Powering Through the Old Floor

Well besides finishing up some mud on the drywall today, I spent my time with the hammer & chisel breaking away the bit of old floor adjacent to the brick wall. There's another section at the front of the wall that I tried hand sawing away (the grain is the opposite direction) but the oak floor was too hard for me to power through. Now I need a masseuse.

Removing Ugly Old Wallpaper

BEFORE

My husband spent a few hours working on getting rid of the ugly old wallpaper on the kitchen ceiling. As you can see in the BEFORE picture, we had attempted to take it down a while back. We pulled off one strip of the vinyl paper and the backing just dropped a tremendous bunch of dust down everywhere. So we decided it was best to wait till the kitchen was cleared out. After the rest of the demo, we pealed off the vinyl sheets, leaving a layer of the woven backing still on the ceiling. He used a spray bottle of water & white vinegar, let it soak in a while & scraped it off with a paint scraper. Thanks honey, so so happy to see that ugly stuff go!

All The Way Down to The Floor Beams

half gone, a photo by BaubCat on Flickr.

Our new floating floor for the kitchen needs to be on a solid and level sub-floor. After walking around & feeling sections give & squeak under his feet, our contractor recommended that we go all the way down to the floor joists & reinforce them. Opening up the floor also make it much easier for the plumber to extend the gas line to the far wall for the new location of the range and a little easier for the electricians to crawl under for that complete house rewire. So all in all, we took up 3 layers of vinyl & original linoleum, one layer of 3" wide pine tongue & groove sub-floor and the final layer of 8" diagonal cross beams. The kitchen looks so much smaller now that everything is gone.
(you can follow the link from this photo to Baubcat's 'Kitchen Renovation' Set on Flickr)

Kitchen Demolition

This is what we’ve learned about how to demolish a kitchen:
Most important is proper safety equipment. Work boots to protect your feet, especially from protruding nails that may end up on the floor. Work glove so you don’t wreck your hands. Eye protection and a large supply of dust masks (as our contract says, you should change these after about an hour because they fill up with small particles faster than you think and then you are really just breathing the dust through the mask). We also had a heap filter to suck up some of the dust.
To begin, remove the appliances, disconnect the sink & if necessary use some shark caps to cap the supply lines. Cover the drain pipe end, so sewer fumes don’t come back up the pipe. Also switch off the breakers and remove the cover plates, outlets and light switches. If you wish to leave one or more outlets for use of power tools, etc. tape around the wire connections & shove them back in the outlet box. Next finish wrapping the room openings in plastic (we wrapped a plastic corridor from the entrance to the front door to carry out the debris and covered the hallway floor to protect it).
Now you’re ready for the fun part (the stronger you are the better) I’m a real lightweight, just the weight of a hammer is a lot for me, so I felt more like a useless observer alongside my husband & the 2 pro’s working on this job, but I got right in there & helped where I could. First step, rip out the countertops, sink and backsplash, our rotten old formica we just pried off in broken sections as needed. Then take out the base cabinets. We had to smash up one in place because the gas line for the stove came up through the bottom of it. Then remove the screws holding the upper cabinets to the walls and any screws through the sides holding them together. If you’re lucky and they aren’t glued to the walls & come off unbroken and if still in usable condition you can recycle them. We are donating our upper cabinets to the Re-Store. If not in good condition, take them outside and smash them apart to make room in the dumpster. Our old kitchens had a soffit above the cabinets on two walls that we were removing, we were surprised to find some huge holes on the under sides of it. To keep from wrecking the ceiling too much, use a utility blade to score along the seam at the ceiling, the joint at the walls and any corner joints. If possible figure out where any electrical wires or other line such as plumbing or other utilities are running behind the soffit and try to avoid them. Take a heavy duty claw hammer and smash through the drywall or plaster & try to knock out a piece. As you work, keep checking for utilities so you don’t damage anything along the way. As you work, used a chisel where needed to keep a clean line along the ceiling seam or adjacent walls you plan to leave in place. After the wall surface is removed, then use the hammer and/or screwdrivers to remove the furring strips that held on the drywall. Now you’re ready to take down the walls. If you can tell from the opening where you removed the soffit where the wall studs are its helpful, otherwise tap with the hammer or if you have metal studs try a stud finder. Then take the claw end of the hammer and smash a hole next to the stud. Try not to thrust too hard as you don’t want to break through any wall surface on the other side. Also, again try to be aware of where your electrical wires & utilities are behind the wall and work carefully around them. Keep clawing holes in a line next to the stud and then wrap that claw behind it and rip out chunks of wall. Remember to use your utility blade to score along seams at joints where you are keeping the adjacent wall. The cleaner the line you can make at the joints the better. After all the wall board is removed go back and remove all the nails or screws from the studs. All that debris gets bagged up or dumped in a wheelbarrow and hauled out to the dumpster. When all the big stuff is gone, sweep and shop vac and admire your hard work, you should be completely spent. If you have that hepa filter keep it running to collect more dust. Our next step was to remove the floor, but I’ll save that for another post.

Kitchen Renovation First Day

Well it's our official first day of construction on the new kitchen. We spent the day moving out the old gas range & the refrigerator and then we sealed up the room for tomorrows demolition...Yeah! We get to take a sledgehammer to the old cabinets. Fun starts tomorrow! We do still have to run a corridor of plastic sheathing out to the front door, and add a zipper entrance at the kitchen, but we're going to wait for the electrician who's also starting tomorrow. He needs to move that breaker panel and we don't want to make his access too inconvenient. Sure hope I can keep up with the pro's tomorrow.

New Kitchen Coming Soon!

Out with the old, in with the new! Finally, we have our permit and the dumpster was delivered today, so demolition of the old kitchen will start next week. It's been a busy few days getting materials ordered and of course I'm still trying to get furniture & stuff moved away from the walls for the whole house rewiring. It's amazing how many little details need to be coordinated, making sure materials will arrive when needed, but also not having too many things taking up room inside when we need to knock out walls and move debris out of the house. It's going to be a crazy month. Hope to post lots of pictures along the way.

Sizing the New Kitchen Hood

This is the beautiful new stainless steel hood from Zephyr that we want for the kitchen. It comes in two different widths 30" and 36". The range is going to be 30" wide, but in reading up on exhaust hoods, some advise to get a wider hood since grease & steam don't travel straight up. I had a few concerned about the wider width. First, I was planning a stainless backsplash panel behind the stove, so it would either be wider than the stove or narrower than the hood which would leave questions for the backsplash above the cabinets abutting the range. Also with the pass thru adjacent to it I thought the 36" might be too overpowering. 
Our contractor suggested we make a cardboard template & see what we liked. I prefer the smaller 30", my husband likes the 36" size, he's willing to defer to me, though he seems a bit bummed. They both have the same 600CFM rating so they will both do the job.
As you can see in the photos, the kitchen is a mess as we've already begun tearing down old wood paneling, ripping up one layer of vinyl floor, and trying to find places for our food & such so we can still cook a little before we're without a kichen completely, hope that won't be too rough on Bob, cooking is his 2nd favorite thing to do.

36" hood

30" hood

Kitchen Renovation Project About to Begin

Kitchen Renovation Project About to Begin
Well we’ve signed the contracts and the kitchen renovation / house rewiring project will be starting soon.  It’s going to be quite a mess here for who knows how long. I have to clear all the art work off the walls, pack up all the small stuff & move all the furniture to the center of the rooms to access all the electrical outlets & switches for the rewire. Then after that, the demo of the kitchen will begin. We can’t wait to clear out those rotten old cabinets & the old floor. But I’m not looking forward to the hassle of peeling that disgusting wallpaper off the ceiling (what were my in-laws thinking when they put that up there?)

Demolishing the Kitchen

Demolishing the floor, a photo by b-a-boop on Flickr.

It's a nasty job, one 6" strip at a time I'm removing the ugly vinyl kitchen floor. Underneath is a 12"x12" vinyl or linoleum floor (a bit less ugly, makes me wish I'd pulled up this first one years ago). It will also have to come up & then there is the original linoleum in red & black. Hopefully I can leave that bottom layer as the marmoleum click I wish to install can be put over one layer of existing floor.

Renovation Existing Tile

When renovating a bathroom, most home improvement sites and books will recommend completely ripping out all the fixtures and tiles and updating everything. They say that you will usually recover the cost when you resell the house. That’s fine if you can actually afford the thousands of dollars in demolition and replacement. Many of us don’t have those resources. And with the current housing slump and home values having dropped dramatically, sinking thousands into a renovation may not pay off.
I have updated both the bathrooms in my home without replacing all of the tile. I have redone just portions of it. I did it myself, and it does involve some delicate precision and hard labor. I’m not sure tile contractors would like my approach either. Hiring someone to do this work may not be easy as they most likely feel it’s easier to tear it all out and then cover a clean flat wall.
Easy doesn’t always mean best for the environment. My approach is to preserve as much vintage tile as possible and to add as little as possible to the waste stream. Where does all that old tile end up? Probably a landfill. Maybe if it were being recycled for some other use, it wouldn’t bother me so much, but most of the time, you see large amounts of construction waste just packed up into dumpsters and trucked away.
Here’s what I did with the 1st renovation. We had broken tile on the windowsill, some edge tiles at the floor that were cracked, a broken ceramic wall mounted towel rack and worn out ceramic soap dish and toothbrush holders above the wall hung sink. After removing the sink, we also found holes through some tiles and cracks in others.
I loved the 50-year-old tan speckled tile but knew I probably wouldn’t be able to match it. The room had black edge tile, so I had to come up with a pattern to insert black tile to fill in the spaces where I removed the broken stuff. It required placing black tiles where the new towel bars would attach to the walls, black tiles on the new windowsill and a few rows of black behind the sink. It also involved preserving at least one tan tile to fill in a spot where one towel bar was removed. Getting tiles off in one piece is the trickiest part & mostly comes down to luck.
Here’s a few links on how to replace a broken tile…

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20051584,00.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_114958_replace-cracked-tile.html

perhaps I’ll post more about my own repair work at a later date as this is already getting too long winded.