Kitchen

Early in 2023 we started planning our new Kitchen. The Kitchen we had was the original Kitchen from when the house was built in 1996, so it was high on our list of big projects to tackle. We worked with Kitchen Designer at Home Depot who handled the entire layout. We spent roughly 8 hours with her over 3 weekends planning our kitchen.

Demolition

The original kitchen had 2 separate pantries, so we decided to repurpose the pantry that was a bit further away from the center of the kitchen to be a Coffee Bar / Wine Bar. That meant ripping out the closet below.

First, we pulled out all of the shelves, then ripped down all of the sheet rock from outside of the pantry.

Then we finished up by cutting all of the 2x4s out one by one.

Next, we turned our attention to cabinets, countertop and backsplash…

The cabinets came out super easy with no issues what so ever. However the countertops and backsplash were solid granite and HEAVY. After carrying the first few pieces out whole, we decided to start shattering them and carrying them out in pieces.

Then we turned to really really nasty part, the tile floor. We used a combination of a sledge hammer, a motorized tile chipper and a demolition fork to pull up all the tile. It was a highly dirty and extremely dusty job that took nearly three days.

With all the tile up, we lifted up the plywood that the tile was put down over. That got us down to the same sub floor that all the other hard wood flooring in the rest of the downstairs was installed on.

Flooring

For flooring, we tried to match to exactly what we already had in the rest of the house. We settled on an unfinished red oak from Home Depot. It’s slightly less knotty than the rest of the house, but it definitely looks pretty consistent.

This was a brutally mind numbing task. It took us roughly 5 days to nail down approximately 700 square feet of flooring. This covered this main floor area, the laundry room and the walk in pantry.

We ran into a bit of a problem once we started testing different stains. Each stain had a bit of pink hue to it as a result of the red oak color showing through. We were not happy with any of these colors, none of them were a great match to color in the rest of the house.

Through some research, Kim discovered a product called Bona Red Out, which neutralizes the pink color of the wood. I ordered a few gallons and was shocked at how well it worked. After two coats the pink color on the wood was gone and the stain color really started showing up nicely.

FINALLY, we settled on a stain color. We went with Minwax Fruitwood which was very similar to the rest of the house but just a bit warmer.

Electrical

As a result of completely re-arranging all of our appliances, we also needed to re run a tremendous amount of electrical wiring throughout the kitchen.

We had to pull 8 gauge wire for the electric oven, low voltage wire for the under cabinet lights, completely move the main light switches since the refrigerator was now taking its place, as well run new plugs for both the refrigerator, and stove top vent hood.

After cutting away the majority of the sheet rock, we re-worked the wiring to handle the lights, vent hood and refrigerator. We simplified a tremendous amount of the wiring which was a nice bonus.

Vent Hood

Our stove top puts out a massive amount of BTUs. So we needed to install a fairly large vent hood to be able to pump the hot air and fumes out of the house. We cut a section of the ceiling out where we needed to run the vent pipe. Luckily, the beams were running the correct way to allow us to run the pipe between them. Had they been running the other way we would have been in a lot of trouble.

The bad news was that their were some electrical wires running right along where we needed the pipe to go. So we did our best to pull the wires out of the way and make room for the pipe. Then we mounted the cabinet to the wall with the hood inside and connected the vent pipe together.