Rehab 4470 – We got the cabinets out and the kitchen wall down

We made good progress this weekend with the kitchen. The cabinets came out easily and were not glued to the wall like the last house (thank god!). Sean helped me take out the sink side and Jan and stove side. Removing the tile backsplash was a whole different issue. We had a couple of problems with the sink base and have to cut off the main drain.  The cabinet bases were also separate from the base cabinets.
Once the cabinets were out what seemed like an easy task of snapping the back splash tiles off and scraping off the glue resulted in the wall board being torn up so much I finally just cut the sheetrock out. We should have done it from the start and it would have saved 2-3 hours of fooling around with the tile.  It also gives the electrician a little more room to work when he moves the switches.  We are going to keep the undecounter lighting that was installed under the old cabinets and install it on the new cabinets.

Lou the electrician came by and we talked about the electric wires in the wall between the dining room and the kitchen. He determined, after crawling around the attic a bit, that he would able to relocate them and expects minimal wall repair to be needed. That was good news. The other good news came from reviewing the blueprints with brother in law Mike over the phone and coming to the conclusion that the wall between the dining room and the kitchen was NOT load bearing.  Once we got through those decisions out came the reciprocating saw and down came the wall. I also cut the wall down to 34.5” to make it flush with the new cabinets when they installed. All in all not to bad of a job with minimal wall repair needed once the electric gets rerouted. The effect we think will be dramatic and really make the kitchen pop once the granite goes in. It surprised both of us how much more open the kitchen looks even with wires hanging down from the ceiling.

The kitchen as you can see also has wallpaper (and the bathrooms) and the genius that put it up did not size the wall in advance. This means the wall is damaged in trying to get the wallpaper off. Jan got an estimate for someone else to do it and it came back at $1200 – ugh! So we consulted with Gene the paint guy at the local Lowes store. No magic wand it seems. Gene did however give us some tips to paint over it.

• First cut or remove any areas that are coming off the wall

• Spackle the seams and parts that were cut out

• When the spackle dries sand it flat repeating as needed

• Then prime the walls with oil based primer – this is key as latex may dissolve some the paper

• Texture as desired (I’ll use Billy’s machine hopefully)

• Then paint with latex color of choice

We’ll report how that technique works in a future blog.

The other good news is we sold the stove, dishwasher, and cabinets on craigslist in less than 24 hours. With the money we can pay someone to tear up the existing tile in the entryway, kitchen, and hallway to make way for the 20 x 20 porcelain. We also got the bamboo flooring on sale from Lumber Liquidators @ $1.79 sq ft. All in all a good week..

Happy rehab..