Kitchen Remodel – Part 2

In the first blog post about our kitchen remodel, Kitchen Remodel –  Part 1, we showed what the kitchen looked like when we moved in. The pictures reflected how we made it even more crowded by adding wire rack shelving as makeshift pantries to hold food and appliances.

After the half wall was completed, the next step was removing the cabinets. The dishes that had been put into the cabinets were removed, put back into the moving boxes, or added to the one wire rack that was in the spare bedroom. No sense calling it a guest room at this point. There was nowhere to sleep.

Yes, it was messy. Looking back, I can laugh about it. At the time, it was frustrating. Especially when the item I wanted was behind the black dresser and I had to carefully climb behind it to get it.

Andy did all the cabinet tear-out. The cabinets themselves were in good shape and he did his best to remove them without causing damage. We were able to donate the majority to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. The bottom cabinet under the sink and the cabinet on the sink side of the oven were actually one large cabinet. Due to the number of nails holding it in and the pipes under the sink, it was more difficult to remove than the others. It was destroyed in the process. The small section that was to the right of the stove was the perfect size for a place in the garage next to the workbench.

The cutout you see in the soffit was the ‘peephole’ Andy made to see what was hiding back there. Prior to removing the soffits, we did a lot of research regarding what we could find behind them. Good news – no wires or anything hiding there.

The upper cabinets have been removed, along with the drywall from the fronts of the soffits.

The soffit over the window and refrigerator had some exposed wiring and a vent pipe.

This was the vent pipe for the sink. There was also a branch from it that went to the basement – on the left side of the picture.

We tracked it down to the small closet where the sump pump was located. However, the pipe was capped off at that end. What we did was cap it off at the top as well and relocate the sink vent pipe into the ceiling.

This sounds a lot easier than it was. I didn’t take any pictures of Andy with insulation all over him as he was cutting into the ceiling. I think he appreciated that.

The pipe has been relocated so that the cabinets can go to the ceiling! The wire for the light over the sink was moved up into the ceiling as well. These were the only things and both were resolved with a few hours of work.

The next step was replacing the drywall. Almost all of the existing drywall would be removed in preparation for the new cabinets and backsplash. In this picture, just the top half of the drywall has been removed and the bottom cabinets are still there. Which meant I could still use the kitchen. 🙂 As long as I had a sink and counters, I used them.

Because we worked in the kitchen in the evenings and weekends, it took several days to get the cabinets all removed and the new drywall up. When the sink and bottom cabinets were removed, we saw that the wood floor was added over the original linoleum, making the floor under the cabinets lower than the rest of the floor. Which explained why we thought the counters seemed a bit lower than normal. Here is the cabinet under the sink that had to be broken to remove. We left this drywall in place.

Andy had a large section of 3/4″plywood in his lumber stash that could be used to fill in the missing floor. I always complained that Andy saved all that lumber from other projects. Hanging onto the lumber saved us both money and time on this project. No complaints about that!

This was taken 15 days into the project. See the gold curtain on the right side, covering the patio door? Since there were no curtain rods left in the house, we made a curtain with a sheet and safety pins and hung it on a shower curtain tension rod.

We started installing the new sheetrock on June 21st and had it taped and mudded and ready for the next step on the 25th. The next step in our project was scraping off the popcorn ceiling and installing the beadboard.  We will tell you about that experience in Kitchen Remodel – Part 3.