Kitchen Remodel – Part 1

When we made the decision to purchase our smaller home, we knew we would be remodeling the kitchen. We were used to built-in microwaves and dishwashers. We knew we wanted more counters and cabinet space. We also knew we would be working within a budget and would be doing a lot of it ourselves. Which meant, we were not going to remove walls or relocate water and gas lines.

Before Pictures

Looking from the living room into the kitchen. This shows the rails from the living room side. Also a good picture of the iron bars on the sliding patio door. The light fixture hanging in front of the patio door fell off when the movers bumped it. We hadn’t realized that it was barely fastened to the ceiling.

Here is a picture from inside the kitchen. 

Looking into the room, standing at the sink. The rails looked over to the stairway to the basement.

Before we started on the kitchen, we worked on a few other projects, so we made it work as best we could. Because we were planning to remove all the cabinets, I put away as little as possible, to avoid having to unload them later.

Wow, it was a mess! All horizontal surfaces had stuff on them. We used a small table as an island. The kitchen table was too big and didn’t stay there once we started the remodel.

We moved on April 6^th and used the small refrigerator in the garage and the one in the camper until we got tired of hauling stuff up and down stairs and inside and outside the house. I also used the kitchen in the camper to do some cooking.

This picture was taken on April 24^th, after our new fridge was delivered. As we progressed with the kitchen remodel, we sometimes regretted having the fridge in the way. We were not able to move it into the living room, as we had hoped.

We cleared furniture and shelves away from the railing and got started with the project in early June. The first thing was to remove the rails and build a half wall.

This picture is showing the rails partially removed. We pushed the shelves in front of the opening until the new wall was framed in.

About 5 days later, we had the wall started. We knew that we wanted a bench along that wall and wanted to be sure the wall was high enough so little grandchildren couldn’t fall over it when standing on the bench. We made the wall 3 1/2 feet tall.

You can see the wood floor on the stair side of the wall and where the rails were placed. We will cut those off in a later project when we do something with that paneling in the staircase.

With the drywall in place on the half wall, it was time to move everything over so we could place the drywall on the other side of the opening into the living room and get started on removing the cabinets and soffits. There was also a lot of sanding that needed to be done, and we needed to get the remaining shelving out of the kitchen and into the guest room.

We cleared out the kitchen, put up plastic and started the sanding. When we were done sanding this wall, we moved on to the next part of the kitchen remodel – removing the cabinets, sink, and soffits. We will tell you about how we worked that part of the project in the next post: Kitchen Remodel Part 2.