Kitchen Reno: Recapping Day 1

Welcome to Kitchen Reno Week on Plaster & Disaster! It’s like Shark Week, except with far fewer dramatic re-enactments and scientific inaccuracies.

As you’ll recall, we did the final prep over the weekend by removing the cabinets along The Wall. Here’s how it looked as of yesterday morning:

And here’s how it’s looking now:

Holy crap, it’s happening.

Day 1 was dedicated to demo. Our contractor arrived first thing in the morning, and within an hour the sunroom was looking like this:

Goodbye closet! Since this was the former exterior wall of the house, it was fun to see the where the original door was, and the paneling and clapboard under the surface.

His crew arrived shortly thereafter, and they spent the rest of the day tearing shit apart (technical term). For disposing of everything, we used a bagster that I’d picked up at Home Depot. With pick up it ends up being about the same cost as renting a dumpster, but the nice thing is that we can keep it as long as we want it so if there’s room we can also throw in the tile and countertop before having it picked up. We put it in the space next to the back porch, and it’s about 8′ long and 4′ wide.

Of course, it was already looking pretty full by the end of Day 1!

They started by tearing out the rest of the wall from the sunroom side, and then turned their attentions to the kitchen side. We put up some plastic sheeting that I’d bought to try to contain the dust just a little bit.

And here they go!

We only had a few unexpected issues, which is pretty good for major construction (and is exactly the reason I wanted to be home for the day). First, we discovered some issues that required reassessing the plans for the beam — the original engineer’s drawing called for recessing the beam into the ceiling joists, but the roof rafters actually made that questionable and so our contractor recommended coming a bit lower with the beam to avoid any structural issues. However, this will leave much less clearance, which isn’t a problem for the portion above the peninsula but for the widened doorway section would be a pain. So for that section, we were able to call the engineer and get approval to use a smaller beam that won’t drop as far into the space. This all means that the beam will drop into the room more than we originally planned, but it’s still going to look AMAZING.

Second, we discovered that the plumbing runs right through where one of the end posts is supposed to be:

They seem to have a plan for fixing it, though, by snaking the plumbing around the post or some such business. I trust them.

We also had the lumber for the new beam and columns delivered yesterday, and so today they’ll be cutting that and doing the rough framing. Sadly I will be at work, but Sam will be home so I’ll make sure he snaps a few pictures that I’ll share tomorrow morning.

Oh and in case you’re wondering what we’re doing with the cats through all this: we closed them in the upstairs guest room with a litterbox, water, and food for the day, and let them back out in the evening. Owen hid unhappily under the bed and in the closet the whole day, whereas everytime I check on them Murphy was just chilling on this towel I’d left on the dresser for a recent guest. Note to self: wash that towel.

So that wraps up Day 1! As a reminder, here’s the progress:

Not too shabby!