Redneck Pool Heater

It was blazing hot this weekend.  The temperature reached 95 on Sunday, and SB and the Princess spent all day in her pool.  Sorry about the crummy phone pic.  Her parents put up her pool this weekend, and filled it with water from their Rinnai on demand water heater.

Our pool is still a frigid 60something.  I've shared pics of the kids playing in our pool here before, and various pool related projects like when I made a DIY buoy line out of a dollar store pool noodle.

See that stone wall back there?  It's holding back the hillside.  Not just any hillside - a heavily wooded hillside.  

I like trees, and the boys enjoy trekking back there with paintball and airsoft guns, but all those trees mean a shaded yard.  And a shaded yard means a cold pool.  We have on the roof solar heaters, but there's only so much they can do with our limited sunlight.  We looked into gas heat, but those things are really expensive.  I checked the webosphere for cheap pool heaters, and that's when I came across the concept of a Redneck Pool Heater.  We had some copper pipe sitting in our garage after we switched to pex tubing when we did our kitchen reno.

It took several evenings and one nasty blistery burn for CG to put ours together.

Voila!  Our very own Redneck Pool Heater.  It sits in our grill, but can be removed when it's done heating up the pool.

And here it is with the lid down.  We tested it out and the water coming out was 7 degrees warmer than the water coming in.

A couple of days with this running continuously, and about 3 propane tanks, and we should be able to start using our pool.  In May.  Craziness.

Thanks for popping in and checking out our new pool heater.

Finished Kitchen Reveal

You've all seen snippets of my kitchen in the background of all my baking posts, but with the installation of our shiny new range hood, here, it's time to finally put the "Done" stamp on our kitchen renovation.  For those of you who don't know the back story on our kitchen, it all started years and years ago.  When we first bought this house, 11 years ago, I said, "this kitchen will have to eventually be redone."

I know you're thinking, "That's not too horrible," but let's break it down for you.  That dropped ceiling and wall of peninsula hanging cabinets made the space feel tiny and claustrophobic.  You needed to send a small child with a miner's cap to find anything, because the kitchen had 6(!) blind corners.  Even after emptying out the cabs, we still found random stuff in those blind corners when we demolished the kitchen.  You can't tell from the pics, but the counters had stains and burns that would not come out.

The double sink had 2 basins that were both too small to fit cookie sheets or large trays, which meant soaking myself when I washed them.

And that super shiny cabinet finish?  If you looked close it was a disgusting drippy mess of an application.  And the floors had permanent stains, too.

So 4 years ago(2008,) we took sledge hammers to the whole mess.  We waited until summer vacation, because we didn't want to interrupt WD's schedule.  School ended June 23rd, and we had the dumpster delivered June 24th.

See those cabinet boxes?  The boys made cardboard homes for themselves, complete with lighting and wall decor, and slept in them for a couple of weeks.  One of my greatest regrets is that those pictures were lost in the hard drive crash of 2008.

WD stands for Whirling Dervish, but could just as easily be Weapon of mass Destruction, because the boy loves demo.  We had 7(!) layers of flooring, and he chewed through all of it.  Don't worry there were masks and other protective gear - he's just ready to jump in the pool after the day of work.

The slider to our backyard

pic from the winter of 2007

was replaced with french doors.

We also replaced the window with a garden window that lets in so much more light.  Cabinets and undercabinet lighting were installed relatively quickly.  The LED strips were picked up clearance for $9.97 each.

We were only without a kitchen sink for 6 weeks.  The large side can fit even my biggest cookie sheets, and the small side is nice for veggie prep and hand washing when there are dirty dishes on the other side(which is often, since the boys do not load the dishwasher.)  We installed it in cherry butcher block from Lumber Liquidators.  I had planned on taking the sink cutout and making a small cheese board, and larger breadboard, but the darn thing is still sitting in our garage untouched.(Hey, it'll happen sometime.)

We lived with that one stretch of butcher block counters and plywood everywhere else for months while I dithered on selecting the perfect slabs of soapstone.  We also had plywood subfloors for several months.  I ordered cork tiles in Cocoa and Praline from Duro-design, a fantastic Canadian company, and waited until WD was back in school in the fall to install them.  I laid the floors about 30sqft at a time during SB's naps.

We used some of the leftover tiles for our message center.

I placed my order for cut to size soapstone slabs just after Halloween.  M. Texeira offers several ways to order soapstone.  Installed, slabs, cut to size(rectangles that you can cut to shape,) or cut to fit(you provide templates, they cut them exactly.)  We were slammed with snow and ice that November and December, and my slabs made it to Binghamton on a truck, but couldn't make it up our hill until mid-December.  I decided to wait until after Christmas to do the fabrication.

CG and I cut and shaped the counters, and we called in our friends to help carry the giant peninsula piece.  Nothing like some rib-eyes and a case of beer to lighten the load.  You can read more about the soapstone installation and other DIY soapstone installations in this Gardenweb discussion here.

When it was installed in January of 2009, it sat on top of 2 30" normal base cabinets.  One of the reasons this reno took so long, is that I kept moving the finish line.  I'll get back to that.

With cabinets, floors, counters, and lighting done, there really was only one major component left - backsplash.  I had originally been planning on carrera marble subway tiles, but I needed a good price on them.  During my tile hunt, I came across these glass Interstyle Barcode tiles in Dragonfish and fell in love.  I fell hard.  And then I found out how much they cost.  Gasp.

I searched for a year for something else that would make my heart sing like those Barcode tiles.  Nothing.  Then in May 2010, CG presented me with 13 of them for Mother's Day.  I may have wept.  I decided to create a random bricks and sticks type tile arrangement.  Over the summer we found some 24x24" clearanced grey ceramic tile at the tile store, some random grey and black tiles at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and some marble at an architectural salvage place.  We set up a wet saw and started cutting, and cutting, and cutting.

We tiled the entire backsplash area, all the way up the sink wall.  I didn't really plan it out, just grabbing from different piles as I went along.  The backsplash was done Thanksgiving of 2010.  It's grouted in Delorean Grey.

This is how it looked at that point.  I probably could have called it done in 2010.


But there was that whole moving finish line.  I made a huge mistake in selecting a side by side frig, and we replaced that with a french door frig that I love.  You can read about how we bought this $2100 frig for $892 here.

I didn't love the big blank side of the pullout pantry, and hadn't planned any cookbook storage, so we installed some cookbook ledges to pretty up that side.  Check out the tutorial here.

I had become disenchanted with the OTR microwave vent.  It didn't work as a vent and WD aka Destructoboy was no longer an age where I had to worry about him putting things in the microwave just to see things spark or explode.  (It's never been an issue with SB.)  I didn't want a MW on the counter, so I looked into a MW drawer, and after much stalking, snagged one off e-bay.  You can read about the retrofit here.

We repurposed the cabinet drawers, installing them sideways and adding some simple bungees & eyehooks to hold wraps.

Speaking of nifty pullouts, I love my baking pullout.  Gluten-free baking means having a ton of different flours and starches to work with.  This keeps them all in one spot in the main part of the kitchen.

I love our knife pullout.  No more knife block.  They're both handy to prep and out of the way of little hands.  I keep meaning to face the plywood edges with some cherry veneer.  I'm still calling this done.

We have 2 double trash pullouts.  One is for trash and returnables(bottles & cans with a deposit,) and the other is for recyclables for curbside recycling.

Above the frig, I have vertical storage. Above the frig and ovens is a great place for vertical storage, because you only need to grab the bottom corner to get a tray down.

I have long monkey arms, so I put the vertical storage up on a shelf and have trays underneath.

For those people without abnormally long arms or those a little more vertically challenged(Mom, I'm talking to you,) there is a handy spot for a folding step stool next to my range.  I also keep round things like pizza pans that I don't want in the above the frig slots.

This slim step stool is 2 steps high, yet fits in a regular cabinet space.

The other side of the range has a pullout for my oils, etc.

The other side of the room has the liquor hutch that my clever husband built.  It was featured in Atticmag.  You can read about it here.

I love the creamy, buttery yellow we used on our walls.  That was an adventure, too.  I picked what I thought was a buttery yellow, brought it home, and it turned out to be a migraine inducing, staring at the sun, melt your eyes yellow.  The paint store guy helped fix it.  And behind this $10 salvage yard door is our closet style pantry.

It still needs some work, but that's for another day.

If you've read this far, you really deserve the big before and after.  Just a reminder of the before.

And the big "Tada!"  The finished after kitchen.  It's not classic white inset, subway tiles, farmhouse sink, but it's very much me.  Hope you like it.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my finally finished kitchen.

This Really Sucks(In a Good Way)

Sorry for the radio silence, everyone.  I was stuck in the weeds last week and had to step away from the computer.  But I'm back, and energized and ready to do some sharing.  I think I might actually finally be able to put a done stamp on our kitchen.  For those of you who don't know, CG and I took sledgehammers to our kitchen nearly 4 yrs ago.  We completely DIYed the reno, and it took a few years to get to almost done.  We finally finished the last item on our list and call it honest to goodness done.  I'll share the whole 4yr long before and after with you later this week, but for now I'll show you that last project - replacing the microwave hood that sucked(or didn't suck as the case was) with 900CFMs of superior sucking.  This is where we started.

Remember how we installed a microwave drawer here last year?  That cleared the way for us to get rid of the non-sucking microwave.  The microwave venthood had to come down, and CG installed a plywood shelf to attach the hood to.  It plugged into the same outlet as the microwave vent, but we ran new ducting because of the different size needed(that rectangular hole was for the microhood.)  Each elbow in ducting will reduce air flow, but we have such a short run that it was fine to use them.

It's important to note here that the duct elbows are connected with silver foil tape, not what we all know as duct tape.  Silver foil tape is the correct material to use for ducting.  The other duct tape is great for making prom dresses and wallets.

Since no one wants to look at ducting, we attached blocking into the hole using a spare piece of a cherry veneer cover panel as a spacer.

And slid a piece of cherry veneer into the hole in front of the blocking.

Blue tape was used as handles to slide it into place.

I placed some of my salt and pepper shakers up on the resulting ledge.  The hamburger splits into 2 shakers, and I painted the dog and cat at one of those paint your own pottery stores.

A reminder of the before.

And the after.

I fried up some potatoes, and it really did a fantastic job with capturing the grease.  The baffles and grease catcher cups can go right in the dishwasher.  I'm so excited to be sharing the entire kitchen reno later this week now that I can finally call it done.

Thanks for popping in and checking out our new vent.