Ok, I’ve been slacking off lately with the blog…I’m sorry. We recently dropped down from two laptop PC’s to one because we need a new charger cable for our old one and I just haven’t made it a priority to get a new one yet…but I definitely do need to because neglecting the blog just shouldn’t be allowed!
Anyway, I figure it’s about time to pick up again with the Before & After series so I’m going for the kitchen…let’s see how well we documented everything 🙂
When we first saw the house, the outside of the kitchen looked like this. This building was attached to the main house but there was no way to pass from one to the other. The PO was using the room as his carpentry workshop.
Because it was his workshop, it was full of various scraps of wood, screws, nails, pieces of furniture that we can only assume he was going to try to use at some point down the road and many other random things.
And because everything needed to be cleaned out before construction began, we had some work ahead of us. Thankfully we had a few friends who volunteered to help us one weekend…they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. 🙂
Once everything was sorted into the trash container or moved into the barn to be used later on, we had the task of taking down the cabinets which were in there. They weren’t worth keeping (and we had no where to put them) so we broken them apart so that we could manage to throw them away. This seemed like an easy task but they were constructed much better than we ever imagined. This photo looks a bit grainy because of the huge cloud of dust which went up after the cabinet on the ground in front of Stefan finally collapsed. And if you’re wondering, the stuff hanging from the ceiling are horse bridals, bits and other pieces of tack…
At last we finally had a mostly bare room to work with which meant things could really get going…and they did!
We started construction on the new kitchen on November 28th (according to the photos). The guy in this photo actually fell off some scaffolding a day later and broken his ankle. That was a bit of a blow for progress since he’s a working machine and incredibly strong (which we discovered when we hired him to help us move). Anyway, behind this tree, he is holding a jack hammer to the wall and breaking out the windows so we can put in full length windows and a big glass door.
Jump forward 29 hours and this was how far he’d gotten, working with the jack hammer and a sledge hammer. Pretty incredible.
Because of everything they were taking out of the wall, they had to put in some temporary supports to keep everything in place.
And while walls were being broken apart from the outside, walls were being constructed on the inside. The entire workshop space was about 18 feet (6 meters) wide and 30 feet (10 meters) long. We split it into one large room for the kitchen and dining room, and the rest of the room was left to become a mudroom and laundry room.
When I arrived two days later, the hole was finally complete. Unfortunately our architect who drew up the plans was a bit of an idiot (hence him getting canned early into this) and the hole for the door was a bit too large – but nothing some bricks couldn’t fix.
The wall inside hadn’t progressed much but I did finally get a shot standing from the kitchen side (about where the dining table is now) looking at the future mudroom…
Tomorrow, I’ll finish this up since it’s a whole lot of photos and there’s a lot more work to be seen.
Read part two of our kitchen makeover.
