My Corny Life: Kitchen Demolition, or How I Spent My Saturday

We knew going in that we wanted to make some changes to the kitchen. We also knew it needed to be thoroughly cleaned, like bathed in PineSol, but ... We didn't know we were going to take everything completely out until that was what we were doing. We also didn't know that doing so was going to be a very good thing for us (more on that later).

So, it started out like this ...

We have very typical 80's era wood cabinets, cracked formica countertops, and some sketchy linoleum flooring tiles. Right away, we knew we wanted to take out the soffits and raise the upper cabinets to ceiling height. Neither of us is a fan of the wasted space, and we know it will open up the counter space. So, it stood to reason that the upper cabinets would need to be taken down off the walls.

What we didn't know until I was cleaning the countertops on Monday is that the base cabinets would also be coming out. See, there's a gap between the countertops and the walls that has allowed things to fall down in the space between the cabinets and the walls. I noticed this phenomenon when I accidentally sprayed some of the detritus from the countertop into the void on Monday afternoon. We decided that needing to remove the lower cabinets was a good thing, as it would allow us easy access to the flooring. We also decided we would clean up the cabinets and prime and paint them before reinstalling them.

Before we removed the cabinets, we took out the stinky, science experiment-filled refrigerator. That immediately improved the air quality inside the house. It also gave us a little bit of additional floor space. (I guess I should have swept before I took the picture, not after. Oh, well.)

Next, we labeled the cabinet doors and drawers with painters tape, so we'll know where they all go when it's time to put everything back together again.

I decided to just count the cabinets from left to right, and label the doors as left/right and upper/lower, hence L1U and R1U in these photos for the left and right doors for the first of the upper cabinets. I suggest using whatever method works best for you. After everything was labeled, my husband removed all of the cabinet doors. We started with the upper cabinets.

Next, we took down the cabinets themselves. Ours were held up by a handful of screws that were driven directly through the cabinets backs and into the studs.

Once the screws were removed, gravity jumped in to assist.

The trim was not actually attached to the cabinets, but was nailed into the soffits with brad nails. As a result, we were able to pull them down by hand. The additional boards behind some of the cabinets appear to have been used for spacing. We used the claw side of the hammer to pull those down without incident. The rest of the cabinets came down just as easily as the first with one exception. Turns out in one cabinet, the people who installed them decided to also drive screws in through the side of the cabinet into the adjoining one. I later learned that you're actually supposed to connect the cabinets to make sure everything stays together. Still, they came down very easily.

For the base cabinets, we had assistance from one of my husband's friends. This made it possible for me to take photos during the process instead of making my husband stop every couple of minutes for me.

And this was when we discovered that there were more than two layers of flooring on top of the original hardwood. Here we can see the linoleum tile (bottom of pic), the layer of linoleum directly beneath that (top left of pic), and the layer of linoleum under that (top right of pic), but wait ... What's that on the far right?

Could it be? Why yes, there's another layer of linoleum under a plywood layer. And that layer was on top of some weird paper board layer that was adhered to the original wood floor with tar. (We didn't get to the tar layer until later in the day, but why keep you waiting?)

Next, the fellas removed the kitchen sink and counter top (all as one piece ... I was impressed) and removed the false front on the cabinet, so they could pull the entire base. This required a bit of sawing to make a large enough hole for the pipes to fit easily through the "floor" of the cabinet. The previous owners left the inside pretty gross, so we will be replacing the cabinet floor anyway.