Well, Jenny and I ordered the tile last Thursday and began our grand adventure into kitchen rehab. Over the weekend we packed up all of our kitchen items setting aside what we considered the bare essentials to get us by until the project is done. I will be setting up a temporary kitchen in the front room in the near future.
On to the project -- There is a good bit of work for me to do before the tile can be laid. Our cabinet guy delivered our new lower cabinet (a three-drawer piece) that will go where the refrigerator was. We needed this to get started because the tile will be laid around it. I spent yesterday (Tuesday) ripping out cabinetry. As with any renovation, there are always some small (or large) unexpected hurdles. Since I wasn't around in 1962, I kind of assumed (before we purchased the house) that cabinets were built then as they are now. Not so! Most (read: all that I know of) modern custom cabinets are built modularly. That means that each unit is assembled in a shop, transported to the house and then installed and attached to one another in place. In the 1960's many cabinets were built on site, in-place. What this means to me is that I can't just unscrew the cabinets and carry them to the curb. They are all attached to each other with lots of 2" nails. All in all, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and I was pleased with my progress yesterday.
I still have some kitchen demo to do, but this stuff will be more tedious. Yesterday mostly consisted of removing stuff that we were throwing away. The next step is to perform surgery on the cabinets to remove what we don't want and preserve what we do want. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do this, but I have a few ideas. I will be making a trip to Lowe's today to pick up some supplies and seek some ideas.
The next step prior to tile installation is removal of the old vinyl plank flooring. At first thought this might seem an easy task. Hell, half of it is coming up already. Unfortunately, I must remove the base trim in the hallway and closets in order to pull up the floor in there. Let's also not make light of the fact that we are talking about over 500 ft² of flooring including three closets. Yay. Also, the glue that was used to adhere this stuff is pretty nasty. The tile guy will take care of the glue as long as I remove the flooring. To keep from getting this stuff all over the bottom of our shoes and into other areas of the house, I will put down some type of floor protector in the meantime.
There are about 2 dozen more steps in this process and I won't bore you with all of the details yet. I hope to keep up the blog on a daily (read, days I work on the project, not every day) basis.
As a side note, one of the camellias is dying. The biggest one has struggled since being transplanted and is in dire shape. On the other hand, the other two seem to be doing very well. I will let you know what happens.
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