Moving the Kitchen With the floor down, we could start moving the kitchen. We decided we’d use the existing cabinets for now. We have plans that hubby will have time during the winter (when he is laid off) to start building cabinets. We’ve built some furniture and cabinets before, so I think they will turn out fine. We’d bought a planer and jointer to help with the project, and first planned on using lumber from the old barn. Now that we have such nice pine boards from the flooring, we plan on using them.

The biggest logistic problem with moving the kitchen dealt with the plumbing. We had to move the kitchen before we could pull up the floor in the old kitchen so we could run the plumbing for the new kitchen. It meant having the oven and fridge in one room and the sink in the other for a week or so.

Here is the old kitchen with the stove moved. The old bathroom is behind the wall with the door, and the new addition is behind that. Eventually that will all be gone and open to the addition – some day!

We got the cabinets moved except for the dishwasher and sink (hubby did not want to move the dishwasher until he could hook it back up).

The cabinets and appliances look pretty nice in their new home. One of our neighbors expressed interest in the cabinets once we are done with them. Otherwise I plan on putting them in my greenhouse (a future project).

This also gives us time to see if we like this layout before we commit to it. We use to have a nice oak round dining table, but we gave it to our daughter before we started moving the old kitchen. It won’t really fit with our “old farmhouse” look, and she really wanted it. I’d bought a lot of new furniture when we moved to WI, thinking we would be there a long time. We brought very little of it with us. But it did make my daughter happy, since she was the recipient of some of the nicer items. We did buy a cheap loveseat so we’d have something to sit on. I’m sure going to have fun buying furniture (some day).

It was the end of July, and time to start the demo process. The old kitchen had sheetrock over plaster. When we removed the cabinets, we discovered they had not primed behind them. Maybe that is a common practice, but it does not discourage mold from growing on the unprimed paper. The long channel in the sheet rock is the result of the counter top not quite fitting. They cut out the sheetrock to make it fit. We assumed they ordered the countertop before they sheetrocked the room, and didn't take that into consideration. Who knows - we all make stupid mistakes from time to time.

I got the sheetrock removed – that was the easiest part.

Then comes the messy part, removing the plaster and lath. At least there was no insulation on the interior walls

But the truly awful part is in the attic. I had to bag up the insulation and haul it out. This is not fun to do in the middle of the summer when it’s very hot up there. I wear my coveralls and mask – breathing that stuff can be real harmful. My hubby has so much trouble with it that he just stays away and lets me deal with it. He’ll have plenty to do when we get to the plumbing.

Monday, August 1^st, and I’ve started taking down the ceiling. Now that turned into a dirty job. Only about 100 years worth of dirt and yuck packed into the joints of the lath on the ceiling. This was the old style lath, 1” thick boards with notches cut into them. A real pain to pull down as it’s nailed up there with real nails. The boards were also about 8’ long. We had been told that the kitchen was the original claim shack, and the bathroom area had been added on at a later date. With the walls and ceiling gone, we could tell that was not the case. The original claim shack included the bathroom and half the kitchen. When the second claim shack was moved to the property, an 8’ section was built to attach the first shack with the second. What is neat is the dining room is basically the footpad of the original home. Pretty cool to think someone’s entire house was the size of the dining room . . .

We also started removing the carpet. The top layer was easy, but the bottom layer was glued to the pine flooring.

We’d done as much as we could without moving the kitchen sink. The next step was to pull up the floor, so we removed the sink and dishwasher, and got to work. We would be without a kitchen sink until we got the floor up and the plumbing run. Not fun doing dishes in the laundry tub.

  ¶ 10:18 AM