The Great Kitchen Renovation

This was the big one!

Nate had a few weeks off from school in June while he was supposed to be studying for the OSSCE's test... it's like a test where he has actors for patients and he has to correctly diagnose and treat them to pass. Anyway, in this window of time we decided that it would be the only time we had to renovate the kitchen before we had to move.

We had 10 days to get it done before my Mom and Dad would get here for a vacation with them, and Jacob and his family.

Here you can see our washer and dryer in the kitchen and the plumbing for them hanging from the ceiling. There were two pipes that were just in the middle of the room and it looked terrible. On top of that the pipe to drain the water from the washer was totally clogged and the plumber couldn't unclog it! So... every time I washed the clothes I had to drape the hose across the kitchen, over the stove (had to make sure it was cold!) and we used a wire hanger to attach it into the sink where it would drain. There were a couple times that I started a load and forgot to put the hose in the sink... we've had a few floods in the kitchen.

Notice that the oven is in front of the window... so much needed to change in this kitchen!

Here are the cupboards. They had nasty old hardware on them, and the color just looked so ugly to me.

Austin is in the process of unscrewing the hardware and taking the doors off.
We didn't have enough storage or counter space in the kitchen so we used a couple of hutches in there to supplement. It didn't look very good, but it worked.

We are almost done taking the doors off.

Opps... I somehow put two of these pictures on... sorry.

What an awesome helper!

Once the doors were gone we needed to sand everything down to paint.

My boys are awesome helpers!

Now we are getting somewhere.

The boys really wanted to help paint, but... I really wanted it to look nice so... all the painting happened while after the boys went to bed. Actually most the kitchen came together after the boys went to bed.

It took about 2 days to get the cabinets painted, and we were anxious to start on the walls, so around 2am we painted this wall to get us excited to see a change.

This was actually exciting to us because we could start to get a vision of what it was going to look like.

Next came the floor. The flooring was just ugly so we decided to pull it up and put in some new vinyl tile like flooring.

We weren't too surprised to find another floor under the existing.

But we were surprised to find 2 more! There were 4 floors in this house! The nasty dark brown is the very old 1930's original wood floor... obviously that wasn't usable. Next was about a 50's looking tile... which to our surprise, and dismay was an asbestos tile! Then the 80's like vinyl, then the current.

We went to both Home Depot and Lowes to see how on earth to do this floor with children in the home. They said that the asbestos tiles are okay so long as you don't break them. So, we had to be super careful to remove them one by one without breaking them.

I had to take a break to feed Alyssa every now and then (the poor neglected thing :-) ) so I let the boys do some painting. The entire time they hounded us that they wanted to help. There were really only a few things that they could do, but we tried to let them help as much as possible. We let them do the first coat, and Nate and I did the second coat.Once the nasty floor was gone we had to prep the floor for the new floor. We screwed in a bunch of plywood for it to sit on.

Austin got to screw in a few screws, but Andrew actually screwed in a couple full planks! Nate just put dots where he wanted screws and Andrew did it all. We were both very impressed with him!

We are pretty much the king and queen of multi-tasking. We were going to wait to put in the tiles when the boys were in bed so while we waited we finished painting and started tearing out the old backsplash which was, of course, ugly.

Well heck we thought... if you are going to do a kitchen lets do it right. The counter tops were also outdated and ugly (noticing a common theme to the kitchen yet? :-) ) so we decided that while we were at it lets put in new counter tops!

Finally the boys were in bed so we could start on the floor!

I had the honor of laying the first tile!

Alyssa tried to help a little too!

Around 3am I woke up on the floor. We worked almost all night on the floor, and I don't remember passing out, but when I woke up... Nate was still working on putting in the last few tiles.

This one corner we couldn't do yet because the plumbing needed to be done first.

This is an upside down sink.

I had to help Nate with the counter tops so I didn't think to take any pictures of the instillation of them.

We decided that the hutches had to go, and be replaced by real cabinets.

The finished product!

It looks pretty dang good if I do say so myself!

On a side note, Nate passed his test with flying colors!

He's a stud!