A Disastrous Kitchen Demo Day

So far all you’ve heard from me on the kitchen renovation are dreams, plans, and small projects, so I’d understand if you’re a little skeptical about whether I’m serious about getting it done.  Well, we recently took ourselves past the point-of-no-return and demoed our kitchen!

Okay, not all of it.  Just the parts that we plan on replacing entirely, so it is still functional (if not pretty) in the interim.  But it was still a big step and suffice it to say it did not go completely smoothly.

Here it was before we started:

The plan wasn’t that ambitious, so I foolishly thought we could knock it out in a couple of hours.  All we wanted to do was take down the cabinet and fan over the oven (where we plan to have a nice hood) and the ineffective wall of cabinets around the fridge (which we plan on rebuilding from scratch).

Easy, right?  How hard can it be to take things apart?

Apparently pretty tricky.

Our goals in this were (1) take stuff out without damaging the kitchen around it since we plan on keeping much of what’s there and (2) try to keep the cabinets that we’re removing intact so we can reuse them for storage in the garage and basement.

We began by taking off the trim, careful to be gentle and not overly damage the cabinets that we’d be keeping (although we didn’t worry to much because we know we can patch and paint if we have to).

Then, we started with the easiest cabinet (the small one over the fridge) and quickly saw that this would take us longer than we hoped, given some of the idiosyncrasies in how our kitchen was put together in the first place.

Weird pieces of wood were screwed into weird places, and a good 25% of the screws were stripped and had to be pried off.  Still, that one yielded comparatively easily.

The one over the oven was much worse.  I only have one picture of the process because for a good hour 100% of our four hands were occupied trying to correctly hold up, take down, and undo the wiring on the ancient and horribly-grease-filled vent unit.

We still have honestly no idea how it was supposed to be taken down, as we ended up having to cut it up and bang it apart to get to where we could release and cap the wires. (And by we I mean Brad, since I am not a fan of electrical work.)

But the bigger issue came when we did finally remove it and learned that the presence of the unit was the only thing holding the duct in place alllll the way up to our roof.  It came crashing down and so Brad had to go up into our crawlspace to seal it back in place with some aptly-named duct tape while I ran around trying to quickly rig up something to hold its weight.

What my solution lacks in elegance it made up for in speed.

But if that was bad, trying to remove the floor-to-ceiling cabinet next to the fridge was worse.  It must have been constructed in place with flooring and ceiling added around it, since it was quite wedged in there.  Even after defeating another set of stripped screws, we literally couldn’t lift it up high enough to get over the lip of the floor without it hitting the ceiling.

After much head-scratching and some fruitless “banging on stuff with hammers” we decided to cut the base off of it.  Ordinarily the base would be a separate box of wood that could be pried off, but in this case it was part of the wood sides of the cabinet.  Saw it was.

That yielded us some progress in terms of movement.

Joyfully, this was enough to get it out of place and into the middle of the kitchen.  Regretfully, it was not enough, by just a couple of inches, to get it out of the front door.  It simply couldn’t tilt over enough to make it through.

We were left no choice but to saw it in half.

We tried to do it in a way that we could potentially put it back together or still use the pieces as cabinets, but it was a pain and unfortunately will make this cabinet less useful.

It definitely felt like a good thing while we were hauling the pieces into the basement, however.

So here’s the current state of my kitchen:

I have to admit, I was pretty scared cutting that cabinet in half and prying apart the vent – it meant there was no going back.  But at least we can still use the kitchen for now and are a lot more motivated to keep the project moving.

Onward!