I know I disappeared again and I know I owe you guys a bajillion blog posts but life has been chaotic. We’ve been dealing with unexpected issues at the house, work has been the busiest it’s ever been, and unfortunately I’ve had another family member in the hospital. I finally have a moment where I feel like I can take a break so I thought I would catch you up on what’s going on at the house.
In my last post, we were in Week Five of the One Room Challenge and I was semi-confident we would end up with a half-finished dining room and a finished pantry. BOY WAS I WRONG.
What we ended up with was an unexpected kitchen renovation.
If you follow me on Instagram, you already know all of this but for those of you who don’t, here is a run down of everything that has happened since my last post.
- As we were finishing up tile removal in the kitchen to prep for new floors, we found a bunch of old water damage. It was clear that there had been some sort of major sink leak before we bought the house. The leak was fixed and new tile floors were put down over the water logged particle board subfloor. Unfortunately, all of that subfloor was unsalvageable due to damage and mold.
- Because the damaged subfloor ran under the lower cabinets, we had to remove all of those cabinets to remove the floor. We tried to salvage as many as we could but the sink cabinet was completely unusable. We had planned on scrubbing the bank of cabinets that made up the peninsula and replacing the bottom center support but the cabinet began to fall apart when we tried removing the old support and the entire bottom of the cabinets was covered in mold. We were able to salvage 3 cabinet bases but have since decided to replace two of those instead of putting in the work to convert them to drawers (all thanks to the extreme generosity of Kyle’s parents; thank you again!).
- While we were at it, we also took out all of the upper cabinets. We had planned on doing a mini kitchen makeover for the Fall One Room Challenge this year which was going to include removing those cabinets anyway so since we had the dumpster and we were already having to work on the kitchen we decided to just go ahead.
- We replace all of the damaged subfloor and started working on electric and patching the drywall a couple of weeks ago and now we’ve started installing cabinets and hope to start on counters soon.
I think that just about covers everything! Work stopped pretty much immediately on the dining room and we got the pantry functional enough to hold a lot of our kitchen crap while we finish the kitchen. I’m working on putting together a post on what our plan is for the kitchen and another showing how far into that plan we are but I’m also posting updates on Instagram as we are able to get work done. Once we finish the kitchen, we will go back to finishing the dining room and pantry and then we plan on taking a nice long break…of at least 2 months.
We are doing this kitchen on an extremely small budget but I think it will all come together! I’m very excited and very nervous all at the same time. It already feels a thousand times bigger without the peninsula though so whatever it ends up looking like, I know it’ll be a huge improvement functionally.
Hoping to get the next couple of posts up fairly soon but it just depends on how much time, energy, and motivation I have over the next few days.
Thanks for sticking around!