All of the plumbing, all of the wiring, all of the painting. But there were some obstacles that were too big for us to do on our own. We knew we would have to call in contractors when we got to the kitchen renovation.
Kitchen? What kitchen? Oh, you didn't realize that our house DIDN'T HAVE A KITCHEN WHEN WE BOUGHT IT?! Nope. The previous owners got foreclosed on and TOOK THE KITCHEN WITH THEM. This left David and I scrambling 2 weeks before we moved in to amass enough Habitat for Humanity cabinets to function for a year or so.
With Habitat for Humanity Cabinets above.
I painted out all of the wood to match which helped a little bit. The previous owners did leave a few of the lower cabinets, so I sewed burlap curtains for the doors because oh yeah... they took the doors and drawer fronts too.
A view of our fridge on the wall that seperates our Living Room from our kitchen.
My poor husband in our war-zone laundry room. The washer and dryer stuck out into the middle of the room, which is long and narrow. His face really says it all doesn't it?
Anyone who has ever done a kitchen renovation knows how pricey they can be. Anyone who has ever met me knows what kind of taste I have. Both of these factors, combined with a house that had almost nothing to work with in the way of an existing kitchen has added up to a HUGE renovation. Sometimes you can limp along and update things without doing a full gut-job. You can repaint cabinets, switch out hardware. But that is assuming you HAVE cabinets, or that you HAVE hardware. We had neither, so we had to start from scratch.
The first thing on the list was to remove the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room. This is the floor plan of our 1st floor, pre-renovation:
I knew from the moment we first toured the house that the red wall had to go. It's the wall you see above that the refrigerator is on. It made the kitchen feel small and choppy, and the island was so narrow, I could only fit the width of the sink and nothing more. It wasn't an actual working island-- more like a sink just floating in the middle of the room.
The problem is that the red wall is load bearing. That means that it is carrying the load for the floor joists upstairs. In renovation sometimes you can just go knocking down walls like crazy, and other times they are load-bearing and you have to re-support that weight if you remove the wall. Unless you want your 2nd story to come crashing down. Which we did not....
So in came the contractors... We have hired them to do the following:
- Remove the load bearing wall and open up the kitchen to the living room
- Relocate the doorway into the laundry room
- Put up a fence around 2 boundaries of our property
- Remove a false soffit in the entryway
- Frame in a pantry
- Add tons of electrical
Our new layout will look something like this:
It's not a huge change when you see it just drawn out, but it feels SO MUCH better already. The blue boxes in the laundry room are the washer and dryer. David and I relocated them last weekend. It took us almost a week to re-run all the plumbing underneath the house. Our timeline was not helped by the addition of 2 days-old kittens that we found underneath the floorboards in the laundry room. I had to stop, bottle feed them for 2 days, and then get them to a shelter before we could continue.
And here is where we are as of this morning... The washer and dryer have been relocated successfully. You can see my antique farm sink waiting to be installed.
This is the view looking into the kitchen where the wall USED to be. Today the contractors are going to put up a beam that can carry the weight of the joists overhead.
Until then we are living in a state of chaos. Our new kitchen cabinets from Ikea arrive on Saturday, but of course we are not even CLOSE to being ready to install them. If things are quiet on the blogging front, please understand that we are up to our ears in sheetrock dust over here and sometimes its hard to get the energy to update.
Soon I will write a post about choosing cabinets, and what the final vision for the kitchen will be.
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