Kitchen Demo

Last night after I got home from my long day of teaching, I picked up a couple of plastic shelves to hold our stuff, and unloaded all the kitchen cabinets on the demo side.  It doesn't look pretty, but we'll be living like this for awhile:

Yes, a classy look.  The cats will enjoy getting into everything.

This morning, Dale's job got cancelled because of rain, so he was eager to get started.  First, we took all the drawers out and doors off, then started swinging away with a sledge hammer!

Time out to put the doors and drawers out, and our helpers inspected....

Then it was heavy duty worktime, getting all the tile and wood framing out.

I kept sweeping and cleaning as we went, I hate it when things get piled up.  After we got the cabinets out, we took off the crap tile from behind the stove.  It had this nasty creosote kind of adhesive holding a melamine panel up.  yuk!  The not-so-fabulous 70's tile was really awful, too.  We also took a few rows of the ceiling tile off -- not the whole thing yet, because that will create a mess everywhere, but that'll come off soon enough.


At this point, we decided we could go out and eat a big lunch so we could work all afternoon demolishing the wall, and also pick up some boxes to put our broken plaster in and more plastic to partition off the area so we don't have a house full of dust.  Then we got down to business.

It's VERY satisfying knocking all that ugly stuff down!  and when we could see all the way through, we realize how nice this going to be!  of course, the plastic is up so we can't really get a full feeling, but the kitchen itself is enormous now.

So this is what it looks like now.  Dale has to work again tomorrow morning, so this was a good place to stop for now.  We swept and mopped, and we can walk through a opening we made.

Tomorrow, we hope to get the ceiling cleaned up around the wall so we can see if it really is load-bearing -- we thought it was, but after checking the rafters, we may actually luck out and not have to go with a load-bearing beam after all.  Hopefully, but we want it to be structurally sound, so whatever it takes.  There is a beam across the entry, so we plan on matching that, anyway, it might just be that it's more decorative and less structural.

Well, that was a long break from blogging....

So - in the past month, instead of blogging and working on the house, I've been quite busy traveling, finishing up the end of the semester, getting ready to start the new semester, and enjoying a bunch of family time.

First, we went to Indiana to spend the holidays with Dale's family.  It snowed the day we arrived, to his great happiness, and snowed 2 more times while we were there. More happiness for Dale, less than ecstatic for me.

That's the view from my daughter's driveway after the first snow.  The picture below is during "the blizzard," which was over-rated.  8 inches, but not too horrible.  Lots of blowing snow.

While I was out visiting, my daughter Leslie and I did a bunch of work on the baby's room - we painted the walls, installed molding, did some sewing -- it was a regular craft-o-rama.

She found this picture on Pinterest (left), and we did a dragging technique on the walls with a bamboo colored glaze (right).  The colors in the picture inthe right are a little off, they're closer to the ones in the inspiration picture, but it was hard to catch a good photo at night.

We also made the curtains, the banner, and several other small projects. 

Then we flew home around new year's day, and a week later, left for a conference in Honolulu, where the weather was more to our liking - around 75-80° each day.  We went with our dear friends Herbert and Eric - Herbert and I both presented at the conference, and then spent the rest of the time doing the tourist things!

The view of Diamond Head from our room - -a cheery sight to wake up to each morning!

We hiked up a slippery, muddy slope to view Manoa Falls -- great memories, even though we were filthy by the time we got back to the car!


We also got a great view of the city from the hills.



And the view from the plane as we left --

As soon as I got back, I had a few days to do laundry and clean up before I headed up to Santa Maria to help my niece clean out my sister's house, so she can get it up for sale.  Lots of packing and sorting, but we got most of it done.  We will probably meet up again in a month to have a yard sale to get a lot of the extra stuff taken care of.  I got home late last night.

Sooooo....we're back and now the other fun begins.  We are going to work on getting our kitchen done.  First step, knock out the wall between the kitchen and the living room.  This morning, I got the furniture moved away and removed the paneling from the wall.  Here's how it looked back when we closed on the house, and now...

OK, not an improvement yet.  But we need to get this off and then start removing the plaster.  Getting the room ready for all this mess means taping it off with plastic and trying to keep the mess contained.  I figured if I got the large sheets of paneling off first, I could get the room taped off easier.

As far as plans for the room go, we're playing a bit by ear.   We want to get this wall opened up, then do our measurements and get things planned.  Doing a lot of work on old houses, you learn that you get a lot of surprises any time you check into the walls, and I don't want to have all my plans based on something that can change at the last minute.  On the other side of that wall is this:

So there's a gas line and electrical at least.  No HVAC in this house, so we don't have to worry about that at least.  But it is a load-bearing wall, so we have to put a beam across the span. 

We're not in a big rush. Again, the bathroom took months, so will this.  I have a high tolerance for living in chaos, and I have a lot of things going on at work this spring, so we're going to take this one step at a time.  We have some cabinets in mind, and some ideas for the flooring, but we'll see how things progress as we go.  I want to move the sink to this side of the room, in a center island.  But I want to try out the sizes before I commit.  So we'll build some temporary structure to check out and live with it a bit. 

But...one tiny step forward!