Demolition!

Yesterday the real, the serious demolition began. A six foot trench had to be cut in the slab to accommodate the drain, water and electricity for the new island that will be separate from the rest of the cabinets and will run at a different angle from the old one that came out from the wall and "walled off" the kitchen so to speak!

Here is David's rough draft of the new set up [he has refined it since to fit the final plan.]

DH is doing the "grunt work" because it saves us lots of money, and the creation of the trench was his laborious work.

I went out run a couple of errands and returned to what the following pics will show as the awful clouds of cement dust floated through the entire house, including all of the upstairs.

I ran around closing doors and draping old sheets and painter's plastic over furniture, quilts, my quilting machine etc, but it was too late to prevent a great deal of the nasty stuff from settling on everything. At one point the visibility was so poor that the pic below is all I could see!

Consequently I was up till 1 a.m., first running the shop vac then vacuuming and repeated vacuumings, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, washing floors, then many loads of laundry. Today my poor abused body was/is in pain and I had still more cleaning and laundry plus trying to organize sufficiently to be able to function with simple meals. And the little fellow was here all day, and we managed to keep him out of the mess! Hallelujah!

Today most of the worst of the dust is gone and my lovely and faithful cleaning lady will get the rest. I even have a dishwasher hooked up [thanks DH] especially as there is no sink!

Here is what was accomplished by this evening; tomorrow is more plumbing, then concrete to fill the trench and lastly tiles to fill in the open area. Tuesday David plans to bring the "boxes", the framework for the cabinets, so all of the rest has to be finished.

Tomorrow Huggy Bunch AZ meets, don't know yet who will be here but at least they can come in and sit down without being covered in cement dust!

I am quite sure that any of you who have done renovation in your homes while living there are quite familiar with all of this.

Renovation!

Renovation is great but what comes before is not so great, the removal of all that is to be renovated!

So today DH began the process by removing all the upper cabinets from the kitchen and re-installing them in the garage, yikes what a mess but not nearly the mess it will be before we are done. I hold the picture of the final product in my mind to keep me sane, it's all a work in progress!

Next Wednesday all the lower cabinets go out, Stardust a local non-profit organization will deconstruct them to be sold in one of their two Phoenix warehouses that sell gently used building materials to the public at 50-80% off retail. The profits are then used to make home improvements for those in need.

It is a fine way to keep usable building materials out of the landfills while providing them for use at deeply discounted prices.

Here are my new faucets............

and granite sinks. This is the big single sink, 33" I think.

The new island has a 14" square prep. sink in the kitchen end.

They are 80% granite and fairly indestructible, heat and scratch resistant. They are made by Blanco and the color is "Anthracite". Being a bargain hunter I searched online for the best price and almost halved the regular cost. It really pays to let your fingers do the walking/searching!

This is a not so great picture of the island granite slab, it's called "Misty Mountain" and most of it will be needed for the four by nine foot island.

So it was necessary to find a complimentary granite for the cabinets, something that would be interesting in it's own right but not so much that it fought with the island piece! It's more cream in reality, the pic. makes it look pink!

I looked at a lot of slabs until I found this one called "White Spring". Both of these pics were taken with my phone so they are not the most accurate color but you get the idea! Next time I will try to remember to take my camera.

The past week DH and I have been packing up all the items from the kitchen, then stacking them out of the way. When the lower cabinets go I will not have a sink any more so we will be eating off paper plates, not products that we can recycle unfortunately but we will keep them to the minimum. There will be minimal cooking too, just things that can be prepared in the microwave-I am really fortunate to have a Costco less than a mile away!

More updates on this project as it progresses!