Demo and Drywall

So, we've made some progress on our kitchen.  If you're on facebook, you might have seen some of these pictures.

It took us a few weeks to get to this point because life happened.  But anyway, here we are.  I know all you really care to see are the before and afters so we'll do those first.

Before

After

Before

After

Try to imagine it looking even more awesome if I had taken the time to clean off my counters before taking any of these pictures.

The space is so much brighter and so much more open and bigger now that the drop down and flourescent lights are long gone.  We donated the ballasts, covers and lights to our Habitat Restore so they could have a new home.  They probably just threw them away anyway becuase that stuff is really cheap to buy new...but at least we felt better about not throwing it away ourselves.

We still have the pile of studs on our back porch to deal with.  It came in handy for putting up the drywall when we needed it and I'm going to be using some of this to make a halloween decoration.  I'll just have to take out the upteen amount of nails in them.  We found one peice of 14" 2x4  that had 18 nails in it....I counted.  I bet they had the intern do it when the house was built.  Thanks guys...we really appreciated it.

Here are some photos of us doing all the demolition work back in June.

 Obviously it created a very big mess and alot of dust.  After all this is over, I'm going to need to hire some helping hands to dust my entire house. 

Most every wire hung below the ceiling rafters so we hired an electrician to move them all out of the way so we could drywall.  It was an all day job and they used 13 junction boxes.  We knew it was a job we couldn't do ourselves and that it would cost a lot, but it still sucked to write the check.

We had Stephen's Dad and Ana come down for a day and help us install all the recessed lights and undercabinet LED lighting.  We knew we could cut our expensives if all we had to do was pay them in food and love. Thank you so much!

Next on the list is to putty and smooth all the screw holes and tape and bed the joints to a smooth smooth finish.  This is going to take awhile as I also have to smooth out all our walls.

Then we will texture the ceiling and walls, then paint.  That will conclude Part I of the Kitchen Renovation project!!!!