Wednesday, April 17, 2013

The kitchen overhaul - Prep work

Our next project is going to be our kitchen.  The whole area right now, lighting, cabinets and floor, sort of give off a yellowish tinge and I can't stand it anymore. We would absolutely love to just rip it all out and start over, but that is just not feasible.  So, we are just going to work with what we have for now and make some changes that will still make an impact all for the DIY price.


Here is what we'd like to do.
- Retexture the dining walls
- paint the dining walls
- perhaps install some board and batten to bring some nice detail to the dining area
- Rip out all the soffits so we have one ceiling height across the whole area.
- Get rid of the fan and install a nice light that is centered in the dining area
- install recessed lighting in the kitchen.
- take out the blinds and make a nicer roman shade or something like that
- replace the stove top with an oven, thereby turning the oven into a pantry
- paint all the cabinets a creamy white


At first all I wanted to do was start small. Paint the dining room.  At that was all, just a small little upgrade. But no, nothing could be that simple.

The first step in all of this is sanding down the walls to get rid of the texture that is currently on them.  I'd hardly call it a texture now...it's just a lot of bumps that you can easily get scraped on.  I've started some already.  The left side has been sanded and the right side hasn't.  We now own a power sander just for this job.  After it's all sanded we can apply a smooth texture first, and then texture it again to give it some depth, then we can paint.


A couple of weeks ago we went ahead and scraped off the popcorn ceiling and the wallpaper.  It made a world of difference, but it also now just looks REALLY bare.  For anyone that may be coming over in the next few months...please excuse our mess!

                                       

The next step, and the one we are currently working on, is removing the soffit.  At first we thought we could just start to demo it from the inside, put up some drywall and be done with it.  Well, Stephen had the forethought to cut a hole inside one of the cabinets to see if it was just empty space or if there was was insulation.  To my dismay, there was insulation. As in, the entire soffit was full of it.   That basically means, if we had just demoed it, all the insulation from the attic (where the soffit was) would just fall into our kitchen.  Picture me throwing a major fit.  It wasn't pretty and I'm not proud of it.

So now, this seemingly easy project turned into a 5 step ordeal.  We have to go into the attic and move all the insulation out of the way (and it's a lot by the way), then we have to cover the area with some plastic and put the insulation back (temporarily).  Then we can demo the soffits out, put up some drywall to close it off to the attic and then move all the insulation back in place.

Oh but wait...there a wires everywhere, and we will be needing come recessed lights.  So, we will have a really bare, really open to our attic, mess of a kitchen until after the electrician does his thing and takes all our money.

Yippie!!!!!






2 comments:

Liesel said...

Sounds pretty exciting and a lot of work. Hopefully you can get all of the attic work done before the heat comes. Is there a reason you didn't paint the cabinets first?

The Bristers said...

We decided to work in a top down fashion. The painting of the cabinets is going to take a while and I didn't want any of the ceiling or demo work to mess up the paint job.