Tear Out

We decided to go whole hog and remodel our kitchen. It's 15 years old, the cabinets are falling apart, the countertop is stained, the stove doesn't work and one of the ovens on the double oven kinda worked.

But the real reason is to open it up and put an island in. It goes without saying everything, and I mean everything, is going to be new.

I had an eight week sabbatical. The first two weeks I spent in some woodworking classes and we started the demo on July 3rd.

Here is what we started with:

And the pantry which was at the back:

And the dining room:

So, it took about 3 days to get everything out of cabinets, moving the fridge and freezer to other parts of the house. In the meantime, we crafted a new cooking area on the deck:

Here's the temp cooking area from the other side. I moved 3 of our cabinets out onto the deck for storage:

Then we took down the walls. This took 2 days. Not shown is the garage ceiling which also had to come out so we could access the wiring and plumbing. We filled up a 20 yd dumpster:

We'd toss all the drywall out the kitchen window, load it into my tractor and dump it in the dumpster. Here is the landing spot on the driveway:

We also found a mouse graveyard in one of the walls. There must have been 50 mice in the bottom of this one wall where they kept falling down & couldn't get out:

here's a closeup of one of the suckers, not much left to be honest. But it did solve the "why does it smell over here every once in a while" question we've had for years.

So, this is what it looked like last Thursday. Notice the plumbing stack. I'll show you how it changed later.

Here is walls down, with the new island taped out on the floor. We need that to cut the tile. We're going to have to put in some new tile as well if you notice the bare spot in front of the ladder - that was where the old cabinets were at.

Here's another view of the pantry, with walls removed:

This had to be condensed down into a 1 sq foot area. My friends Jim and Cliff did an awesome job moving all the plumbing. This is what it looked like on Friday afternoon. You can also see a new framed wall.

Here's the new pantry...you can see we moved the wall out 2 feet.

So, we're basically back to where we started in terms of plumbing and wiring. All the wires I had to cut have been re-joined and we'll be furring out the walls in the pantry and getting all the new wiring in this week. Next week will hopefully be drywall provided the new stove fan liner comes in.

I've built 4 base cabinets, but have basically ran out of room in my shop and I need to get them moved out so I can do the rest. The 4 base cabs took 8 hours, so cabinets are not a main worry at this point.