The destruction of the kitchen

Now that the garage is done, the next step is the kitchen. First, a little background. When we bought this house, it was site unseen (well, at least the inside). We bought it in a foreclosure auction on the county courthouse steps nearly 6 years ago. It was two months after the sale when we were actually able to look in the house itself. Keep in mind I was also pregnant and hormonal at the time. Well, I took a look at the kitchen and about burst into tears. It was UGLY!! Still is ugly. Paneling everywhere, ugly yellow and brown countertops and floors. I'm sure back in the 60's and 70's it was state of the art. But I wanted to stay in my almost new doublewide trailer with the nice white and cheerful kitchen (and walkin closets, and huge master bath with a shower and seperate garden tub).

So, that brings us to where we are now: finally starting to remodel this house a little. We have had a bit of controversy about it. First we were going to gut the whole kitchen and start over. But new cabinets cost money, even the cheap ones. We were also going to have a contractor do it (different guy than the one that did our new doors on the garage), but after waiting a year on him, we have decided to just tackle the job ourself. We ruled out cabinets. We can strip and restain and update the hardware ourself on these. But the paneling and soffit's gotta go. We ordered new countertops at Lowe's last week. Unfortunatly, they won't be in for 8 weeks. And the floor guy comes out tomorrow to measure the floor for new linolium.

First to come down was the soffit in the kitchen

when the original owners put it up there, it was not meant to come down.

And just as I suspected, after tearing that down meant I would also be painting the ceiling. But it sure did open the place up.

North wall, Before

and after

then came the snack bar. You can see in previous photos that it wasn't the same height as the rest of the counters. Jeff is in the process of building a cabinet to go here (there wasn't one before).

Stay tuned, there will be more coming soon!