Day 1
Thursday
In three different stages, throughout the course of the day, we removed a window ledge,
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| Yep. That's 26 year old cardboard right there shoring up the back side of our former window ledge. Fancy. |
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| And a Pepsi bottle (circa 1989)… it was very clean, surprisingly. Like someone politely rinsed it out before hiding it in our wall. |
all three countertops, the sink, disconnected all the plumbing,
took down two hanging cabinets
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| See the random hole? I swear… every time we take something down we find a hole where there shouldn't be one. I think the builders were hammer happy. |
and removed a good portion of the painted wallpaper on the walls.
Don't ever paint your wallpaper, people. Just say no.
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| Even if it's this ugly! Don't paint it… just tear it off. |
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| The family that peels wallpaper together, stays together! |
So, what was the unplanned activity? The wallpaper removal.
See, what happened was I had planned to take the cabinets down at a later date. I had talked with my husband about putting up some fabulous open shelving in place of the two single cabinets on either side of the sink and he was game for it. He told me just before starting to demo the kitchen that he'd be willing to do it now if I wanted. So we did. And I loved it instantly!
I mean… look at the difference it made.
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| The first view from of my kitchen walking through the doorway of the breakfast room. |
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| Huge change, right? |
But removing those cabinets made us realize that we needed to address the wall since the tile we have planned isn't going to cover it. And that's when we decided to start ripping down the wallpaper. The painted wallpaper. Maybe the paint didn't make it harder to tear off, but it sure seemed like it. And adding a layer of two of latex (and primer if I remember correctly) really only created sharper edges to slice under your fingernails.
Up next… new countertops, sink and faucet and my poor husband will be skimming the upper portion of the walls all weekend so that the tile guy can come do his thing next week.
Happy Mother's Day weekend!