Kitchen remodel, part 1

So as promised, I’m putting a few pictures in here to try to share what we’ve done to our house in the last 10 months since arriving here. I suppose first off, we have to show what it looked like upon arrival:

Ok, not an awful kitchen, but nothing to shine about either. The linoleum was fairly new, but the appliances were 30 years old. The dishwasher and stove were a little bit frightening, and the fridge was small and missing all its shelves. This whole project began when we decided we would have to get new appliances, and in so doing we said, “what the heck, lets move the fridge and the stove. Makes more sense to have them switched.” Then somewhat apprehensively we decided that I would try cutting a hole in a wall for the very first time, taking out half of the wall behind where the fridge was to widen the window into the dining room and open up the room a little.
  

So once we’d gotten rid of the fridge and were cutting our initial hole in the wall (above is the front and back, before the hole was cut), we decided there was this other little area that had a wall which really didn’t make sense. For some reason they’d narrowed the walkway into the dining room with this little 14 inch stub wall. So we said, “Heck, we’re taking walls apart, lets see if we can do that one too!"

 

So I started cutting into the drywall to disconnect and re-route the electrical. Eventually it got to the point where we were ready to start major demolition. I opened up the wall above as much as I could and was comforted to find that both sections of wall had a solid double 2x4 beam running all the way across.

Combined with the fact that it’s a vaulted ceiling above, I had little worry that the walls were load bearing. Of course, I still was very nervous to cut anything. Even after some nervous phone conversations with a contractor, and texting photos of the wall segments that had been cut, I was still very careful. Oh, I’ll also add that when we cut up above that little stub wall, we found that for some reason they’d added a 14” drop down from the beam, just to make the doorway a little shorter - who knows why. So we knocked that out as well, to raise that doorway into the dining room a bit. After some fun moments with a sledge hammer and a circle-saw, our kitchen looked much different.

We had to angle the corner to accommodate for wires, but in the end it didn’t look so bad. Once it was all secure, we got to slap on some trim and spackle and try to make it look good again.

And then of course we said, once again, “But wait, there are these funny little sections dropping down from the ceiling. Why on earth did they put those there - they just take up space. Lets open them up too, while we’re at it!” So of course, we did. There was a long strip over the sink that we got rid of, just to raise it all the way to the ceiling, and there was another shorter but much taller block that we got rid of over the space where the fridge had been. Of course, we had to get rid of all the cupboards first, but then we got to have more fun with a sledge hammer and circle-saw. . .

And then of course I got to mutter some more about the crazy people who built this place. When they were wiring it, apparently they decided that they didn’t need to run the wires through the studs up in those places, since they were closed, and they were just happy running them on the studs, or even just letting them float loose in those hollow spaces (which they did in that space above the fridge, and which was a lot of work to fix). Of course, this created an obstacle to putting new drywall down, since it can’t be placed when there are electrical wires sitting on top of the studs, so I had to cut into the walls down by the outlets to disconnect and re-run those wires through the studs. Eventually all of the drywall came out. . .

It really makes me wonder about the shoddy work you get from professionals! I mean, I’ve only been trained by google and youtube, and even I can tell you that this is crummy work. Anyways, after gutting and re-wiring my entire kitchen, we were at last able to put up some new drywall here as well. Just for perspective, Kristin is standing where the dishwasher used to be, right next to where the sink goes.

Now that the walls were all finished, we decided that before putting cabinets in we were going to tile the floor, since we’d done it in our last house and it wasn’t that hard. The first step was to cut and put down cement backerboard, make the wooden subfloor more rigid and reduce the risk of the cracking.

 

After that, I got a decent tile saw from harbor freight and planned out a spiffy design mixing three types of tile, and we started cutting:

 

After laying them down dry, Kristin helped me mortar them in and then clean up. We then put down grout, and after cleaning that up and sealing it we had a nice new floor, a much more open kitchen design, and we were ready to put in appliances and cabinets. But I’ll put that in another post, since this one’s long enough.