Demolition!

So, we've settled on a bid, scheduled an installation date, and have a dining room full of brand new cabinets.  Everything is ready to go, which means it's time for us to get down to business and rip out the existing cabinets.  Here's a few before shots, just in case you've forgotten what the kitchen looked like when we moved in:

Dining room through the door on the right

Bathroom and bedrooms to the door on the left,
pantry through the door Drew is standing in.

Glorious white-beige-cream-gray palace, prepare to be downgraded significantly.

Drew had Good Friday off from work, so I asked him to pretty please chip off the backsplash tile so we could get the cabinets out of the kitchen during the weekend.  First, I got this photo in a text while I was at work:

Perez: Note that we continue to SAVE THE DATE, even as we demolish our kitchen. 

Huzzah!  The tile is coming down and he emptied out the cabinets and there are no holes in the wall!  Then he sent me this photo:

Well, the tile is down but what is that giant hole above the stove?  Why did all the wallboard come down?  What is going on?  I was confident that Drew had applied the same impeccable tile-chipping technique from the previous wall and that something must have been different about the tile on the other wall, potentially due to being near a heat source, but it got me all nervous about the part where we decided to save money by fixing the walls up ourselves.  Then I had to go bill more hours and tried not to think about it.  No sense getting fired over a few holes in the kitchen wall, right?

But oh my, you are a large hole.  And that wall is a really big mess.

And then I got this photo:

At some point, the kitchen was apparently painted the color of urine.
The horrible creamy walls just look better and better. 

Gaah!  It's great that he removed the cabinets but I'm such a worrywart that I wanted to be there for the cabinet removal to help and/or call 911.  I assumed he was okay since he had the presence of mind to take a photo and text it to me, but it still made me nervous.  Luckily, the end of the day was near and I could go home and inspect the damage to my kitchen and husband.  Upon coming home, I found several silver linings to my previous concerns.  First, Drew was totally fine.  Other than cut up hands from handling tile shards, there were no injuries.  Second, he'd cleaned up the mess in the kitchen.  Third, he was doing the dishes.

Best husband award! 

Saturday morning, we woke up full of vim and vigor, ready to tackle the other wall of cabinets.  The tile-chipping, cabinet removal, and clean up had taken Drew about three hours by himself.  We were hopeful that the other wall wouldn't take too long, but we knew that removing base cabinets (one of which had a gas line threaded through it) and a microwave could add some complexity to the day.

Cute butt award!

The cabinets were attached to the wall with 3-6 long screws.  Some of the screws came out easily using our power drill and some took some more muscle (Drew's, not mine).  The first cabinet we tried to remove was mysteriously attached to the cabinet to its left.  We could see no screws.  Sticking a 5-in-1 in the crack between the cabinets indicated a lack of adhesive.  There was just no clue about how the darn thing was still on the wall.  He decided to try and unscrew the center cabinet, the one above the microwave, to see if that would come out.  Then everything was super wiggly and I got very nervous that the entire wall of cabinets, plus the microwave, would come crashing down.  There was a fair amount of cursing before Drew decided to yank the cabinet around a bit while I "held up the microwave" (as if I were actually strong enough to do that) and see if it would pop free.  At the time, it was the most reasoned decision we could come up with.  So he yanked and wiggled and the cabinet came off the wall!  Better yet, the microwave and center cabinet didn't come crashing down!

Note the footstool and set of antique history books that served as a "just in case it falls off the wall" back up.
WHO'S A PRO? (Answer: Neither of us).  

More urine-colored walls.  And more holes.  Hmm.  It turns out that the crazy person who installed the cabinets screwed them together with visible screws (which we removed initially) and super secret screws underneath the door hinges.  Talk about annoying.  If there had been no visible screws, we would have obviously thought to look under the hinges.  But there were screws all over the place, so who knew there were ALSO super secret screws?  Harumpf.  Lucky that screws rip right out of cheap particleboard if you pull hard enough.

We also got the inside scoop on what was between the microwave and the upper cabinet.

Very long anchor screws.  Some mouse poop.  A 2x4 with our favorite "decorative" tile on it.  The microwave and center cabinet popped right off and we were two thirds of the way there.

I really hope that blue electrical box contains a dedicated circuit!  

The corner cabinet was pretty tough to get off - there was more cursing and yanking than ever before - but the antique books did their job and we were finally done with the upper cabinets.

Removing an errant screw left in the wall. 

Taking the stock of the crazy quilt that is our kitchen wall, it seems like the stove used to be about 18-20 inches to the right.  Clues include that weird unpainted rectangle to the right of the stove, the odd location of the microwave plug, and the location of the gas line.  Maybe this means that moving the stove 18" to the right will be easy as pie!  Maybe not.  We'll see.

Then we set about removing the base cabinets near the stove.  The left cabinet was tucked behind the baseboard and window sill, so we had to remove the right cabinet and then scoot the stove over to get the left one out.

Removing the right cabinet was slightly complicated by the presence of the gas line, which had been installed after the cabinet was already in.  After some questionable attempts to cut the cabinet away from the gas line with a hacksaw, I took a screwdriver and a hammer to the cheap particleboard frame and it came right away.  I'm a nervous nellie about a lot of things, but hacksaw + gas line is near the top of the list.

Ta da! No gas leak!

Anyway, it all worked out nicely and now our kitchen looks like a crack den.  The whole thing took about 3 hours, which left us plenty of time to enjoy the day.

At least this is what I imagine a crack den would look like...

We decided to leave the base cabinets in place on the other side of the kitchen so that we could continue to use the sink and dishwasher up until the last possible moment.  Doing dishes in the bathtub can wait.

Drew gets the best husband award a million times over because he really did most of this himself.  Although I did step in at a few key moments, I mostly stood around in my slippers and snapped photos and got anxious about things falling down.  This is partly because Drew said that this was kind of a one person job and I would just be in the way (probably true) and also partly because I'm pregnant and not very useful for things like yanking cabinets off of walls.

At least I helped with the cursing.

More updates to come!