Kitchen Renos 1.1

Well it's been a busy week and a half since I last blogged about the kitchen.  John's been busy plastering the kitchen since the 20th, having to do a couple coats where the wall cabinets sat, as we are raising the new wall cabinets up and we want to make sure that you can't see the line where the previous paint was.  He's gotten quite good at plastering, I've thought back to when to his first plaster job and compared it to now and I must say he's definitely learned a few things.  It makes me quite proud of the things he's learned and mastered!

First coat of plaster done.

Last Thursday, John was able to get the new light for the eating area done (sorry for the blurry picture, I will try and take a better one later).  He waiting to put up the one for the kitchen part until after the cabinets are in, as there are 6 lights versus the 4 that are in the eating part, so we don't want them to interfere with the cabinets being installed.

It is hard to tell, but there are little leaves on the lights.
It matches the dining room light.

Saturday we started on taking out the base cabinets.  I unpacked the cabinets and found places to put everything (mainly the spare bedroom) and John began the demolition process.  The kitchen began to look a lot more bare very quickly!

When John disconnected the sink, he quickly discovered that there was only a shut off valve for the dishwasher, the only want to shut off the water to the sink was to the entire house!!  That made for an interesting work around....he hooked up the old tap so that we could still have water to you know go to the bathroom or bath...

 We ran into another surprising discovery.  As John took off the base cabinets, we discovered that the flooring in the kitchen was not the original flooring and that it had actually been put on top of another flooring and the flooring that we have now was done after the cabinets were put it.  We began to think that this was going to become a huge issue since we are planning on putting our flooring on top of the existing floor, under the cabinets and the new cabinets are bigger than the old cabinets, meaning that there will be some overlapping, ultimately meaning we could run into some issues with the cabinets being level....turns out that once John took out the corner cabinet, he could that the cabinet was leveled with some wood, so he's assuming that the contractor we have hired to do that can do it.

This flooring seems awfully familiar....Mom/Dad, did we not
have this or something similar in our old house?

With all the cabinets out and the sink gone, it meant that we had no places to wash dishes, but thankfully John was able to hook the dishwasher back up so we had it for a few more days!  He had to do something a little fancy to make sure it wouldn't tip over though, since it is a built in dishwasher and it's since turned into a free standing one!

Hooking the dishwasher back up
so that we have it for a few more days!

 

Clever man used his ladder and a
2x4 to stabilize the dishwasher!

Since the weekend, John finished sanding the walls and washed them down to prepare for painting.  Tonight we went out and got some shut of valves to shut the water off so that neither of us would hit the tap while painting.  We're hoping to get the painting done Friday/Saturday and then start on the flooring and then we are all ready for the contractor!  Hopefully the time will go quickly, because I miss being able to cook properly!