One Room Challenge: Kitchen Demo & More!

Week two of the One Room Challenge has us left with a completely gutted kitchen, bathroom, pantry, closet. It also meant we needed to “move out” of about 30% of our first floor!

Moving Out…

I spent days gradually boxing up our kitchen, bathroom and front closet. (The front closet scares me more than anything! It keeps our days organized.)

• Temporary Kitchen: We’ve made a kitchenette area in the laundry room because we have a utility sink in there. That’s where the coffee pot lives, along with the dishwashing items.
• Refrigerator: We moved the fridge to the living room. It sits right outside the dining room, which can be helpful for meals and snacks.
• The Dining Room: This is where all of our non-perishable food items, paper plates and plastic utensils are organized. This way, I can pack lunches, have the kids eat breakfast, and we can sit down for dinner.
• Front Closet: I moved most of these items to the room that I call “The West Wing” of our home. We have a bedroom/full bath on the first floor down the hall past the laundry room. One pair of shoes, backpack and coat are set up near the front door. Everything else is living in The West Wing.
• Powder Room: This room was pretty sparse since we knew we were doing demo, but we just relocated items to other bathrooms. We have one full bath on the first floor, and then a full bath at the top of the stairs, plus our master. So, we aren’t actually inconvenienced at all. The kids have been running towards this space–realizing it’s gone, and then heading to a different bathroom. It’s actually kind of funny.
• The Basement: We boxed up a lot of items from the kitchen, but we also just used random containers and baskets, too. We aren’t doing any cooking since we won’t have a stove, so everything went down there to wait until the kitchen starts to come together.

Kitchen Demo

The team of guys that did the demo showed up Monday around 10:00, and they were done around 3:00. They were awesome–all worked well together, were super forgiving when I had an entire cabinet I forgot to empty (how does that happen), and were great with questions about specifics. You could tell they had done this before 🙂 We all tried to catch glimpses of the eclipse together, but couldn’t really see much.

Down to the Studs!

The guys did a great job putting up plastic to keep the debris at bay, and they also cleaned up everything they could–which I value so much.

This is the “closet” that will be turned into the new, smaller powder room. You can see where the toilet marks are–the new toilet will be going back in that same spot, with a wall being built on the right hand side of it.

Here is the view from the other side of the powder room. On this side of the powder room, the electrical will be rerouted so we can insert the fridge into this space. By nesting the fridge, it keeps the walkway into the kitchen open. Next to the fridge–where I’m standing to take this photo, will be the pantry.

Here is the famous entryway into the kitchen from the garage and hallway. Can you seeeeeee where the original fridge marks are? You could collide with the fridge EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. This is probably what I looked forward to most about this kitchen demo, the idea that we could just walk into our home with a clear path.

This is also super exciting because now that the kitchen demo is done, our carpenter is coming to rip out the doors and window in this wall. It will be reframed for three windows, (which have arrived!), and header boards are going to be installed above the window areas. The plumbing and the electrical will be rerouted to fit the new design.

This wall will remain in tact. The plumber will be moving the pipes, working in the correct vent for the hood, and adding the proper water line connection for the pot filler. The carpenter is planning to fill in the gaps in the floor with wood–just for support. We are planning to do an LVP, but that type of flooring gets installed after everything else is done because we are putting it right on top of the existing hardwood.