Saturday morning I took Heidi to the store to buy a gift for a Birthday party and when I got home my dining room wall was gone!  And I didn’t have to do any of it :). We sold our beautiful chandelier on Craigslist and the lady came to get it in between photos.  Our new design is more casual.

Here’s the other side of the room and the back side of the pantry.  With Darren making such fast work of the drywall (He made it look so easy!) I started taking down the popcorn textured ceiling.

The entire family helped.  And it was a BIG help to have many hands taking trips to the dumpster.  By evening, Dub said, “I’m tired of taking shamrock to the dumpster.”

“You mean Sheetrock?”

“Whatever.”  It still makes me giggle.

Darren wrestled down our old range hood. Whew, we thought we’d never get that down. And unfortunately the back side of that wall holds the gas line to the upstairs heater.   It will be an extra expense to move it out of the way so we can open the room up.  You never know what you will find inside walls.

Behind the range hood was this strip of wallpaper original to when the house was built in 1971.  It almost looks like grass cloth.

I listed the old cabinets on Craigslist for $100 and had a ready buyer within the hour.  They drove out and took everything apart and hauled it away.  Whoop! (except for the desk and island which really isn’t reusable anyway.  We still are mustering up the energy to remove that stuff and for now the sink is still handy.)

Caleb carried all our books to the basement and then Darren and I hauled the bookcases down for the kid’s to organize.

This wall is leaving too.  We plan to paint all that brick a nice light color and wrap it all the way around the backside into the dining room too.  If I don’t like the house THIS open, I plan to buy a couple of IKEA bookcases and put them back to back so one side faces the dining room and the other side the family room then put in crown molding and trims so they looks built in.  Our Ikea won’t open until October 2014, so I have some time to think about it.

In the midst of this we moved all our pantry food to the garage and our dishes to the attic kitchen.  I’ll show you that later this week.  We’ve found it’s not too handy to have our food and cooking space 2 floors apart.  So we bought a mini fridge for upstairs and are gradually carrying our most used items up.

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Now the pantry can come down too.

Whew time to take a break.

And pay the kids in popsicles for all their help.

I spent today on the attic bed working on menus and reading books.  I guess all that work wiped me out more than I thought.  It sure felt good not to run kids to school and all around town for their activities.  Summer is the BEST.

Before

Nothing a little elbow grease and a crowbar can’t handle.  Notice, one project at a time for me.  I let the kitchen get to total disaster state while taking down the wall.

I learned that Sawzalls are empowering.

After, no more shadows from the wall. Let the sunshine in (tomorrow.)

“Hey Mom, Now that you’ve cleaned up the wall–and washed the dishes and scrubbed the floor, I think I’ll empty out the cabinet here.”

I’m digging into our huge kitchen project!  Monday, I carried all the camping gear out of the kitchen cabinets in the attic and moved them to a new spot in the basement (that Darren cleared off and cleaned for me.)  Then I disinfected everything and sealed the grout on the attic kitchen countertops just to make sure everything is watertight. It’s move in ready :).

Before: The wall paper is a creamy white with tiny mauve dots on it in flower clusters–very ’80’s. And not terrible on the eyes but not stylish either. The floor is the same vinyl that goes through most of the main floor. We plan to tile and keep the vanity but upgrade with new faucet and hardware.

Then, I finished removing the wallpaper in the guest bathroom and took off the popcorn ceiling in the same room.  I decided to start there  since the room is small and if I figured out the job was beyond my skill-set I could give up and hire help without a huge mess in the main living area.

So far so good, thanks to some youtube videos on how to remove popcorn ceiling that had been sealed on with paint (Easy tip–just add a few drops of dishsoap to plain water in a garden sprayer and soak the painted ceiling–wear eye protection and cover anything that could get destroyed by water.)  This is a messy job!  A wide metal bladed scraper goes a lot faster than small plastic scrapers.  And no matter how careful you are, you will have places that will need spackling when you are done.  It’s all good–don’t stress too much.

Ceiling’s all peeled. It looks worse than before but primer and paint will fix that. And the walls are stripped to reveal an ugly green paint with a thin layer of primer over all.  The primer made stripping the wallpaper a lot easier.  Still deciding on paint colors.

Be sure to use primer before painting. I skipped this step in another house and it looked great until the humidity came along and peeled all the paint off–heartbreaking!

By evening, I started emptying the dining room of furniture. In preparation of starting on the ceiling there first.  I hope to carefully remove the crown molding and chair rail etc to use in future projects.

Goodbye beautiful dining room….I’ll write an update on the paper floor you see here in a few days.

Today, I’m tearing down the little half wall separating the kitchen from the living room–which is basically in the way of everything. It’s a bigger job than it looks like with al the wood trim around the two windows.

Meet my new Stove :).

We finally made the last two decisions necessary to get this project rolling.  I found a gas range on craigslist–which we pick up Tuesday. It’s everything I wanted!  I have been drooling over double oven gas Viking ranges online and finally gave up the idea after seeing the price tags.  Yikes!  These babies are worth more than both our cars put together.  (Yeah, we drive really old  cars :).)  Even on sale or used it looked like a dream I was going to have to wake up from.  Then I saw this craigslist ad for $2200.  It’s still sounds crazy expensive, but I gave up on some other things in our remodel plan to make it happen.  (Oh and that cutting board lifts off to reveal a stainless steel griddle. I know! Right?)

The other huge decision:

And we picked out our floor.  We ended up with real hardwood in a new finish that we hadn’t considered before called Cambrdge Oak:

It’s lighter than either of our choices before with a nice wide plank hand scraped texture.  I was worried that I wouldn’t love the red tones forever, but since it’s thick solid hardwood, I can sand it down and refinish if I want.  (Though that’s a huge job that I hope will never have to happen :).

We decided to slow down on the mater bathroom part of the project and focus our energy and budget on the kitchen.  Our tiny budget just won’t accommodate both right now and it’s a relief to admit it and form a plan :).  Also I’m doing a lot of the demo personally so am starting in the dining room to leave our functioning kitchen in tact as long as possible  It feels like a snails pace right now.