drawer and shelves so we could store mugs and dishes on two levels within a cupboard. I will also admit that we splurged on plants, plant pots and some hanging acrylic shelving for the windows. I also received a free fern and a free palm tree from people in the neighbourhood.

The challenge is that if it were up to me, we would have a bright & colourful quirky kitchen with green or yellow cabinets. If it were up to Mr. Tucker, we would have a cold, modern and dark industrial kitchen. These are two fundamentally opposite styles so we decided to settle on a classic white look: something not too trendy so that it doesn’t look dated in a few years but also something we can jazz up with pockets of colour and personalized decorative bits. It looks pretty sterile now but I am sure as the days go on and we bring more herbs inside and find hangers for our dish towels & put up some art, it will warm up a bit.

At the end of the day, this is what we spent:

To be honest, we had to compensate for some lack of knowledge with money. Because the walls were in bad shape, when Mr. Tucker tried to prime them they bubbled up. So he ended up running out and buying a special sealer to rectify that. We probably could have found an alternative (we did watch some videos that suggested diluted white glue) but we are always pushing the boundaries of time/money/life so I consider that a learning tax. Overall, the paint and tiles make up the largest category at 42.4%, the new lights and the island were about 34.2% of the cost, and the decorative items were 23.4%. As the kids say: I’m not mad about it. Considering we got a quote for $9000 for a small (2×5) backsplash and to replace two countertops (bathroom and kitchen, less than 5 ft each) last year in the condo – and that guy wanted to tile over the backsplash tiles that were already there – I consider this a solid deal. Besides, we got to learn new skills and have the satisfaction of finishing a DIY project.

The one thing I did not factor into the costs was out Tool Library Membership. I suppose for accuracy’s sake we could toss on a little over 1/3 of that cost for $100 adding to the total here. But honestly, we get an OTL membership every year and it is difficult to price out the value of it because it depends on what we borrow and how many classes we take there. So I decided to leave it out. We feel that the OTL is a super important resource for our community so even if we didn’t use it at all one year, we would still pay for it.

In the end, I am pleased as punch with how it turned out. I had never noticed how reluctant I was to spend any time in that dark gray kitchen. But the kids love the new island and sit at the bar stools (Ikea – $20 each!) and chat with us when we are making dinner. Behold, the glory of the new kitchen:


(Yeah, I could have maybe tidied and staged it better for the final photos but this is real life, not instagram)

Renovation inflation

Renovation inflation


Office real estate photos from our home’s listing in 2017

I have recently become obsessed with Alexandra Gater’s YouTube channel. She does a lot of budget-friendly & small space home décor and DIY projects and I especially love her StudioFix episodes. Having lived in a 530sq ft box in the sky with Mr. Tucker and a large dog, I would have appreciated more content like this in the early N’aughties. She points out that most home décor content is aspirational (and for most of us, unattainable) but it is very easy to change things up on a budget. There are some great ideas in her videos for people of all abilities and at the very least, the videos will show you how very small things can brighten up a space. Bonus: she’s in Canada and lists products we can get here.

Our kitchen is very small, especially for people who actually use their kitchen for cooking. We have a wheeled sideboard for extra prep space, which is a pain in the butt because it blocks the window & we also have a Kallax unit from Ikea that divides up the space. After watching the AG videos, Nick and I decided to replace these storage units with a kitchen island that has closed storage to open up our space a little & keep untidy things hidden. The kitchen will look better with less furniture crammed in it, less clutter will bring more light into a small space and we won’t have things piled up all over the floor or overflowing from the baskets in the Kallax.

But as I kept watching AG turned me onto companies who sell pre-painted replacement cabinet doors for Ikea kitchens. My mind was blown that these places existed! Since we have a tired, old Ikea kitchen (that was repainted before we got here. Think: this style) I thought it would be fun to investigate this as an option. I first started by measuring all of our cabinet doors. I then hit the Ikea site to see if they sold replacement door fronts. Sadly, that was a dead end: I could only find a few door front sizes. So I went to the websites that AG had recommended – and we discovered local companies who also did the same thing, so we also started researching those as an option. That didn’t last long though because most doors were $200 or more! We have TWENTY-THREE doors and drawer fronts in our kitchen. So we scratched that. Miss #1.

Next up, we found people who would custom make doors for a lot less than the above companies. But even then, these were also expensive and had shipping costs. Miss #2. Finally, miss #3 was when Mr. Tucker figured he could make some doors using his Tool Library Membership and booking some time in their studio and…at this point it was clear that the entire idea of a low-cost, low-time DIY was getting away from us. Our lives are busy enough, we don’t need to add any more HUGE projects to our chores.

We were suffering from Renovation Inflation aka, “we are already doing X, may as well do Y as well…” except for Y is an infinite number of projects, if you don’t check yourself. It is also how you end up spending more money, “well, we’re already paying $500 for a kitchen island, what’s a couple of doors?”

In the end, we sat down and really thought about changes that would make a huge difference in our lives and the biggest one? Paint. Our kitchen is a two-toned gray colour that darkens the entire space. So the walls needed to be painted. The cabinet doors are fine, as in, they are functional and not falling apart (ok, that one cutlery drawer is hot garbage). So in the end, we decided that we could probably get an entire kitchen refresh with a coat of paint. Even if we buy the REALLY GOOD cabinet paint a gallon of that will still be less than one cabinet door. Will it be as fancy? No. Will it be more modern? Still no. Will it brighten up the kitchen and make us happy? Yes.

Since we are saving money on the refresh we also decided to get rid of the metal peel-and-stick tile that was used in the kitchen. It’s super dark & dated and worse, it is peeling in places which could be a concern for water damage. Not only is it on the back splash behind the sink and stove but the previous owner also created a band around the entirety of the kitchen and the basement half-wall. Sadly, as Mr. Tucker started to remove it we realized that it was GLUED ON & taking it off is pulling some drywall down with it.

The plan is to start by filling the large chunks before sanding and painting. We will lay real tile (white, subway – we are pretty basic) behind the stove and sink (with the help of a local handyman) and the entire family will sand and paint the cabinet doors next weekend. Unfortunately, all of the doors and the walls will need to be cleaned with degreaser first before any of the actual painting can get started. We are hoping to do that in the evenings.

I feel like (despite the real estate photos) our kitchen is grey and cold and painting it white will give us a lot more light in the space. I am not looking for a super fancy renovation here, I want a usable kitchen that is bright and airy and where the windows aren’t half-covered by cabinets due to lack of storage.

Here is what it looks like right now:


The room is actually 9’3″ x 10’2″ – so, tiny

Here is what we are doing:
– Ditching broken storage (Kallax and cheap movable island)
– Removing old metal peel-n-stick tile
– Painting the entire kitchen white (walls and cabinets)
– Tiling the back splash on two walls with real tile
– Replacing the old light fixtures
– Putting in a closed storage island

I think in the end it is easy to let your imagination run wild with renovation inflation. But if you stop and breathe for a second and figure out what you truly need to refresh a space, the answers are usually small: a new coat of paint, some new cabinet knobs, a new ceiling light. I suspect the entire refresh of our kitchen will cost us less than 4 cabinet doors from one of those replacement door companies.

Check back in a week and a bit and I will let you know how it goes (with price breakdown).

No good deed goes unpunished OR let’s reno a condo!

No good deed goes unpunished OR let’s reno a condo!


I’ll be quite honest with you: I never wanted to be a landlord. I had no dreams of a real estate empire or building equity in owning buildings. It’s risky, a lot of work and it’s not my thing at all. Now with the increasing interest rates bearing down on people it’s terrifying to think of how leveraged some people are*.

But when we moved into our current house, I jointly-owned a condo downtown with a relative. Mr. Tucker & I began our life in there with our dog Dixie so it holds some nostalgia for us. This relative also owed me a lot of money for making capital repairs to their home while we rented the house from them (it is quite confusing but originally the plan was that we were supposed to switch homes and we would pay a certain amount. It didn’t work out.). At the same time ANOTHER relative was breaking up with a partner and struggling. So it made sense to just let the second relative move in at cost and figure things out from there because…

We had moved in December two weeks before Christmas, then a series of misfortunate events happened:
– We discovered that the condo had been basically destroyed by water & smoke damage and we suddenly had to do a lot of renovations
– The kids started in their new school and it was a challenging time
– I was diagnosed and we found ourselves suddenly without one income

I thought things couldn’t get worse from there but over the course of the next year we discovered that the relative we had rented to was unreliable. It was nothing too onerous: partial payments here, asking to borrow money there but there were definitely signs. Two weeks before the following Christmas we got a call that they were struggling a lot with their mental health and so they moved into our house for a few weeks as I helped them chase down emergency therapy supports around the city. It was then that we discovered that they were deeply in debt and struggling, so (stupidly) Mr. Tucker and I offered to help consolidate their debts onto my line of credit** and help them get back on their feet again. Previously they had been a pretty responsible adult with a great job so we figured they only needed a bit of a boost. I smartly had a lawyer friend witness a contract agreement between us both that had this relative paying us a certain amount every two weeks with the goal of paying it all off and building back their credit.

I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of it but as it turns out this person hasn’t been going to work. They got by in various ways, I guess, but in May of this year they basically just stopped paying and didn’t return calls, texts or emails. In August Mr. Tucker had to go down to the condo and ask them to leave in person. They still haven’t spoken to me and have now holed up in YET ANOTHER relative’s basement.

So for the SECOND time in 5 years we found ourselves doing a complete renovation of a trashed condo. The floors are damaged, there is smoke damage, and all of the appliances need to be replaced. So once again we find ourselves paying a mortgage and condo fees on a place that is unrentable and unsaleable. It is compounded by the fact that I have a broken foot still, school starts on Tuesday and I have a major abdominal surgery on Wednesday so Mr. Tucker will need to stay with me for that first week.

Originally Mr. Tucker and I wanted to hire a contractor and just get it done as soon as possible. We thought we had found someone but then he basically bait-and-switched us for more money and asked for more time. Even though his prices were astronomical the timeline was such that he said he’d be able to complete the work quicker than anyone else, which is why we agreed to his terms. So him coming back and changing the terms was so weird that Mr. Tucker and I told him that we would discuss and get back to him. The next morning at 6am we received an email from his “son” saying that he had been injured (between the hours of 10pm and 6am – what rotten luck!) and that he would be out of commission for a few weeks…and then he posted a video on social media a few hours later of him doing some tree and hedge work. I just absolutely had to laugh at the ridiculousness. Just bow out gracefully, my dude, no need to make up stories.


Note saying to not use the microwave

At that point though Mr. Tucker had had enough. So we hit up the IKEA website, he borrowed tools from his dad and he just made the decision to DIY it. So far he’s gotten rid of the appliances, over this weekend he has replaced the countertops and taps in the bathroom and kitchen, will replace the showerhead, do some grouting & sealing and then hopefully paint it all so that we can stage it and get it on the market. What makes me laugh is that we will basically save $8500 by DIYing this project despite losing so much time with the back-and-forth with this “#OurCity’s Handman.” Mr. Tucker is essentially learning new skills out of spite and fueled by rage.

So I guess not all is lost: Mr. Tucker is impressed with how easy it is to install things from IKEA (which #OurCity’s Handman also said he uses), he’s enjoying the process of learning these new skills and a friend has offered to help us repair the floors where they have come up. Sure, it’s not an ideal situation but knowing what we know now I wish we had started two weeks ago instead of messing around and going back-and-forth with this numpty (we also have a local contractor who is lovely but he does amazing work, is reliable and so, is already busy).

Hopefully we can get it all cleaned up and looking great sooner rather than later and then our realtor friend will put it on the market for us. While we are both nostalgic for the great times we have had there, the future has us moving forward towards Mr. Tucker’s retirement. Keeping the condo isn’t an option unless he works full time and while we are sad to to let it go, we are happy that someone else can make great memories there.

Mr. Tucker is already talking about what projects he could also tackle around the house. So I guess if there is a sunny side to this story it is that it is fun to learn new skills & it is empowering to know you can DIY things…and of course, a special thanks to YouTube and IKEA.

*I am not, I could afford to keep the condo and rent it but again, I have no interest in being a landlord. We will try and sell it first and then if it doesn’t sell, we’ll consider it.
** Yes, yes…only lend money you can afford to give away. It won’t sink us but it is truly maddening.