Introducing... Stuff!

Here's what we've gotten! :)

These are much more shallow than the ones that'll go here, but here's the finish! Gorgeous, eh?

Pantry... flippin GORGEOUS!  This is not sitting on its base, though... total height: 93"

Here are the floors and I put a toe kick against it to show the two finishes together.  Love it!

Delivery Date

 We got our cabinets earlier this week and picked up our flooring from Lancaster today.  Since we needed to rent a truck anyway, we also went ahead and picked up our drywall (22 pieces!) and the rest of the plywood for the floors, plus a miter saw (YAY!) and the underlayment.  We rocked the 10% off coupon at Home Depot but still hit about 7% of our budget--just on building materials! Ouch.  We are 70% to our max budget and haven't gotten our countertops.

Our cabinets, minus the few that we put into the new kitchen to see how she looks.  Dave lost his Camara spot :)

New flooring - 22 boxes, with some pieces laid out to see how it looks.

The garage! See all of our plywood and 22 sheets of drywall?!

I've always wanted one. Shhhh - don't tell Dave. I convinced him it was a necessity.

Once we got the cabinets, we opened up the pantry and started to clear out the dishes.  See how empty these are?

Just to talley - a total of about 7 cabinets mostly emptied, with the exception of frequently used stuff.

And it all fits into our 18" pantry!!!! WOO HOO! Let the fun times begin.

Weekend Warriors: Our new subfloor

Over the weekend (April 6-9) we removed all of the tile (the green is gone!) and then removed the subfloor beneath it in some parts. We're not done, but here's our progress!

Our kitchen... horrible floors, yeah?

We looked for this wallpaper at home improvement stores but couldn't find anything to match.  I guess that striped look is out? Who knew.

Our closet; the first to get tiles removed

Dave reading directions to the jackhammer

The beast.  20 lb jackhammer from Home Depot.

First ripping stuff up.

Moving down the hall.  Gosh that tile was a beast.

We're going to need a dumpster soon! And that's not even half of the pile. Check in to the next blog page to see the old subfloors out and the new subfloors in! (See, I'm a great blogger because I keep y'all on the edge of your seats and wanting more)

UPDATE:  4/28/12
Here are the rest of the photos from that weekend.   The subfloors in the halls are all cut and in place, but need to be nailed and glued still, which should get done as soon as we are done with the dumpsters and the kitchen cabinets have been cleared out.

That's the garage door (closest) and basement door (further away) and looking into the kitchen.

Original Pics

Here are some pics of the original house, before work was done!

Dining Room -The hutch is extra storage, since we don't have enough in the kitchen.  Beautiful new windows, though, eh?

Fridge... blocking the doorway.  Notice the sweet Ikea storage on our wall.

sink, dishwasher, and another 9" of storage. Those bulk heads are going soon, too :)

Yes, this is what you see when you walk through the hall. Giant fridge blocking doorway, and garbage right in front for lack of anywhere else to stick it.  And I admit that I have a drinking problem (Diet Dr. Pepper)

The only place to stick our dish drying rack is to the left of the sink.  Which is under the cabinets. Which sucks, especially with big dishes that need drying.  Really this is just catastrophic and sad.

The Plan

Before going on about all of the work we've done, here's the plan:

 This is the original layout.  You'll notice the beautiful large opening between the hallway and kitchen, which just so happens to be blocked by a fridge. That's where the problems start.   And the two base cabinets that we currently have, 9" each? Ridiculous.  (That's no joke; there's one next to the fridge where we try to cram in our flat baking items, and one on the end for silverware, but big spoons have to go in the back because they don't fit next to everything else).
Add to it that closed, boxed in look, and you see the problem.

So the wall between the dining room and kitchen are coming down.
We also hope to add a passthrough between the food area (kit/DR) and LR but that's in a load-bearing wall and it may have duct work, so we'll wait on that one before giving it a definite. 


What you end up with is something that looks like this:

A large peninsula will house the sink and dishwasher plus one additional cabinet, and then have 3 2'-wide 1'-deep glass cabinets looking into the dining room for that extra storage space and to enlarge the surface area.
The coffee station (back wall) is 15" deep and will have all of our appliances, clearing up any other counter space we have.
And the stove will actually have two work surfaces flanking it, instead of the aforementioned 9" space currently provided.  Novel concept, eh?


Here's the view from the dining room into the kitchen:

And from the LR into the kitchen/DR:

And the problems begin

It's been the week from h e double hockey sticks. 

We ordered all of our cabinets (YAY!) and thought we were ready to get starting but we hit not one but TWO big road blocks. First, we found out that Dave is moving to second shift which means we'll have no time together to be working on the kitchen on week nights.  I took a lot of pride in the bathroom knowing that we worked on it together. I hate working alone, and I don't want him to do all the work! I think this became a weekend project. (ewww)

To add insult to injury, our project may have grown significantly.  We hadn't really thought (isn't that where most problems start?) about how we'd remove the tiles. It seemed easy enough, but it turns out the 12x12 ugly green and beige tiles are attached using thinset onto a cement board onto more thinset onto the subfloor.  If we are able to pull up the tiles, we'll have to find a way to get through all of that mortar but more likely, I think we may be looking at replacing the subfloor completely in the hallways and current kitchen.

As of right now, we've done minor demo but we're just trying to do what we can before we actually "start" the remodel.  We have yet to book our sub contractors or the dumpster (another stumbling block... I'm sure I'll write about that soon!) and yet we have a giant hole in the wall and a quarter of our DR floors are up.

Cheers.