This is what happens to your walls when you need to rewire your whole house. Since our 1947 home had mostly cloth insulated wire, lots of holes needed to be knocked out to accommodate the new electrical wires & to pull out that old unsafe, ungrounded antique stuff. That old woven covering gets caught up on nails, in tight holes in the studs & any sharp splinters on the old wood studs. Our house luckily has wood floors & joists and a crawl space under it which I hope made the job a bit easier for the contractors doing this messy job. Since we ripped out the kitchen floor to the joists, it gave them better access under the house although it's a tight squeeze with plenty of dirt and the Florida heat is killer. Before they started I was expecting we'd have long runs of wall gouged out between every outlet. But fortunately in our case the wires came down the wall under each outlet and draped under the crawlspace to the next outlet. It seem the electricians had a tougher time when the wires ran up the walls to light switches & into the ceiling, that being another horrible place for them to work since we have blown-in fiberglass insulation up there. These guys have been doing an excellent job keeping the holes to a minimum and cleaning up debris all along the way. I am so pleased with the work they are doing, as I was expecting a much bigger mess.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Today I received some glass tile samples for the kitchen backsplash. As with anything you order online, you can't always tell colors on a computer monitor. I ordered 3 different samples, one of the 3 was a different manufacturer than the others. They all looked slightly different online, but two ended up an almost complete match (both the glossy ones). The other one is a matte finish and we like it better, but it does appear a little more blue than green. You can see scratches on the surface of the glossy ones and since we're planning to use larger 4"x12" tiles to cut down on grout lines, the scratches may be a problem. I may order a few others yet.
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 |
