Kitchen reno, early Sunday morning edition,

It is a milestone day for us! After three months of work, the raised floor is down, the wall completely demoed, as well as the tile, and the electrical all secured and labeled, today marks the end of our part of the construction (for now). The contractor is due here early tomorrow morning to start their end of things.

Once they are done building the knee walls for the massive island, installing upgraded electrical, and installing the lower cabinets, JohnR, Andrew, and I will take over again to install all of the open shelving, all of the tile work, and the pantry cabinets, as well as painting the cabinetry on the pantry wall, the ceiling, and all of the touch-up work. Fun times to come, but for now, our work here is done. Yay!!!

#kitchenrenovation#kitchenreno#kitchenremodel

I now completely understand why contractors don’t like removing cabinets intact. It takes for-flipping-ever. We had to be extra careful because they were going off to another home.

From the onset, we thought removing the granite was going to be our biggest headache.

Our contractor told us to give the granite a rap with a small sized sledgehammer, which we did. And, just like he said, it cracked easily without damaging the cabinets below. We had the most incompetent counter installer for our last renovation, but we sent them a silent thanks for not properly gluing the countertops down, which made for unexpectedly easier removal.

The large pieces were easy to smash into manageable bits to haul away, although we still have three modest sized pieces we’d love to give away if anyone is interested.

The thing that gave us fits was the 96-in tall pantry cabinet, which not only weighed a ton, but had to be lowered on its side in order to get it through the front door. Even the young one will be popping Advil tonight.

The folks that purchased the cabinets were at our house bright and early this morning, we helped them load up their two trucks, and off our old cabinets went to their new home in Baltimore. The couple was gracious enough to allow us to keep our oven through the Thanksgiving holiday before they come to pick that up as well as a few other appliances.

With that, we are done until the day after Thanksgiving when we finish taking down the partition wall to get ready for the pros to come in. (We are currently without running water in our kitchen, which is exactly as bad as it sounds. We are hopeful a temporary sink will be delivered by the end of the week.)

#exhausted#kitchenreno#kitchenrenovation

Welp, womp womp. Kitchen construction is now delayed until after TG holiday.

Damn it all. This time, due to an illness in our contractor’s family, so understandable, but still disappointing.

We have lived in a construction zone for the better part of three months, and with the holidays, we will likely still be sweeping up dry wall bits well into the new year. We definitely won’t have the counters installed before then, that is now certain.

Worse yet, our old cabinets are on their way out this weekend, which means by Sunday afternoon, Operation Campsite will commence when we lose our kitchen sink and move full time to our temporary set-up. We are going to have the contractor swing by with a sink cabinet and hook the plumbing back up to get us through. I mean, it is better than washing dishes in the powder room sink for two months, but still.

Some major updates from the self-styled demo team, though:

1) The upper cabinets are down! The lowers will be removed this weekend. Contractor thinks we are going to have a major problem with the weight of the granite. We don’t disagree.

We got a very nice text from our GC saying that we do such good work, he’d like to hire us (he was joking), and continued, “the work doesn’t pay much, but the job satisfaction is up there.” JohnR told him we’d be happy to be paid in Advil at this point

2) The load-bearing/not load-bearing wall dilemma. Five days, three holes, two professionals, and one husband have now had a turn at sticking their heads into our ceiling to see what they can see. There was some creative connecting of the partition wall to the joists above by the original builder, to be sure, but the word this morning is: go for it!

Nobody has a Plan B (or, rather, the contractor doesn’t want to say what Plan B is out loud to me for fear of a full-on grown up melt down), but I’m pretty sure it begins with “support” and ends with “post.” Before anyone changes their minds, we are going to start chopping on Sunday. If you are a church-goer, throw a prayer or two our way.

3) We finally, FINALLY, made a decision on the range hood fiasco. We SO wanted to go with an in-ceiling flush mount ceiling hood, but in the end, venting it outside would have required pulling a permit AND, because of the long struggle to understand a puzzled-together overhead joist system, our contractor was VERY reluctant to cut through any. Budget-wise, we could either hire a structural engineer or have pretty things. I’m going with the latter.

Luckily, we had our heads turned by this stunner! The company, Futuro Futuro, is one of few that do pendant range hoods with 960 whopping CFM. We are goo-goo eyed over the 36″ Balance model and it should be here in time for Thanksgiving. Not that anyone here will be cooking any damn thing on Thanksgiving, but we can gather ’round the swanky range-hood and give thanks.

The device will act as a pendant light as well as function as a powerful range hood, so a win-win in our books. And, the charcoal filter doesn’t need changed for five years. Not exactly what we thought we wanted, but something tells me this is going to be one of our favorite purchases.

(Fingers crossed because it is not returnable…)

One side done! Still not sure if this is a load-bearing wall. All evidence points to it not being one — we even poked our heads in the ceiling to reassure ourselves. Still, we want the all-clear from the contractor before the actual wall comes down. Neither of us is eager to take a stud down and watch our offices above crash into our former dining room

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, who knew taking down cabinets would be such a bitch?! The problem, as probably everyone else knew except us, is that a lot of hidden finishing nails go into cabinet crannies to keep them nice and tight and together. Trying to pry those loose without damaging the cabinets is a fool’s errand and we are not enjoying it.

Save some money and do the demo yourselves, they said. Ha.