WHAT WALL?

Sorry for the long delay in posts. Hopefully this mega-post--which will contain a big surprise for some of you--will make up for it. Ready?

We took down a wall! So remember that "next project" that Chris sketched out while we were at breakfast during Week 2 of the floor project? Well, this is it. We've long talked about opening up the floorplan since the kitchen and the dining room are both fairly small, but most of the plans have been too involved and usually end with me saying, "Yeah, it would be nice, but I don't think we'll be in the house long enough for a renovation that big." Or time-consuming, or expensive, or all of the above.

But Chris convinced me this simplified, compromise sort of plan meant only losing two cabinets, and of course the wall, and with the house already in full-on renovation mode, that's a plan I could get on board with.

We had to temporarily take down the corner china cabinet...

And that meant finding a safe home for all the china, and space--not to mention safe space--is getting kind of hard to come by, especially with the renovation now overtaking two rooms.

The guest room floor on a blanket it is.

A few days before, we roughly taped off the wall so we could try to visualize what it would look like once we finished the pass through. The idea is to have a half wall the same height as the cabinets, and the countertop on that dining room side of the kitchen will create a buffet of sorts into the dining room.

And here we go with demo again.

Which meant there were more surprises to discover about our charming little home and the occupants before us. When Chris was tearing through from the kitchen side, he found some of the interior structure a little strange, and then when he started tearing through from the dining room side, it all made sense.



Notice the wallpaper? At some point, folks moved in, and they decided, "Hey, rather than do things right and tear down this wallpaper, let's just drywall over it, paint, and pretend like we never saw it." So not only do we have multiple layers of flooring in the kitchen, there are multiple layers of walls in the dining room and who knows where else. Of course part of me can't blame them. The wallpaper was awful, and I probably would have wanted it out of sight as quickly as possible, too. I digress.

On with demo. One of the two trickiest parts of the wall demo portion was relocating electrical outlets, especially the light switch. Since the light switch was on the wall we were taking down, and the pantry covers the wall on the other side, we had to move it into the dining room. After many minutes and a few trips into the attic, we had success!

The second most tricky part was deciding whether the wall was load bearing (and if so, installing a heavy header). Since the wall used to be an exterior wall of the house, some of the structural components that would usually answer that question were a little more vague. So after consulting with Chris's brother, who has a lot of construction experience, and one of his friends, an engineer, we determined the wall probably wasn't load bearing. But we adopted the motto of said engineer friend, "When in doubt, make it stout," and put up a header anyway. I don't think Chris could move the next day, but our pass through wall is indeed stout now.

Not bad for just a couple days work. And the openness is priceless.

FLOOOOOOOOOR!

(Theme to the movie Rocky)

Dah dah dahhhh dah dah dah dahhhhh...

Dah dah dahhhh dah dah dah dahhhhh...

Dahh dah dah dah dah da dah dahhhhhhhhh...

Dah dah dahhhh dah dah dah dah dah dah...

Dahh dahhhhhhhhhhh dahh dahhhhhhhh...

You get the idea.

PROGRESS ABOUNDS!

Hope you are in the mood for detailed construction talk because you're getting the male perspective today! 

It's too early in the morning to operate power tools outside so I'll spend some time on a long overdue update.  I believe we left off somewhere around here.

The mighty sink cabinet.  It did not want to come out, mainly due to plumbing and the previous owner's affinity for spray foam.  But then, POOF!

It's gone.

So if you are keeping track, we have removed all the lower cabinets, patched the subfloor, fixed the door (that will be a later post) and are just about ready to begin the new floor installation.  The final step, determining if our refurbished subfloor is level.

This part I dread the most.  If it's not level, then we'll have hours of sanding, spackling, and smoothing ahead of us.  I can deal with the surprises but sanding is by far the worst.  I can think of a million awful things I'd rather do like...

 
...oh.  It's level.

Now, we lay down an underlayment.  It's a thin, squishy pad that provides the floor with some cushion (prevents squeaking) and blocks moisture rising from our crawlspace. 

Next, we seal any gaps in the walls or trim using spray foam.  This stuff is my new favorite.  It comes in a small aerosol can and, when you spray it, sticks and expands to close up any gaps or cracks.  As mentioned earlier, the previous owners used it to fix the plumbing cutouts in the sink cabinets and were a bit too liberal with the product.  Well there's good reason for that, it's awesome.  Here's my "generous" usage to seal up the drain pipe.

Kathleen said it looks like the pipe had a party.  Now we are ready for flooring.

DRAIN TO SOMEWHERE

With only one short wall of floor cabinets left to remove (plus the sink and the dishwasher), we're definitely starting to feel like we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And we got a good start yesterday on the remaining cabinets with the removal of this mammoth guy.

He is the only cabinet in the entire kitchen that is a true floor-to-ceiling unit and definitely one that we have dreaded removing. It probably took us about an hour and several mallet marks on the ceiling to finally wiggle him free. When we finally did, we discovered surprise number #23.

I never noticed till we were removing the mammoth cabinet that it is not as deep as the other cabinets, and I guess it's cause they needed room for this huge pipe behind it. Chris says it's the main drain, but since it connects to the ceiling/attic (and at least at the moment, there's nothing for it to drain up there), the drain to somewhere remains shrouded in mystery. I kind of like it that way.

If we're able to pull off a wildly productive day today, we might actually be able to begin laying the new floor tomorrow, which is very exciting. Today also marks the end of week 1 on the project (which we were hoping to complete in about 7-8 days). How are we holding up? Chris began sketching out our next project at breakfast this morning...

JUST CALL US THE TORTOISE(S)

Slow but steady wins the race right? Well it has certainly been slow, but we are making progress every day, and progress is progress. And even with all the setbacks, we're still not too far behind our initial schedule even with taking the night off last night. (Chris told me when I got home from work he was tired of being sweaty, so he got cleaned up and we ate burritos instead.)

At this point, our kitchen looks like this.

And our makeshift kitchen looks like this.

I know it's off topic, but aren't my tomatoes pretty? I hope we finish the kitchen soon so we can cook with them. And if you're wondering, the bag hanging from the chandelier keeps us from bonking our heads on it when we walk through. (Except for when Chris sees it in his peripheral and thinks something is attacking him, in which case he still hits his head in the tussle.)

We've pulled up nearly all the tile and removed two of three walls of floor cabinets. We've also patched damaged subfloor and drywall in all these areas.

We've of course finished out the laundry room. (I know we've already posted the afters, but the complete photos show a good progression of the floor process we've been through in the whole kitchen.)

 

And last but not least, we've discovered yet another layer of linoleum.

LITTLE VICTORY

Why, yes, that is a new engineered wood floor in our laundry nook! Thanks for noticing! After a frustrating day 2 and 3--which included replacing parts of the floor structure by the back kitchen door and a very ill-timed downpour after many weeks without rain--we finally enjoyed a little victory last night (day 3 if you're keeping count) when we Chris finished laying the new wood floor in the laundry room. We're pretty happy with the result, and it's really nice not to have a huge washer and dryer in the middle of our small kitchen anymore.

KITCHEN OVERHAUL--THE BEGINNING

Actually if our kitchen renovation were a book, our official day one would be part of the preface. Real demo was not slated till midweek, but we've watched enough Renovation Realties to realize that DIY house projects rarely go as planned. So we wanted to get a head start, knowing there would be surprises but just not knowing what they would be. Oh did we find out.

But first, the first blissful hours of we-can-do-anything enthusiasm...

Taking those energizing "before" pictures.

Feeling pleased with our know-how in putting up a dust shield.

(Note: Chris may or may not have been pleased at the particular moment pictured above because he was trying to hand me duct tape, and I was trying to get a picture of how funny it was with him trying to pass through the shield. Oops.) But he was pleased with the finished result.

And finally, feeling ready for and initially victorious in demo and tile removal.

And then the surprises started rolling in.

Surprise #1: More water damage than we had exepected (or should I say hoped for?)

So not much of a surprise, I guess, although we hadn't anticipated ripping out all the tile in the laundry room or replacing portions of the drywall. Thus demo came to an abrupt standstill while we debated whether we had the materials/tools and enough salvageable tile to retile the laundry room. But we came to an on-the-fly Plan B: Instead of retiling, we plan to put down engineered hardwoods that are left over from the master addition. (We set this as our goal for Day 2 so we can get the washer and dryer out of the kitchen floor, lovely details that were not part of our Day 1 plan. Although I keep telling Chris I'm loving the extra counter space.)

Surprise #2: So that's why it's always getting hot in here.

While trying to remove the floor molding (or whatever it's called), Chris accidentally punched a hole in the drywall, which revealed...No insulation! And we thought the kitchen was always hot because of the oven and the toasty afternoon sun. (We however were not surprised by the intense peach wall color that existed before the current barely green one. We knew about that because the homeowners before us decided it wasn't important to paint behind the fridge or between a few tight but 100% visible spaces.)

Surprise #3: How many subfloors are there?

We felt we had conquered the first of many beasts when we finally busted through the existing subfloor. Only to find a second layer of subfloor? OK, we can chalk this up to overexcitement and limited subfloor knowledge. What appeared to be two different pieces of wood were really just the first two layers of the plywood subfloor.

Surprise #4: Amazing technicolor kitchen and an old door

Thankfully this one was more of a "hmm" surprise rather than a "So what's Plan B?" surprise. What appeared to be just 70s-tastic green laminate floors underneath our old subfloor is actually 70s-tastic green laminate floors plus a rocking red and tan border. Nice. Also, the pattern enabled us to see the old footprint of the house, including where the original door used to be. (You can see this in the picture above by the wood shape that is set in to the technicolor linoleum.)  Explains some things and yet still so many mysteries, like why there is metal flashing inside the exisiting back door. (I have no idea what this means, but judging from Chris's tone in talking about it, this makes whoever thought this was a good solution a complete idiot.)

We worked late into the night and were able to remove all the tile in the laundry room and up to the fridge, as well as the existing water damaged subfloor in the same area. All in all, not a bad day one, even with all the surprises and setbacks.