Destroying the Kitchen in Order to Save It

Our kitchen was not awful. The cabinets were starting to show their age and the partcle board shelves were starting to sag. The floor was a vinyl sheet that had seen better days and the counter top was pretty much shot. On the plus side, we painted it pretty happy colors a few years ago and the toaster oven works great. Wait... now that I think about it our kitchen was shot.

Also, there was some weirdness to it.

Mainly:

• The kitchen was shaped like a giant "L" with the lower leg being a pantry.
• Our washing machine was behind enormous sliding steel doors.
• The dryer was around the corner in the pantry and a good 20 ft from the washer.
• The refrigerator was around the corner as well.

Okay, this may be hard to visualize so here is the general layout of our kitchen at the beginning of the project and the hoped for general layout of the kitchen at the end of the project. (BTY, not to scale. The addition will be much deeper that I showed below and there will be another room to the right of the utility room.)

So we are destroying the kitchen while we wait on the permits for the addition. We decided that with drains and water supplies being put into the future 3/4 bath, we could use it as a temporary utility room until the addition was completed.

The steel doors. The old hot water heater used to live ther as well	The pantry Full o' stuff as usual

The first step was to clear everything out of the pantry and from behind the steel doors (Wasn't "Behind the Steel Door" a 70's movie... Oh. Wait. Never mind.) Once everything was gone the real destruction could begin. Since we are on a slab and the drain for the house was basically right next to where the washing machine was, our contractor needed to pull up the vinyl floor and then jack hammer a series of trenches to contain the drains that the new bathroom and utility room will need.

It actually took longer for them to get the floor and adhesives up than it took to jackhammer the slab.

Next to the washing machine with the drain in the wall.	The pantry floor looking a lot like the grand Canyon.

Our house was built in the mid-1950s so it was sorta cool to think that the dirt below the slab hadn't seen the light of day in nearly 60 years.

After the trenches were done, the pipes went in.

The large grey pipe is actually the old vent and was taken out completely. New venting is going in.	The tall pipes in the foreground will actually be drains in the wall that will separate the kitchen and bath.

We got a little lucky in that the drain for the house was in a spot and deep enough to easily allow enough "fall" for the new drains to being installed and flow properly.

Once all the drains were in, the floor was patched with concrete and the contractor started additional framing and electrical work.

One of the things our contractor is doing that was clearly not done during previous renovations in the house, is getting rid of unused parts. That's why the unused vent was removed. He actually hauled out a fair amount of junk from attic that was just parts that were left behind when our furnace was replaced several years ago.

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So we got our official list of uncrossed "T's" and undotted "I's" from our county zoning unit concerning our Special Permit. All in all, they were very minor but since this was an exercise in jumping through hoops for the sake of jumping through hoops, we did just that. I ran the corrections out to their office and made sure that everything that was required was now in and acceptable. I was told that the first part of the process would be done the following week and that our request was now being forwarded to the board that votes on them. We would be getting a letter telling us our hearing date which may be up to three months from now.


We got the letter the other day and it contained a very pleasant surprise... our hearing has been scheduled for next month! Wow. Super cool. Soooooooo, assuming we really are in the home stretch on this, we may actually be two to three months ahead of schedule when the exterior construction starts.


Maybe we will be pretty squared away by Christmas after all. Which is cool because I hear that Santa sometimes skips houses under construction. It is some sort of OSHA requirement for him.