Le Bois Sucré: 05/17/11

It took about 2 hours to demo my Ugly Kitchen and about two months for the kitchen to be put back together.

When planning a kitchen demo in a small 600 square foot condo I recommend getting a small student fridge, budgeting for take out food and to plan on reducing your food in your fridge freezer to almost nothing before the renovation. I also recommend money, and lots of it!

We were not planning to do the kitchen for another month but I was luckily already packing and I did not at the time realize how much crap and lack of space I had. On the day of the renovation we midnight shifters were awakened at 7:00 am and still had so much to clear out of the kitchen. We look like drunken college students scrambling in every direction. No longer being on "normal" people hours it was so painful to be awake at the time! We started just throwing things instead of organizing them onto the table and on the floor. We wanted to just get this kitchen done and to go back to bed! The two months renovations and midnight shifts were painful. To have to be up after a long shift or to have to make decisions without much sleep is not a good idea.

I got to take down the first cabinet with a sledge hammer! That I have to say it is a liberating thing to destroy an inefficient kitchen cabinet. To totally rip the cabinet into shreds and to declare there is nothing in this kitchen that I want to keep and be able to budget to put it back together again.

There were issues that came up just in the demo. It turns out that the gas was never capped correctly before the demo (not the contractors fault but it was before the demo). So there was a gas leak luckily I noticed and they were back in an instant. The lighting guy could not come for over a week so we had an empty kitchen for over a week. Then there were just so many delays like deciding on different doors, and things not in stock. Then the counters guys could not come at one point and then there was an extra space to accommodate for the counters. Then the sink that came with the counters was actually too big for where the plumbing was... and so we started in October and a couple of weeks before Christmas we were actually using non bathroom water. We had for that period only one source of running water! So you know we did not cook even when all we were waiting for as our kitchen sink. So for two weeks when the kitchen was mostly complete except for the kitchen sink! A lot of it had to do with getting condo board with us or scheduling time to shut off the water/etc because our condo is all connected with all of the condos.

This waiting resulted in us having to live like were trying to try out for A&E's show "Hoarders" for such a long time. We just wished it was already over since we had to eat out until we got the fridge back (two or three weeks later). It was just us and a cooler and we never seemed to have cool drinks. It was worth it two months later when we got ice maker in the fridge we have now. But all I wanted was iced drinks and we could not get it.

Jonathan and I who just wanted to be in our kitchen especially as the winter holidays were upon us. We flipped through cookbooks saying-- oh that looks so good! We would drool and wish and wish.

Enjoy the pictures below and I will update with final pictures in another post.

Don't you love the Martha Stewart paint samples?

This was above the fridge and you could never get anything in or out of it!
I hate above the fridge store unless it goes out as much the fridge and has
storage like I planned for my platters/etc.

The upper cabinets that were so low that you could not wash dishes in the sink without
hitting your hands on them. Yet there was so much room ABOVE the cabinets too.

Normally if I walked into this situation I would be upset, but not today!

The fridge turns out was leaking majorly and when
we took it out it had huge puddle. If it was not for the
three layers of laminate the people downstairs would
have been in a squalor's Venice!