Kitchen Remodel – How we got here

We are in the thick of a home and kitchen remodel right now, as in trying to quickly lay floor down in half of our downstairs before cabinets get installed. So I thought it was about time to do a kitchen remodel post or two or four. 🙂

Bear with me because this post may be a bit more wordy with less pictures than what you are accustomed to from us, but it’s an important post to lay the ground work for how we got to where we are now in terms of remodeling our kitchen.

How we got here:

We excitedly purchased new bamboo hardwood flooring in a luscious dark finish for most of our house just after Thanksgiving of last year.

Before we had actually purchased the new flooring and had it delivered, the hubs went a little crazy from being fed up with our funky carpet and starting tearing it out.

Fast forward a few weeks and one rainy day just before Christmas, we got a nice present delivered to our home – 4 pallets of new hardwood floor.

Little did we know that we would not be purchasing it as a stand alone DIY project due the fact that you always ALWAYS uncover things when remodeling a home. We I happily trudged along after the new year while I helped my husband lay the new floor in our upstairs (let’s be real, he did the heavy lifting).

We quickly completed the bonus room first…

…moving on to the laundry room only to discover MOLD. Black and vicious mold that covered 2/3 of the subfloor. We had to rip out baseboards to get up an extra layer of plywood under the linoleum too.

So I spent a miserable weekend scrubbing until my arms were going to fall off until it was all gone. In case you did not know it, laundry detergent is a multi-use product for cleaning mold in addition to your soiled linens. Great! We finally knocked out the ceiling, walls and then flooring in the laundry room. Here is the before and after. MAJOR improvement.

 

Then we finished down the hallway, got the stair nosing in place and moved on to the master bedroom. We knocked all of this out by mid-February and felt pretty good about ourselves. We still have transition pieces to lay and baseboards to finish in the laundry, but that’s really it for the upstairs.

Enter our downstairs which is one flowing space with open doorways between each room – no defined spaces to start and stop. We, er I, quickly ripped up the one section of carpeting in the family room. Then we tackled the kitchen floor one weekend with the help of hubby’s mom. Same deal here as the laundry in that the builders put that extra layer of plywood under the linoleum, which makes sense to make it level with the other flooring, except it makes for a pain in the butt when you go to rip it up. Talk about staple city. My hand is cramping just thinking about it.

But here’s where it gets stupid. The plywood and linoleum flooring ran all the way under the cabinets. So in order to put down our gorgeous new floor, our crappy old cabinets that we hated anyway were coming out whether or not we replaced them with something new. So decision time…do we go ahead with a kitchen remodel we had planned for a year or two down the road and enjoy it now or find a temporary fix?

We did a little digging into a temporary fix where we may not have to tear out the cabinets that involved buying a special tool to run along the cabinets to make a clean cut along the plywood/linoleum, BUT we had plans of changing the layout just enough that didn’t make sense at all. We are pushing out the sink wall to gain about 10-15 inches of space and we are pushing out the stove wall to gain 3 inches on each side, which also means extending the island to match. We could have tried tearing out the existing cabinets, run the new floor across the entire kitchen so any changes in layout wouldn’t matter and put the old ones back down in place. But then what do you do about counter tops? We were also afraid of finding additional mold and water damage, not being able to put the old cabinets back down, etc. So none of these temporary fixes made any sense whatsoever.

What decisions we made:

Obviously, we decided to move forward with a full remodel. Luckily, the layout of our kitchen was functional and the best it could be for the space, so it is just a remove and replace job. But you guys know we LOVE to cook and we LIVE in our kitchen. We weren’t going to skimp on details or compromise to save a bit when we plan to enjoy this kitchen for a while, but we still had to attempt to stay in a reasonable budget. And we I already had a ton of ideas in my hand about how I wanted it to look, it was just a matter of figuring out the real cost of those ideas to see just how much it would be and if we could stomach it.

Here’s a picture of our old kitchen with the old flooring still down just so you can see why we wanted it gone.

Other than the green counter tops and builder grade cabinets, it doesn’t look so bad to the naked eye, right? Well, that sink was in danger of literally falling through the counter, most of the cabinets had been wood-glued and piece-milled back together over the years and they were the plastic coated finish so you couldn’t put a band-aid over them by just using some paint.

So I’ll post next about our decision process. 🙂