Ugh! So ready for this phase of the remodel to be over! The house is permanently covered in dust and since we are still removing parts of the kitchen you don’t “see” a lot of progress. Most of the things we are doing are still behind the scenes so it is harder to keep a positive attitude when you don’t see a lot of change happening.  The thing about old houses is that you never know what you are going to find.  We ran into two huge messes- first, bass-ackwards plumbing that I showed you guys in my last post.  Now, we are contending with 110 year old electrical wiring…that has been “fixed” several times. It sucks when someone tries to fix this type of issue with no real electrical wiring competence  Besides that, we are adding several lights inside of cabinets and also under cabinet lighting so we are having to run lots of new wire anyways.  It is very time consuming to say the least.

We do have one huge change to document, however, and that is the installation of several can lights. I cannot stress the difference this has made already and they are not even completely installed yet! WATT a difference (see what I did there?!) 🙂

We also had to finally remove the cabinets from the walls in order to tear out the plaster and access the electrical components. Trying to fit the entire contents of your kitchen onto your dining room table is not fun! It hard to find anything to eat because I can never find a pot to cook in!

My typical look on Sunday!  #selfieforthewin

Goodbye laminate floor!

After many hours of work and several trips to the dumpster, we have finally gotten down to the studs.  I think I must have forgotten to take a picture but there was hardly any insulation at all in these walls. No wonder the kitchen was always so cold!

If you look closely in the upper middle of the above photo you will see the remnants of the original back door frame.  The frame was pretty tall- we think there was probably a door with a transom window. How cool would that look now?! It’s a shame that the door is long gone 😦  You will also see that the window on the left was originally much larger and a very different shape than what you see here.   Our plan is to remove the window on the left and replace it with a wood window and corresponding trim that better suits the look of this house.  We will also be removing the 2nd window in order to install a back door directly off of the kitchen.

We also rerouted the gas lines and changed the placement of the stove.  In our new design plan the stove will be centrally located on the south wall of the kitchen.

Until next time!

-L.

We are elbow deep in dust, dirt, and demolition here! And boy, am I ready for this part to be over!

We have been slowly tearing the kitchen apart for a few weeks now. Raul is in his last semester of school (yay!) so he has been way too busy to help much with the process which leaves me and my parents to cram in as much progress as possible every Sunday. The tricky part is tearing things down and still trying to maintain some semblance of utility in the space we are currently calling the kitchen.  All of the contents of our many cupboards and cabinets have been relegated to the dining room for now which makes preparing any meal very easy…not.  We are currently operating with no ceiling and 2 out of 4 walls.  Oh! And no dishwasher (the horror!) We have been surviving on mostly cereal and canned soup in order to avoid any kind of food prep which gets old, real quick.

Our first task was to remove the false ceiling that had been added at some point in time.  We noticed the drop ceiling last year when we had to gain access to the plumbing due to a water leak coming from the upstairs bathroom.  After I was able to poke my head through the access hole and determine that we were losing about 8-10 inches of space with the drop ceiling we began to form ideas of removing the ceiling entirely.

Once we got all of the plaster knocked out if was painfully obvious that the plumbing was an absolute mess. It looks like  a sadistic game of Mousetrap up there, doesn’t it?!

It took 2 days to reroute the plumbing but it was well worth it.  We raised everything and either tucked it nicely into the original plaster ceiling or ran it in a horizontal line down the center of the kitchen. The plan is to add a beam to our new ceiling that will hide all of our plumbing and electrical. Now everything looks nice and organized 🙂  If you can’t tell the difference, no worries, a month ago I probably wouldn’t have been able to either. But now, after several hours on a ladder and even some burns on my hand from dripping solder I can see that this setup is much better!

Next up, bye-bye soffit! Since we plan to install new cabinets that extend all the way to the ceiling then there is no need for this bad boy anymore!

Here is an up close look at the Fiestaware backsplash that I had mentioned previously. Because of the way this was installed and also due to the nature of the “tile” itself, removing this backsplash was tedious work.

We decided to go ahead and remove the 2 layers of plaster from around the chimney to have a portion of exposed brick in our new kitchen.  Basically, we are looking at the backside of the fireplace that is in one corner of our living room. I think the exposed brick wall looks awesome! I added a satin finish concrete sealer (3 coats) and I am really happy with the way it looks…also, one project completely done (yessss!!!).

Unfortunately, we were also forced to strip the paint off more doors! I swear, this is the one job that continually tests my patience the most…but I am becoming somewhat of a pro at it. Here’s a picture of Raul modeling the proper usage of a heat gun which I have concluded is great for simultaneously removing 3 layers of paint but not so good for getting old varnish off.  If you look closely in the bottom right corner of this picture you will see the 3 colors of paint that used to be on this door- white, tan, and lime green (WTH!?!…just, WHAT?!).

This weekend we are back at it again tearing out more plaster and hopefully finishing the sanding on the 3 doors I have stripped over the last couple of weeks. I  have my fingers crossed that we will be putting up new drywall in 2 weekends (and the extended forecast even shows temperatures in the high 50’s, I know you are all ready for Spring, too). Here’s to a productive Sunday! Thanks for following along!