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.