Dry Wall, Staples, and Hardwood... Oh My!

Taking down the old pantry was fun and easy. Take care as to not damage more drywall than necessary or you'll spend more time sanding later on.

Pantry gone!

If you look at the pictures below, I patched the holes left by the pantry walls with scrapes of dry wall I managed to save from the demo. While this is the cost effective way of dry wall repair, it's not the most efficient use of time. It would have been better to put in a sheet of drywall from the corner all the way to the edge of the old wall vs trying to fit in a skinny piece of dry wall in the hole that was left by the wall.

Amateur dry wall repair 

 What the patch work does is create a whole lot of joints that need mud and sanding. Augh..

What not to do.

The ceiling should have been patched with one large piece of drywall instead of using 3 smaller pieces.

How not to patch a hole.

With all the sanding and mudding I had to do, there was a lot of down time in between coats of mud. I decided to tackle the old floors while waiting for it to dry. There must have been a sale on floor staples when these homes were built. There was a staple every 6".

Asian broom.. every house needs one.

District 9 was rezoned to help control dust during the floor demo. I also added a sub-division of District 9 to further help keep dust at bay during the sanding of the mud.

You might be wondering where we kept all the appliances and kitchen stuff during all this work. Behold:

Dining Room

 We lived like this for weeks!

Family Room

Finally painted and ready for cabinets to be installed!

Next time on the Honey Did List... installation of cabinets!

Planning and Demo

Hi there. It's been a long time since I've posted anything new. I've been lazy.. sorry. But let's get back on track. We decided to go with IKEA for our cabinets. If you haven't used their Kitchen Designer, you're in for a treat. You can enter your room dimensions, floors, paint colors, doors, windows, openings, etc. Once you build your virtual room, start designing. This phase took weeks to come to an agreement. You have so many options when it comes to cabinets. Do you want drawers? doors? pull outs? It's a lot to think about.

Below are two ideas we were considering. Option 1 is very similar to our old layout except the dishwasher is now moved next to the sink. Moving the dishwasher next to the sink wouldn't be too difficult since we're moving it closer than it was before. You'll want to check where the electrical/water is coming from if you're considering changing things drastically because if it's farther, you'll need to run new electrical/water lines. Option 2 is a dramatic change to the old layout. We added an island to allow more flow in the kitchen. No longer would we need to walk around to get to the sink. One thing that helps with visualizing your design is to tape it out on the floor with blue painters tape. We decided to go with option 2.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 2 - top view

Time to DEMO!! No sledge hammers like you see in all those HGTV shows. We found buyers for our old cabinets (Craigslist is awesome!) so we had to take care when removing them. The old cabinets came down rather quickly. Each one is held in with only a few screws in the back that go in to the wall studs. Some were also attached to the adjacent cabinet. We took all the cabinets out in one evening.

One thing that had to go was our tiny pantry. "Hunnie, now grab the sledge hammer!" A good idea is to tape off the area with plastic to help control the dust. The kitchen would look like this for a couple weeks.

District 9

plastic wrap the appliances too.

Check back to see the build process.