Kitchen Pictures

Here are some picture of our progress! 

This was the color in the kitchen before. It wasn't horrible, but we wanted something different. 

Starting painting

We are also stripping some of the woodwork in the kitchen to repaint. 

Thomas did some plumbing and insulation. Behind our old dishwasher, we could see the exterior wall of the house... Not great for keeping the kitchen warm. We got a new dishwasher and hope to get a garbage disposal eventually (so excited!). 

Thomas pulled up the top two layers of linoleum and we worked together to scrape the last layer that was glued to the fir flooring in the kitchen. It was by far the most difficult project that we have taken on and was not fun. We hand scraped for a while and then decided to rent an industrial wallpaper steamer to scrape the rest. It was far faster than hand scraping, but still took three entire days to scrape away the linoleum backing and adhesive that was left behind. 

This was part way throught the linoleum scraping. Several sections came up nicely, but the rest was a real pain. The rest of the floors in this house will be a cake walk compared to this room. You could not pay me to do this again!

At this point, we had rented the steamer and it was going better, but still had a long way to go.

It was hot and messy, but really helped loosen up the paper and adhesive.

When we pulled up the plywood over the end of the kitchen, we found fir! It was covered in paint, but was the original porch flooring. This area used to be a covered porch and they closed it in. Thomas stripped the paint using paint stripper.

The paint came off pretty nicely. 

This is one section of the floor to give you an idea of how disgusting it was... No fun. 

In between the porch flooring and the kitchen flooring was a gap that was filled with junk wood. There was obviously a door there and we had to fill in the gap so Thomas cut it to a uniform size and we filled it with new clear fir flooring.

Thomas cutting the flooring. 

This was before sanding. 

Because the two floors were at different levels, Thomas made shims to bring the flooring to level.

The shims that brought were put under the flooring. I wrote a note on them in permanent marker about the year we refinished the floors and our names :) 

The finished transition.  You can see water damage near the sink, ah well. 

After we cleaned the floors with mineral spirits. They were ready to stain! 

I will post pictures of the completed floors soon! 

Does anyone else leave notes when they work on their house? I left an envelope with a letter in a wall when we did some electrical and I try to leave little bits of 'us' when we do big jobs. 

Up next, we need to finish the baseboards and then we will be adding quarter round at the bottom of them. We will also put some molding at the base of the cabinets because there is a gap at the bottom. I will also be painting the banquette again to match the cabinets and we hope to move the appliances back in soon. The end is close!