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.