Kitchen Remodel Project

It’s been a minute since my last post. Quite a lot has happened this past year, so model building got back burnered. Back in April, the plan to remodel our kitchen got green lit, so I started with building it around a new cook top. Go big or go home, so I went with a 48″ Wolf gas cooktop with a griddle option, model SRT466; and of course, I also need the proper ventilation system to go along with this cooktop so I went with a wall mount vent: PW482418. Additionally, I went and picked out a new sink, a copper sink from Home Depot because I get a 10% military discount there. These were purchased back in April, and while the copper sink was shipped to my house, the Wolf products were just put on hold until I actually have a kitchen. Now to design the kitchen around these two things. The double oven is only a few years old as one of the first things we did to the kitchen when we moved in; and our dishwasher is less than a year old. So those two things will be recycled. Also planned for recycle was the faucet as it still worked beautifully and our garbage disposal and fridge which are also fairly new.

The design:

I picked up some home design CAD software and started playing around with basic ideas and drew out what I wanted with input from the wife. She would have had everything white, the tile, the countertops, the cabinets. So a little convincing and having to draw these things out so she can better visualize helped win her over; albeit still very skeptical. In November, we’ll hit our 9 year mark of living at this place; so we’ve waited a fair amount of time before kicking the piggy bank(inheritance funds) in the teeth and just doing it. So in April, I had this rough idea that’s been swimming around in my head for YEARS, finally drawn and we have a visual. The parents were getting into town about that time, and so we wouldn’t be able to break ground until they went back to HK at the end of June. So plenty of time to refine the design and shop for contractors. Also plenty of time to warm the parents up to the idea of completely gutting and destroying their beloved kitchen. It wasn’t too hard to convince them, especially with visuals in hand.

We went through a few unlicensed GCs (one that’s done work on a few houses in my neighborhood) and a few licensed GCs and after a few weeks of meetings and quotes; we settled on The Cabinet Pros as I got the best warm and fuzzies from them vs all the others. They were definitely not the cheapest, as several of the other contractors quoted less – but experience has taught me that you get what you pay for. They seemed fairly serious and very on time when doing meetings. So the decision was finalized early June and a 20K deposit was donated to the cause.

Week -2

Parents fly back to HK, we contact contractor and start scheduling the start date for the week after the 4th of July weekend. It gave us time to do one last BBQ with friends and get the kitchen emptied and everything into temp storage. The adjacent living room becomes storage and everything is plastic wrapped.

Week -1

Time to say good by to this 1988 kitchen with slight appliance upgrades and resurface cabinet doors – something the wife and I did the first Christmas week we spent at the house.

Week 0

We finalize the plans with the contractor and it’s pretty damn close to what I want. So the wife and I are happy. There are a few unknowns, such as the need for a support beam and the what if of stuff hiding under the kitchen soffit.

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Volks A Brand Subaru Progress Part 2 and Completion

I’ve been working on the Subaru figure on and off for the past few weeks and really testing out these new curved knife files. I’m using using straight edge files and even some of those are not thin enough to get into the areas I need. And those files are straight edges, so curved surfaces need a bit of care to not flatten things out; so these curved tools are amazing! But sanding is boring, and really there’s not much to see unless put in extreme zoom.

After all the initial sanding is done, the parts are thrown into a bath of industrial strength degreaser to remove any mold release still on the kit as well as just cleaning it. Soaking over night, the parts are rinsed and thrown into the ultra sonic cleaner to scrub them clean.

And now the fun begins. Fixing all those gaps lamented in the previous post. There are two different putties at work here. The major filler is a two part epoxy putty that fills the majority of the gap area. It takes about a day for that to fully cure. But once done, I move to light curing putty for quick work. I can putty, sand, repeat relatively quickly.

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Volks A Brand Subaru

This is a kit from 2008, well, the original was from 2008 out of the C3X Chara Hobby show sold in a small production run by Volks. The character is from Choukou Sennin Haruka and is one of those ecchi choose how to molest the characters kind of games. She has the options for before and after a battle from the game for which I guess she loses her right arm/hand. It makes for a better looking pose than with the sculpted hand. Here are some reference pictures:

This is a recast from that kit that I picked up around 2011. I think I pinned up the kit when I first got it and that’s about all I did. I feel like working on something fairly easy, so I picked a figure kit. I got a set of new tools that I want to try out on the kit. Step one was to remove all the old pins and redo everything

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Pictures from SCGMC 2023

The Southern California Gundam Model Competition was this past weekend, Nov 11, 2023. If you were there, thanks for coming! I mean, I chatted with folks from New York, Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburg, Denver, etc. A good number of these folks flew/drove out here specifically to this show. One of the folks from Pittsburg came up and said hi to me and I completely didn’t recognize him – the last time I saw/talked to him was 2006 (a good 5 years before our first SCGMC – and SCGMC has been around for 12 years now – ugh, I suddenly feel old AF). So if you missed it this year, try to make it next year and here’s what you missed:

Panels we had:

The Vendors:

We don’t have a date/venue nailed down yet, but we’ll be working on that for the next few months. That said, we do have next year’s theme announced: “Seed” The theme usually ties into something Gundam related – for instance, next year will be the release of the Gundam SEED movie, and with that, there should be tons of Bandai merch on the subject. But for those that know us, things can take a very creative or dark turn as you guys are very good at the outside of the box thinking we look for; I mean, you guys ought to be after 12 years of SCGMC theme training. For those not familiar, the theme is an overarching “add-on” game of sorts that can be part of any of our 16 categories

We had 101 individual entrants this year with 316 competition kit entries. This doesn’t include all the display kits that folks also brought that were not entered into the contest. Not bad for a Gundam focused model contest. We got most of the pictures of the kits and apologize if we missed yours. There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes to get this running as smoothly as we possibly can. Right off the bat, below is the link to a PDF file with the winners and pictures.

2023 SCGMC Winner’s list

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