Kitchen remodel starts
I’ve had a super busy weekend taking the old kitchen apart. Our contractors are showing up tomorrow to start on a new one.
Why are we remodelling our kitchen? A lot of our friends ask us this because the old kitchen looked quite nice. Here is a photo:
The old kitchen looked great, but had a lot of shortcomings. The biggest one is that most of the useful storage is up high and hard to reach (even for me at 5′11″, even harder for Christine at 5′1″). There is a dead chimney running up one corner of it which wastes a lot of space and by removing it we can fit a large cabinet for the microwave and dishes. The cabinets in our kitchen were built by the previous homeowner and were well made, but not always well thought out. The silverware drawers were only about 2.5″ high and we couldn’t fit a full stack of forks. The tops of the cabinets were all at different heights which looked kind of strange. The area for the refrigerator was smaller than normal and limited our choices.
Here is what our kitchen looks like right now:
Removing the cabinets wasn’t too bad. I was happy to find someone (a member of my homebrew club) who was interested in all of the cabinets and he helped me remove them. I’m glad to see that they didn’t end up in a landfill.
I spent the rest of yesterday and most of today redoing the kitchen electrical. The original electrical had some serious code violations (the worst was a 50A 240V circuit breaker being split and feeding the outlets and lights over 15A wires). I used the 50A breaker to run a new subpanel and moved all of the kitchen related electrical to the subpanel. It is much cleaner and will allow the contractors to turn off the subpanel for wiring in new circuits without having to turn off the rest of the house power. This is a photo of the subpanel:
There are tons of other photos athttp://blogs.phred.org/photos/house/category1023.aspx. The kitchen will probably be the biggest thing going on in my life over the next month, so I’m sure that I’ll have more blog entries about it and will be updating the photos page too.
alex