Kitchen Remodel-Demolition Edition

You know that book, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," where the kid gives a mouse a cookie and one thing keeps leading to another? Well, long story short, our oven died so we decided to redo the whole kitchen!

This is what we started with (Andy photo shopped the red lines to show the changes we wanted to make to the island).

And this was our inspiration. We wanted to go with a white kitchen, stainless steel appliances, and a wood breakfast bar.

We started finding contractors and getting estimates for all the work we wanted done: new counters, new back splash, cabinets painted, butcher block slab for the island, and we started shopping for new appliances. It was a lot to do at once, but we were also kind of under the gun. We didn't want to get the new oven put in until the work was all done, and, call me crazy, I don't love not having an oven, so we wanted to move fairly quickly. We got one estimate from a company that included everything we wanted to have done. While that would have been a much easier route, we decided to save money and do some of the work ourselves and find better deals with various contractors.

The main part we felt comfortable doing ourselves was the demolition.

Andy's mom happened to be in town the weekend we demo'ed the island so we put her to work too!

The demo for the counters was pretty easy once we got the hang of it. It was just a lot of stuff because we had to take off all the tile and then the concrete slab underneath.

Once the counters on the island were demo'ed, we had our neighbor help us cut down part of the island wall because it was kind of useless, and we would rather have a little more counter space. We also cut out a piece of cardboard to try out the dimensions for the custom butcher block counter we were going to order.

Next up was the backsplash. Under the category of "First World problems," the backsplash was kind of a nightmare. Plan A was that we wanted to keep our original back splash, but everyone told us that probably couldn't happen. Sure enough our new counters were going to be about an inch lower than our old ones so we had this weird gap that we didn't know what to do with. We decided to just go for it and get a new back splash. I started to do the demo, but it was much harder to do than the counters because the tiles were glued to the drywall. It was almost impossible to get the tiles off without damaging the drywall. We looked into hiring someone else to do all the demo work, but one place was WAY too expensive and the other place didn't work with our time frame (the demo had to get done before our new counters went in). At this point we had already picked a company to install the back splash, and we were told that they would do any drywall repair that was needed. So we decided to go back to doing the demo ourselves and not worry too much about the drywall damage. It wasn't until AFTER I had demo'ed most of the back splash and damaged quite a bit of the drywall that we were told the install company does NOT repair drywall. Great. This was definitely a low point in our remodel process because there was a lot of damage, and now Andy and I had to figure out how to fix it all. By this time, the counters were getting installed in just a matter of days, so we were pressed for time. 

Andy was not a happy camper that weekend as he did his best to repair the extensive damage. It didn't help that we had different ideas of the best way to go about it. In the end, he was able to get it good enough that the new tile guy we hired (we changed our mind about the other company) said he could work with it. Phew! It was so nice to get all the demo done and then we were ready for the installations to begin...