Kitchen Remodel Continued...

The kitchen remodel is underway full swing. We purchased new stainless appliances from Home Depot using 10% off deal (I know, I know, the girls won't be impressed) and 0% 1-year financing. We pulled out the old stove, dishwasher and hood and moved the fridge to the dining room for now. Paper plates and cups are helping decrease the amount of dishes washed by hand.

Here's a shot of supplies we've purchased which seem to be piling up. The white panels are backerboard, which are made of cement (heavy) and help to keep the floor underneath the tiles from moving to avoid cracking. In front of it is the new stainless hood. The small stacks are the porcelain tiles, which don't look like much but those 15 boxes weigh over 1000 lbs. About 1056 pounds actually. The good news is, if you spend more than $100 bucks at Home Depot, you get to use their rental truck for 75 minutes for free. The bad news is somebody had to haul it all from the truck to the house. That somebody was not pregnant Kim. Or Will.

The parquet tile demo was somewhat painful, consisting of me on hands and knees chiseling out each tile one by one. After it was completed two full trash cans were filled with the broken tiles. Tory has been a invaluable consultant; I call him up at almost every step for advise or some form of help. He has generously allowed me to borrow his tile-cutting wet saw as well as his miter saw, when I finally get to installing the new baseboards.

That's MDF underneath the glue, so some of the yellow spots are chunks of the MDF board that were chiseled out along with the parquet tiles. The most difficult step so far in the process was scraping off the excess glue from this layer. I spent most of one afternoon (with frequent breaks) with a heavy scraper, scraping inch by painful inch. It didn't really change the look of the floor, so no new pics, but it helped level the floor and prep it for the backerboard, which will be the new concrete underlayment for the porcelain tiles; the backerboard will be going on next.

In the dining room, the laminate flooring came out without much effort. The thresholds needed to be removed as well. You can see the plywood I had to install to raise up the dining room to the same level as the kitchen.

At the threshold of the dining and kitchen it became obvious that the kitchen was significantly higher, and there were several old layers of previous underlayment and flooring. You can see in this picture that the 1/2" plywood will perfectly match up with the kitchen floor.

After taking off the stairway threshold you could see the layers in the kitchen; underneath the parquet there was: a layer of MDF, an old vinyl floor, more particleboard underlayment and finally the plywood underlayment. In the kitchen there was only the plywood underlayment.

Here's a shot of the layers; I put a parquet tile on top (which I saved for myself) for full effect. I thought it would be best to pull up all of the old layers in the kitchen, but after considering the work involved and consulting Tory and Dad, I went with adding the plywood layer in the dining room instead. I'm still kind of curious as to what the vinyl layer looks like exactly.

Here is the dining after the new plywood was installed.

More to come.