The Kitchen: Scenes from a Holiday weekend

Pictures of us scraping old thinset mortar off the floors are very boring. So are pictures of us laying the new concrete subfloor and screwing about 10,000 screws to hold it in. But here's a quick photo montage of what we did on our kitchen project this weekend. We took full advantage of 3 days off to make some pretty major progress (and I still managed to make it to the pool and get some sun!) Upper cabinets have been hung and the tile floor in the kitchen is laid, it just needs to be grouted.

The Kitchen: Floor Demo

Our first step in completely demolishing our kitchen was to get the gross floor tile up. They rent these machines at Home Depot that pretty much do it for you, but that would be far too easy. My wonderful husband decided to use a "scraper" to get up all the tiles manually - as in back breaking work. However, once he got started, it actually went super fast and easy. We got the entire floor up in 2.5 hours. Starting to scrape after we moved the fridge and stove out of the kitchen.

It started slowly and then all the sudden, we hit a major groove and it went really quickly. Progress!

Goodbye tile! We definitely filled 4 of those big trashcans with all the tile and grout.I was in charge of cleanup...And this was the state of the kitchen after 1 day of working for 2.5 hours. Not too shabby!

Next up - cabinet demo! And a trip to the commercial dump, which was an eye opening experience!

The Kitchen: Before

So the reason I haven't blogged in a few weeks is because we have officially started our massive renovation of the kitchen. And I'm already over it. We're doing EVERYTHING ourselves, so obviously things move sort of slowly (even though I am impressed by how much we've gotten done so far). We are gutting everything and bringing in new floors, cabinets, countertops, lighting, paint, etc. Luckily we've been upgrading our appliances since we moved in and the only new appliance we will need is a microwave.

So here are our "before" pictures, so you can see the yuck we have been dealing with..Outdated Cabinets, gross white laminate countertops, nasty white tile floorsThe Floors - my nemesis. White tile with brown grout. We have a feeling the grout didn't start out as brown when it was installed. The tile was in super bad shape and never stayed or looked clean. We have it in the foyer and entry hallway as well, so it wasn't very welcoming. Close up of how gross our cabinets were. We scrubbed them down when we moved in 2 years ago and it didn't really help because there was so much grime and build up. The laminate counters were peeling away from the wall...lovely!

So that's what we lived with for 2 years! I'll be back with our current progress - let's just say the demo is already done and now we're just working on putting it back together...

Gone to Carolina...