Welcome to Kitchen Reno Week!

You guys, we made it! The kitchen wall is finally coming down! Originally (as in, until last night), we’d planned a pretty normal post schedule for this week — I was going to stop in with a kitchen update post on Wednesday, and then we were going to have two unrelated posts today and Friday.

But then I got to thinking, isn’t everyone just dying to know what’s going on in my house? Like, how can I expect you to make it through the week with just one kitchen update post when something so monumental is happening?!? So instead, I decided to make this whole week all about me! (If you think this is self-indulgent, just remember that this is the week leading up to the Boston Marathon, source of all my broken hopes and dreams, and let me enjoy my kitchen party.)

So the plan this week is that I will be posting every day. Yes, every day! They won’t be long posts, because on top of massive renovations I also have to, like, go to my job and stuff. But I’ll be stopping by to share a few photos and updates. If you don’t hear from me, you can assume that the house collapsed and Naomi will be taking over the blog.

For today’s update, here are some photos of the prep work we did this weekend. Originally my dad was planning to visit and we were going to do a bunch more work on the pantry wall, but we’ve delayed that visit until this coming weekend so all that work is still in store. But in the meantime, we kept busy. First, we had to clean out the sunroom entirely and also clear out big portions of the kitchen including a bunch of the cabinets we’re removing. The sunroom went from this:

To this:

Most of the furniture we just moved into other rooms temporarily, but the dark gray couch and coffee table (both IKEA) we actually sold on craigslist last month. We won’t have space for them when we turn this into a dining area, and they were in decent shape so we decided to make a few extra dollars for the renovation by selling them. We didn’t make a fortune, but between the two of them we made $200 which was worth it to find them new homes quickly.

In the kitchen, we went from this:

To major progress getting the counters and cabinets cleared:

And then we started taking down the cabinets on the wall that will be coming down. It just involved a few screws on each one. Here’s the first:

Of course as is par for the course in this house, we discovered that the cabinets were hiding all manner of construction sins. Fortunately this whole wall is coming down.

Then we tackled cabinet #2:

And finally the corner cabinet. This was definitely a two person job: one to do all the hard work, and the other to take photos:

To get this one out we did need to rip off the trim around the window, because the cabinet was really wedged in there. But since it’s all coming down anyway, we weren’t too worried about damaging anything.

That left us with this:

So now we’re ready for our contractors to start the demo this morning! I can’t wait to see where things stand for tomorrow’s update — wish us luck!