Kitchen Remodel (part one)

I was trying to remember the date when we started working on the kitchen in our house so that I could lay out a time frame to give perspective on how long we've been dealing with this end of our renovation. The more I thought about it the further the date went into the past. It felt wrong to discount everything that we have done in months past in preparation for what we have accomplished in this month simply because those particular hurdles were not nearly as climactic. So, the story of our kitchen renovation goes back so far that I'm going to have to break up the blog a bit and spread it out over the course of a few posts. I could probably give you the nutshell version of everything and like good little impatient fast-food only Americans you will be satisfied. However, if you know me at all, you know that I am never handing out nutshell versions of anything. If I tell you I'm hungry it's usually in enough words that could fill the pages of some of the smaller paperback novels.

The kitchen renovation began shortly after we bought the house in February of '07 and has been part of our lives ever since. I don't think that there has been a single moment in all of that time where we have not had at least one tool taking up residence in this room. The reality is that there has been a constant flow of building materials, tools, paints, broken tile, and household items (that have no business in a kitchen) that has been circulating through use and unuse and finding temporary placement in a room that is commonly the most used room in a house. It would be a gross understatement to say that it has been inconvenient and well more accurately stated as a test of our sanity, patience, and claims that we actually enjoy this sort of thing.


From the first photo you can see how dated everything was. This photo was taken on Dec. 4, 2006 while we were looking at the house with our realtor. Note: Jodi (eight months pregnant) is dark in this photo only from the shadow formed by the flash hitting the wide-angle lens. Just in case you cared to know. Let me give you the official tour. Let's start with the ceiling that had large sections of (most certainly) lead paint peeling off and ominously threatening to land in some innocent person's food when they turned their back. Then there was the bottle collection left behind by a previous tenant who clearly assumed that the next home owner would share his/her appreciation for such a random selection of cheap liquor containers. Next comes the walls sporting their beautiful wall paper that someone proudly installed at some point in history. I apologize now to this person for we couldn't wait to remove your handiwork. The cabinets weren't too awful except that they had no backs to them, they were always filling up with pieces of plaster and drywall dust when we were working on something nearby, they seemed to have been built by someone who kept in mind that mice need to eat too, and half the doors were extremely hard to open due to the misplacement of the latches.
So, yeah, I guess that they were pretty awful. The floor was 12" x 12" laminate tiles that I can only hope someone got for free, because what a waste of money otherwise. There was hardwood under those hideous tiles, but it would've cost a small fortune to refinish it since the installers of the laminate tile thought that it would be a good idea to use that hardwood as their base to stick the tar paper to. The tar paper can be seen in the next photo (taken 3/3/07) as well as the bare plaster walls.

The last photo was taken while tiling the floor in June '07. We managed to successfully continue to use all the appliances by staging out the process and moving them around. This wasn't fun, but it was exciting to get rid of nasty tar paper floor. The floor quickly came together and in a few days it was complete.

To be continued... Part Two.

Posted in: home renovation