Let the renovation begin...

For the last four months Cherie and I have been selecting and staging the materials, doing the architecture, and preping for the mess that will be our kitchen once the demo begins. Doing everything in budget with mostly high-end materials has been the challenge. The lion's share of materials have been purchased through DirectBuy, tile exclusively through the internet (Cherie undercut all competitors by 50% with her backsplash find), and the sliding glass Pella door was the only purchase through a "big box" retailer. Now that everything is purchased and in the garage, we are under budget by a little less than $800 - enough to buy paint and incidentals. Cherie was like a kid in a candy store with all the shopping!

The plan is that Cherie and I will be the general contractors and the misc. do-it workers. Demo, construction, electrical, plumbing, and installation will be sub-contracted out. Most of the sub-contract work will be with a single company in order to keep the continuity in place. We are a "go" for the demo starting on Monday the 12th.

The first activity is to strip the 12 year old wallpaper form the kitchen and family room. Luckily, we hired a good installer back then and used top-of-the-line strippable wallpaper. I like to use the steamer to get the paper off and Cherie is "old school" with the sponge and scraper. Both work (although I think the steamer is better) and we've been at it the last 3 days and are about 1/3rd of the way done (only can do this when we clock out from our day jobs). With the white walls being exposed, we can hardly believe that we lived with this "look" for a little over 3 years before we put the paper up! Looks bad!

The new kitchen will follow a similar architectural line as the past kitchen with the removal of the ugly island and installing a peninsula. We'll also be moving the fridge to where the pantry used to be and installing a sliding glass door in the place of the current french door to eliminate the "swing-in" open dead space required. The concept of changing the architecture crossed our mind to create a more open space, but had multiple hurdles to overcome and ended up to be cost prohibitive within our budget.

This is what we started with:



And what we are planning looks something like this:

Let the renovation begin!