Demo’ing The Kitchen

If you’ve ever bought a fixer upper home that had really gross rooms, you know the thrill of demo’ing the space and taking it down to bare bones. Demo’ing the kitchen was just like that… it was so refreshing to get everything out and to have a blank canvas.

Remember the kitchen? 

The picture makes it look about 100 times better than what it actually was. The cabinets were falling apart and most of the drawers were broken, not to mention loads of mice droppings everywhere. There was also a big water leak underneath the sink that had gone on for so long, it caused mold on the wall and all over in the base cabinet. The stove had burners that didn’t work, and the room was just about as dirty as you could imagine. There wasn’t a single inch that wasn’t coated in grease. We also had a good suspicion that the refrigerator water line was leaking as well. (Spoiler alert: it was!)

The only way to help this kitchen, was to take the room down to bare walls and start over. We did this right after we scrapped the popcorn off of the ceilings.

We started by removing the cabinets…

Nothing about them was worth saving. This house had been beat up. 

Even with just the upper cabinets removed, the room started looking so much better…

Next step was disassembling the sink drain. It was so nasty in the cabinet, that there was no way we getting close without wearing special masks…

I actually can’t fathom how people were living in this house allowing all of these leaks to continue causing damage. Mind blowing. 

With all of the cabinets out, we started busting up the tile…

While we were at it, we did the entry way tile as well…

Then, we started removing the soffit that was above the cabinets…

How much better does that look? And at this point, we still had the underlayment from the tile to tear up. Let me preface this by saying, that process wasn’t very fun. And it was only going to get worse…

We tore up the wood sub flooring and were left with about 976 screws to get up…

It wouldn’t have been so bad, but a lot of the screws were stripped from when they installed them, and also covered with thinset. I sat down on a bucket lid and worked my way across the room… trying not to grumble at the people who installed the underlayment, thinking they needed to add screws mere inches apart. I wasn’t successful in my not grumbling. It happened. 

In the areas where the water had soaked through the particle board, rotting it, the screws pulled out of the wood like butter. We were definitely looking at replacing the subfloor…

The worst areas were the section in front of the sink, and where the refrigerator sat. I’m not kidding when I say this… every single piece of the plumbing in this house was leaking, or had leaked, causing big issues. We just had the fun job of uncovering it all to see the damage it had been causing. 

With the water leaks identified and the damage done, we knew the next step was to replace the sub-flooring… and that definitely deserves its own post!