Demolition Derby

The kitchen saga continues!

So, after our big whirlwind trip to Ikea to order everything (keep in mind we couldn't actually take anything home with us--that would require another 5-hour trip. Well, actually several trips, but that's no fun to read about), we waited weeks and weeks for our truckload of flat-packed goodies to arrive in Atlanta. We didn't want to demo everything too early because we needed a functional kitchen.

Eventually, most of our cabinetry arrived. We assembled it in our basement, moved our fridge and stove into the dining room, and began demolition.

The first thing to come up was the floor. We scraped up a little chunk of the three layers of linoleum and sent them to a local lab for asbestos testing. When everything came back okay, we spent days scraping and chipping and tearing away at the linoleum until we got to the 60 year-old paper that separated all the linoleum from the angled floor boards underneath.

Somewhere in this process we learned that ceramic or stone tile was not an option for our kitchen. Angled floorboards that sit over an open basement like ours, not a concrete slab or subfloor, are too flexible to tile over. So our options were wood or vinyl. We decided on hardwood since that's what's in the rest of our house.

Our existing hardwoods were in dire need of refinishing. When we had ripped up the glamorous forty year-old avocado shag, we had left the hardwoods with their old wax finish from four decades before. I wanted to give them some a darker stain and some polyurethane protection, but first we had to get the rest of the kitchen removed.

Au revoir, upper cabinets! You weren't even deep enough to hold a standard twelve-inch dinner plate!

Bye-bye, bespeckled backsplash! I will not miss your sassy gold flecks, but you were very easy to clean.

So long, sink. I will not miss your paltry nine-inch depth.

And finally, farewell to the base cabinets. I am sorry my husband saw it necessary to hack at you with random tools to accommodate our temporary dishwasher. Apparently I didn't think enough of you to take a picture of your departure, or of your charming temporary residence on our front porch before your trip to the dump. But you will be remembered all the same.

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