Let the DEstruction begin!

Of course before we can start the new stuff, we have to get rid of the old.  I suppose we could have had it done, but I'm sure it saved us quite a bundle to do it ourselves.  When we had walls and ceilings repaired after ice dam damage a few years ago, we did some of the prep and finish work - enough that the value covered the deductible and the insurance company paid us some extra!

Joe started by taking down the tile backsplash.  That SHOULD have been easy, but, alas, it was not. When he and Dad put the tile up all those years ago, Dad wanted to make sure it'd never come down.  Let's just say he succeeded...  In addition to mortar, he used Liquid Nails on each piece. We were too young and ignorant to say no - Dad had done lots of handyman work and we figured he knew what he was doing. Not in this case.  Even when we wanted it to, the tile wouldn't come off. Well, at least not the way it should have.  The tile did come off - it just pulled the plaster behind it off as well! So we ended up with this mess on our hands.  It will likely need to be stripped to the studs and rocked. They may be able to skim coat it, but I doubt it. The plaster is all crumbly and not a good base to work on. Sigh.


Then Joe started on the wallpaper, probably the most dated thing in the room. I must confess to being glad to see it gone, no matter what else we do. He spent hours pulling off the top layer of paper. I then started on the thin paper backing and the glue/sizing. Many, many more hours of spraying and scraping. NOT my favorite job. We knew there had been green paint under the yellow and I uncovered a lot of it by scraping off yellow wherever it was loose or bubbled. I found this blue in one small space. It's only about half an inch wide. We never knew it was there! It may turn out to be the color we use, or something close to it.

Here's what the walls look like before and after removing all the crud under the paper...

We thought the remodel might start this coming week, so I really rushed to get it done. I must confess, I also wanted it done so I could get out in the garden right away when it warmed up.  Still waiting for that! But the walls are ready. Unfortunately, the remodel will wait yet another week. HD has to inspect the cabinets. They won't start work until all cabinets are present and in good shape. That makes sense. If one were damaged, it would hold everything up for several weeks waiting for a replacement. Making sure they're all good saves time and inconvenience all around. And they're doing a lead test.  Pretty sure they'll find it, since the house certainly predates lead-free paint! I don't know if they'll need to do much of anything serious to contain it - probably mist areas to keep dust down and then dispose of it properly. The green paint (isn't it a lovely shade?) is in pretty good shape, and I think that's likely the leaded stuff.

We're waiting as long as we can to take the last of the kitchen apart. We'll move the microwave, toaster and toaster oven onto the porch, have borrowed a mini-fridge, and will borrow a hot plate. I think the big fridge will stay in the kitchen (covered) and we'll probably have access most nights, so the mini one will get us through the day, or even a few days. I found some old plastic dishes we'll use. They'll be better than our regular ones, as we'll do dishes in the bathtub, and plastic ones won't break if they get dropped, nor will they chip the tub! Since the existing cabinets are staying, we'll leave most of our stuff in them and just seal them shut with something like painter's tape. We'll have to empty the lower ones and the drawers when the counter goes in, but they won't even measure for that until the cabinets are in, and then it's another couple of weeks to make them, so we're looking out a minimum of a month from our start date for that. We should have our sink through most of this, too, provided we can get into the kitchen easily. I foresee lots of grilling and deli food in the near future! I think we'll end up moving our wicker porch furniture into the shed, giving us more room on the porch.  Good thing all the patio stuff is out of it now.

Oh, one last fun thing. The door in the bottom photo here is our spice cabinet! It's really just a medicine cabinet in the kitchen, but it's perfect for spices as they stack just two deep, so they don't get buried way in the back of a regular depth one. We've never seen one like it (I'm sure they exist...) and we really, really want to keep it, both for the convenience and its uniqueness. Only one tiny problem with that. With all the work, there is not a single bit of inside wall large left large enough to hold it. And we can't set it into an outside wall. It's too deep to allow the required insulation behind it. We decided to simply mount it ON the wall, instead of IN it. Since it's getting painted along with everything else, it won't matter if the trim would isn't an exact match. It probably will be - there's a good deal of baseboard, chair rail and door trim coming out - but it won't matter if it's something else. One piece of wood we're keeping? The door frame showing Kendra's growth over the years! We don't yet know where it'll end up, but it's absolutely staying.