October 21 & 22, 2019

We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of demolition. We working on getting the sink, dishwasher, base cabinets and the pantry out so we can remove the underlayment completely. Our initial plan was to try (Daniel more than me) to save the base cabinets and refinish them. They were a PAIN to remove and I noticed that they were being taken directly to the trash trailer- I was SO not mad about it. SO as of right now  our plan is to get refinish the upper cabinets and purchase matching doors to whatever base cabinets we end up buying. Picking cabinets is ROUGH. We are leaning to IKEA cabinets, but we will see how this goes.

Taking the counter off of this section literally took two hours. it was anchored really well.

I am shocked this door held on while the rest was ripped away.

Here we are currently. YIKES.

What is this random picture you wonder? Well, after we got the island out I FINALLY convinced Daniel that we needed to go ahead and take out this portion of wall. Our newly painted, newly trimmed wall. We are idiots.
 Trying to get the correct breaker turned off so we can take the outlet for the oven out. We got it off, but not before Daniel got a little zap zap. The meter read "0"  when he started to remove it. I completely freaked out at this point.

This is the only "before" photo of this wall I can find. This was our youngest's birthday.

Oh hi, this is chaos. I was so excited to see what it would like without the wall-I stripped the paneling that covered this section- also recently painted and trimmed. We were waiting for our GOOD friend to bring us a trailer in the morning for all the debris.  Notice the
we have it still piled up partially in the kitchen, the other half is in the driveway at this point. I am sure our neighbors were thrilled.

 The water line to our fridge will NOT STOP RUNNING. Guess how many times I have knocked over the red bowl with water in it? Too many.  The answer is too many.

 This was the picture I received at work- the diagonal boards are the subflooring. Daniel made the decision at this point that we were going to need to remove everything- just to make sure that the floor was going to be in good shape for a long time, and to get rid of all of the crumbling particle board.
 Three lovely layers of floors. We had already taken the laminate to the trash outside.

Backstory- we JUST painted the kitchen grey and had added new trim. It WAS level with the floor. Now there is a bit of a gap.

Once Daniel and I got the top few layers of the floor up, we realized we were in for a much bigger job than we originally thought.

SO I figured before we got too far with the kitchen posts that I should mention that we have "accidentally" gotten ourselves into another major home renovation before. We have this cute tendency apparently.

When we bought our 1952 ranch home it had carpeting. We knew there were hard flooring beneath and that refinishing them would be our first priority before moving in. Well, it was a mess. Daniel worked his tail off sanding the floor, once we got the carpet and padding removed. We noticed that there was pretty extensive water stains. We were on a time-crunch and decided to stain it "ebony" to try to hide the stains.  Daniel then coated it with the polyurethane but, it did not have time to cure properly, and we did not have ideal weather- it was rainy and humid. When we moved our furniture it scuffed in several areas, but we lived with it for two years.

This past mother's day I said that I wanted to paint the living room, I figured that was a pretty easy gift. Well, we figured, now was as good of time as any to replace the trim...which then led to it being a good time to totally refinish the flooring in the living /dining room. Our quick painting project turned into TWO months of floor refinishing. Daniel and I work opposite schedules, and with our kid's activities, we were each working on it solo.

We had to experiment with several strippers...my husband had to find the best. :)

We had to brush the floors with a coat of stripper and let it sit

This was after the stripper had sat for awhile- then we got to use a paint scraper and scrape all of the old stain off. IT.WAS.TERRIBLE. I considered carpet several times at this point.  This is honestly why this project took so long. We had to go over sections several times- it was MADDENING.

While we were doing the floors we decided to remove this half circle built in shelf and the tile from in front of the door. The tile was tedious work. I was not very careful with removing it because, initially, we were going to lay new tile. We ultimately decided we liked it better without tile.  I am also a major klutz and do not need something else to trip on.

Slowly but surely getting there. You can see a little of the water damage I mentioned. Daniel worked at bleaching those areas before we put on new stain.

This area still had  carpeting and we decided to remove it as well. The stains you can see here are what go through our whole living room.  Just in the major walkways. We worked really hard to get this area sanded and bleached to match the living room

Almost ready for stain

Here we go! We are using Jacobean this time.

All Stained!

This was before the polyurethane -you can see the spots where we had to bleach a little more since staining. It has remained a little rough to the touch but this area is covered by our sectional so its not a huge deal.      Polyurethane is dry! So, there you have it. Our first adventure with a small project that quickly turned into a big one!