Monday, November 19, 2012

Final Kitchen Destruction

Last week we accomplished the last of the major kitchen destruction. Both areas that we were touching are not load bearing so that made the job a little easier (but certainty not easy) since we could do the work ourselves and we didn't have to higher out for beams or anything. 

The first thing we did was create a bump out for the appliance wall. When this pic was taken, Nate had done a lot of work already on the other side of the wall. We knew we were going to have to get this bump out done fast for our Thanksgiving party so we had carefully measured our everything on the other side and Nate had built the frame for the wall. This made things a bit easier on this side. We were able to drill through the wall right at the new wall opening on the other side so that we knew where to start and end the opening.


After measuring again to make sure everything was correct on the unopened side of the wall, we ran chalk lines so Nate would have a guide when he was cutting (and we didn't get any wonky diagonal lines or anything).


Then we basically created a tent around the wall to try and keep the dust down while Nate hacked up the wall and I hid from the dust.


Since we know from experience how messy/difficult it is to take down plaster and lath with a sledge hammer, Nate used his sawzall to cut the wall into sections that could be carried out whole. This drastically reduced the amount of dust and clean up necessary. We need to give a huge shout-out to our friend Tim who came over late one night to help carry this very heavy wall sections out. He was actually bummed that he didn't get to take the wall down with Nate so we're going to have to make it up to him.


And through the magic of Nate's super preparedness, this is what it looked like after clean up.


Since he had already framed everything out, the wall was then ready for electrical and drywall.


On the other side of the kitchen, we had this doorway. We didn't like this doorway because it made it so we had awkward diagonal cabinets that really didn't hold anything. After many iterations of kitchen designs, we finally decided that the smartest decision was to do a little extra reno now to move the doorway so that the cabinets could go all the way to the wall. We figured if we didn't do that then we would always regret it and we certainly didn't want that.


It didn't take much for Nate to open up the doorway.


Next step was to put everything back together!

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