hitting rock bottom before you can rebuild

Our new kitchen is almost finished! The only major things left are the ceiling lights. After that I'll have to repair the ceiling, repaint and put up a pot rack, but those are very small, minor things. It's taking us a little while, though, because Pd has been busy with other things (he is the electrician in this family), and honestly, there isn't as much motivation as there used to be — the kitchen is useable, more or less, so we can afford to wait.

Anyway, I figure, I will do a few posts about what we've done so far, and perhaps by the time I'm done I'll be able to show you a finished kitchen.

These are the befores:


It's a decent size, as you can see — about 165 square feet — but awkwardly laid out. There are doors, windows or other openings on three walls, and the fourth wall is a lovely brick that we don't want to cover up. (The upside to this is that we actually get lovely light in there at certain times of the day/year.) There was practically no storage — we had more cabinet space in our little galley kitchen in our old apartment, which was maybe half this size. Certainly we had more counterspace. All in all, it was an aggravating space to work in.

And the floor! I can't even tell you. It's linoleum, which is fine, but why this horrid pinky-peach? And the grey patches are random, literally random. I have had two and a half years to stare at this floor and I am telling you: there is no pattern. Which drove me up the wall, because I am not good at random.

When we bought this house, we always knew that we would do something to the kitchen, that it wasn't going to be satisfactory for very long. This time, we debated whether we should just refresh it — maybe put in furniture that would serve as a pantry or an island — but in the end, we decided that we wanted to do this once. And so, complete renovation it was, starting with the demolition:


The cabinets came down so quickly that I didn't have a chance to take any pictures. I went on a walk with the Spanish Inquisition so that they could do the noisiest parts first, and by the time I came back, an hour later, they were done. So we started on the floor, too, and by the end of the day:




Apparently, the reason for the ease of demolition was that the wall cabinets had been secured to the wall by six screws, and the bottom cabinets had been secured to the kitchen by exactly none. This disturbs me less than it probably should, if only for the fact that I only found out after six measly screws were no longer holding up all of my china. Conversely, the single shelf holding up the undercabinet exhaust hood was attached to the wall by seven incredibly long screws, in a pattern I like to call "Is it holding up now? How about now?"

The only other discovery of note was that a tomato plant, which I had thought dead, was still alive and had some green tomatoes on it — which was unfortunate, because we made this discovery only after someone dropped a sink on it.

(We were using our backyard as a dump for the time being. This particular plant had fallen off its stake, very early in the season, and as I couldn't find the vine again I had assumed it had died. Instead, it seems to have grown laterally. But it was already October, so I don't think the tomatoes were going to ripen in any case. Sad to say, but this is my most successful tomato growing to date. I am better with roses — possibly because I don't even like tomatoes. But it would be nice to be able to grow them. As of right now, I would need to get a bumper crop three years running to even approach a 50% success rate.)