Going…Going…Gone

With a completed bathroom upstairs (i.e. a place to wash, a toilet, and a sink for washing hands and dishes) both the kitchen and the rest of the downstairs bathroom could come out. Oh how happy were Mr. Remodel and Mr. Fix-It and his Helpers who, you already know, love demo.
Of course Mrs. Remodel is more ambivalent. Demolition means something else will be worked on and eventually fixed. But in the mean time she is losing the kitchen for several weeks and the stuff stored in there has to go somewhere else and there isn’t anywhere else for it to go except the floor which is getting quite crowded.

Let’s start with the downstairs master bathroom which had almost been cleared out already and had some of its drywall replaced.

Here it is with shower and toilet still in place (this is an older picture before the drywall went up).

Here they are gone.


What has been interesting is to see what things look like behind the fixtures and walls etc. I suppose I imagined things to be neater and better-looking. Above is the drain for the shower in a large hole. Perhaps it’s all as it should be but it doesn’t look very nice although I suppose it doesn’t matter. If the drain drains and it’s hidden and never seen by the homeowner, that’s probably good enough. However, I wasn’t keen on some of the construction debris that the original builders had left in a gap behind the built-in shower. I suppose they thought it would never be seen and if it were, they would be long gone. But for a tidy person, there is just something wrong about this. It’s sweeping the dirt under the carpet on steroids.

Onto the kitchen.

Before.


One of Mr. Fix-It’s Helpers particularly enjoyed smashing the tile counter with a hammer. Much better than trying to scrape up the vinyl flooring which appeared to have been stuck down with superglue. The cabinets, on the other hand, had to be taken down more carefully because they were being given to someone to use in their home. Recycling.
BTW. If you are taking out fixtures and fittings as the result of a remodel, try contacting Habitat for Humanity first in case they can use them. They didn’t want our cabinets because they didn’t take cabinets that had been nailed in. They thought they couldn’t come out intact enough to be used. Ha, they hadn’t countered on Mr. Fix-It who got them out without any damage and a lot easier than it should have been, and they went to someone who needed them.

After.

Quite a change eh?

The brown paint is the colour of the wall behind the cupboards because the cupboards didn’t have any backs to them. I hope that isn’t the colour the kitchen was originally painted. See how funky the drywall is at the bottom where the sink was.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s going to be a really nice kitchen here in a few weeks. For now the kitchen is a table, a microwave, a fridge downstairs and a sink to wash-up in upstairs.

Originally, the kitchen backsplash was going to be six inches high of some sort of sandy-brown tile with paint on the wall above it. I bought pendant lights at Lowes to fit the theme even though I hadn’t found the tile yet.


Then I changed my mind. Partly because I just couldn’t settle on a tile. I suddenly decided that I really wanted was a tiled backsplash in yellow to fill the whole area instead. Not a bright yellow, more a lemon with lots of white in it to tone it down.




Therefore all the regular type of drywall in backsplash areas had to be pulled out to be replaced by cement board and purple board which we'll get to see next time.