If you'd like to be brought up to date, check out the archive in the sidebar for previous posts. I posted recently about the beginnings of the demolition phase and my flooring dilemma, and now for lots more demolition.
There's been alot of work going on at my house, and this being my first renovation, I am realizing how tough it is to have your home in complete reno chaos. This is one of the first times I've ever wished I had fewer cats. But I'm coping and praying things will be done in a timely fashion. I've got all fingers and toes crossed on that one.
A couple weeks ago my boyfriend and I started taking down all the old cabinets in the kitchen. As sad as I was to see the pink go, it felt REALLY good to have at them with a crowbar. I thought I'd show you a sequence of photos of the work we did in preparation for my contractor's arrival. One weekend we started by removing the island (that housed the dishwasher), the wall cabinet above it, and the built-in china cabinet.
Here is the island with the dishwasher removed.
I am totally dumbfounded by the poor craftsmanship of so many things around my house - this island being one of them. This is what the interior of it looked like (with the door removed). And I will spare you the horror of what we found underneath the island once it was taken apart.
This photo is the island and the cabinet above it removed. It was a very revealing process as the island was built recently by a former owner and the cabinet on the wall above it was there probably since the house was built. The island came apart with 2 whacks of a crowbar. The cabinet above took about 20 minutes.
These next photos are the china cabinet before and after it was removed. Gotta love the brick wallpaper we found behind it.
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Kitchen sans island and china cabinet viewed from the living room.
During this process we also removed the side porch roof since the door it was located over is being sealed up. It was HEAVY and was added to the pile of garbage on the driveway. Here is the garbage pile as it was about 2 weeks ago, and it has since almost doubled in size.
The next weekend we started on the rest of the cabinets and the tile floor. Here are the cabinets, with the pink doors removed.
Upon removal of the base cabinets, we discovered some old vinyl/linoleum.
Finally, we managed to get all of the cabinets down. We discovered wood paneling in behind - and later learned it was used in parts of the ceiling and along the lower walls.
After several hours of hard HARD work, we took up all the tiles. This may have been my favourite part, because as I've mentionned in past posts, these tiles were ugly, crooked and not cleaned up after having been grouted.
My contractor has done some work this past week, so I will show you some of that in an upcoming post. One last minute decision I made while he was finishing up the demolition has me SO excited as it has made a huge improvement in the space. I'll share that next time as well so stay tuned. :)