Kitchen Demo Day

"A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step."
~ Lao Tzu

After months of thinking and researching, the rubber has finally met the road!  Today was the first day of construction at our farm house as new homeowners.  (Though, technically, we have already done work on the house.  The bank requested that a list of items be completed prior to closing but that is for another post.)

Following my predetermined order of operations, the first phase is demolition.  We will be gutting the: 1) entire kitchen 2) entire first floor half bath 3) entire first floor ceilings (to make way for the second story radiant floor heating)  4) second floor bathroom  5) master suite divider walls (for open concept en suite) 6) entire den  7) entire attic 8) basement and foundation.  We chose demolition as our first step in order to utilize the 30 yard dumpster which it being delivered this week.

 The largest of the six demos is by far the kitchen, so naturally we chose that! Luckily, we have many close friends who are generous with their time and eager to help.  Last week, we sent out a few texts and... three buddies to the rescue!  Armed with sledge hammers, picks, axes, shovels and coke zero, the sheet rock and wood began flying around 10:30am. 

THE BEFORE

DURING

 THE AFTER

Total work time: 4 hours.  Not bad for only four guys.  It pays to have beastly friends.  We all wore dust masks in a feeble attempt to not breath in the dust.  By the end, we were all sneezing and blowing unsightly snot rockets but that is all in a days work.  We sat down around 1pm to eat lunch in the living room and found shards of brick on the couch which is 15 feet from the kitchen.  Go hard or go home I guess.

OUR CREW (minus 1)

Left to right: Rob Daly, Me (Ted Wilson), Tommy Nic (Anthony Petrock - Absent)

There's Gold in them hills!

Well maybe not actual gold but in addition to awesome architectural finds, we found a dime from 1920 and a very unique old necklace!  Also, depending on what you consider treasure, we found a great deal of mouse droppings (evidence of all kinds of critters which once called our kitchen home).

The good news is we uncovered TONS of huge original hand honed wood beams.  Many of the beams are hand notched and wooden dowels driven in as nails.  Some may look at the after pictures above and see an ugly disaster but we see the potential for a gorgeous finished kitchen with exposed original ceiling beams!  Here are a few pictures of our finds:

As you can see, some of those beams are huge!  The ceiling beams in the kitchen are true 4" x 10"s and the posts are true 8" x 10"s!  Some light sanding and maybe some stain and the exposed beams will really add to the wow factor.  

All that is left in the kitchen is removing all electric, plumbing and nails.  Last, we will remove the floor to gain access to the crawl space (I'm sure there will be more surprises). Once the floor is up, we will install a vapor barrier, new plumbing, new electric and insulate before re-installing the floor.

Until then...