A Very Busy Saturday: Moving Cabinets and Building Walls

So this weekend we got a lot done at the house... with the help of a few great friends we were able to check quite a things off of the to-do list! 

First off, the kitchen cabinets. We knew from the beginning that we would be replacing all of the old kitchen appliances but our existing dishwasher was a compact, only 18" wide. We did look at maybe getting another compact washer but ultimately decided against it because many of the compact dishwashers available got pretty bad reviews and on top of that, most of them were more expensive than the bigger, standard, washers! So, although our new dishwasher hasn't even been delivered yet, we knew we needed to make more space for it.

James removing the old dishwasher

Too small of a space :(

 With the dishwasher out, the boys were free to rip off the counter top first thing Saturday morning...and they literally ripped it in the process, but no worries since we will eventually be getting rid of that too.  While the boys did a dump run, I removed all the cabinet doors... not easily though, every screw was glued into the hinges! Then, with the counter top off and doors out, they were able to easily detach the cabinets and shift them down a few inches.

James, Colt and Justin leveling the cabinets

We were pretty lucky in that there were a few inches of wall extended past the end of the cabinets and when the boys put the edge of the cabinets flush with the wall, that gave us the perfect amount of space for the new, standard sized, dishwasher!

No drawers, no doors, more space!

With the bottom cabinets tackled, the boys took down the upper cabinets for me so that I could clean them easier... once they are cleaned and painted we are going to reattach the upper cabinets higher than they were, to the ceiling (more on that later).

 

The hood that goes to nowhere.

So while the boys were busy inside, I set myself up a cabinet washing station outside...

 

After removing all the hardware and hinges from all of the doors and drawers, I washed, scrubbed and scraped every surface with a mixture of TSP and water. These cabinets were filthy, especially the top surfaces, you could literally scrape the grease off of some of them! 

A stiff bristled brush, new sponge and toothbrush were key to get all of the grime out of all of the nooks and crannies, but my savior was a putty knife that I used to really scrape everything down with. It was hard work and took about 6 hours overall, but in the end, everything looked so much cleaner, it was definitely worth it!

Like new... kind of :)

Next up for the cabinets, paint! But that's next weekend... finally for this post, the extra side door that we decided to get rid of. After much debating, we decided that our floor plan would be a lot easier to work with if we got rid of the side door. Since we are adding a sliding glass door to our bedroom at the back of the house, we are able to get rid of that door as an "exit". But most importantly, removing the door will really open up some options for how we can arrange our living room furniture. (With such a small house, that side door wasn't necessary anyway). And because we know nothing about getting rid of a door, we had our contractor friend, Mikey, come in to do the job right for us! He worked all day and now we have nice, big, beautiful wall! Here are all of the pictures I snapped throughout the day... it was hard keeping up because once the door came out, he had the new wall framed and the siding up in no time!

BEFORE INSIDE

BEFORE OUTSIDE

Goodbye crap door!

New framing

New siding

AFTER OUTSIDE... Ready for paint :D

AFTER INSIDE... Door no more! Thanks Mikey!

The old door and siding also made great fuel for our HUGE bon fire that night!

Oh, and I can't forget that the boys also installed more than half of the new faces for all of the electrical outlets in the house... no pictures of those at the moment, but they look so clean and white compared to the old, dingy, beige ones!

Overall, it was a very successful, productive weekend and I couldn't have been done without our awesome friends, so special shout outs to my home-makeover-heroes for the weekend: Justin, Colt and Mikey! Thanks guys!

Next up, I am super excited (and a little nervous) to start painting our cabinets... we've become weekend warriors and I can't wait for the next one!