What troubles you, John Spartan?

It has begun! The great kitchen remodel of aught seven is officially underway.

First, as with all good makeovers, some before shots. Not much to comment on here, really. We don't hate our kitchen as such, it's just a little dated. The building was converted from a factory in the 80s, and those white laminate cabinets have seen better days.

Also, the oven you can see here can not hold a temperature to save it's life (or the life of a baked good) and we have to regularly set the temperature twenty five degrees higher than we want to get it to come all the way to temperature.




More lovely laminate cabinets, and our inexplicably white sink. The new one will be stainless steel and undermounted. Fancy!

Our faucet drives us bonkers. It has a built in sprayer thingy, but it never actually stays on sprayer as it should, except when we want it to go back to being a stream.

Finally, you may notice the darkness of the pictures. That is due in large part to the darkness of the room (and in small part to the lack of ability of the photographer.) We have three new lovely pendant lights that we hope will alleviate this issue.





Cabinets, gone!

Fridge gone! (But in our living room, in working order thank goodness.) Refridgerators are really heavy. I mean, really heavy. Moving the fridge took way more time and effort than we expected.

The hood microwave also was more work than expected, being more firmly attatched than we realized. Thankfully, after a little fiddling I was able to get it down.

We also managed to disconnect the gas line from the stove with a minimum of drama and no action movie explosions.





More cabinets gone!

Sink gone! And heavy!

All in all, the cabinet removal went much easier than we expected. Having never done it before, we really didn't know how it would go. It ended up really just being a case of taking out some screws and pulling out the cabinets.

The tile removal was fun as always, and Mary discovered a new favorite tool. It's basically a heavy chisel on a sturdy broom handle that used to break up tile (you can see it in the background here next to a floor scraper.) I still prefer the tried and true concrete chisel and sledge approach, but to each his own.

Now comes the long and boring processes of scraping the tile adhesive off the floor and patching and priming the walls. Someone needs to invent a painting method that involves the sledge hammer. I'll call Galager.