|
Planning an Attack
They say updating kitchens and bathrooms can increase the value of your home the most. While this is likely true, its not why I re  did my kitchen. For me, the main reason was that it was out of date; it had been styled to look like the 50s, but since had fallen apart in many ways. In other words, the old kitchen had to go.
The first step in renovating a kitchen is to figure out what you want. My main goal was to make it nice, keep the price down, and purchase stuff off the shelf so I didn't have to wait for anything.
What I wanted was simple as I liked the layout of the existing kitchen, just not the style. So, I kept the same basic layout and only made a few minor changes. I settled on some simple white cabinets, but wasn't sure what to do with the floor or countertop.
What Lies Beneath?
My main dilemma was that I didn't know if I had hardwood floor somewhere under my  existing kitchen floor. If I did have a hardwood floor that was restorable, than that is what I wanted to do; if not, I was thinking about tile. This was important to find out, because what I did with the floor would change what I did with the countertop.
The existing floor in my kitchen was a vinyl sheet that I put down a number of years ago. The vinyl floor was on top of plywood; however, it was obvious that the floor in my kitchen was raised almost an inch above the surrounding rooms. The mystery was finding out what was under that plywood, and if it was something I could use.
Destruction & Discovery
 The first real job with the kitchen was the destruction part. Although many seem to like this part, I find the destruction to be one of the hardest parts of the job. Taking the old stuff down without damaging anything important is not always as easy as hitting it with a sledge hammer. In fact, I don't know if in any of my home projects if I've ever used a sledge hammer, except for a bathtub.
I began to remove the old cabinets, which were built-in, made from plywood, and the back of the cabinets was the wall. The walls in the kitchen were covered in paneling that was designed to look like tile. Under the paneling was a thin layer of plywood. One of the design changes I did make was to remove the valence; for my kitchen, I felt it took up a lot of space that could be used for storage or to just make the room  feel bigger.
Once the top cabinets were gone, I went to work on the bottom ones. These were a mix of plywood and one was metal. As I removed the plywood base cabinets that were built-in, I saw that the cabinets went down below the plywood floor. Once I exposed the floor below, I got my first glimmer of hope -- hardwood.
| 
Re: Kitchen Renovations, Part 1
