While the old kitchen in the house was functional, it really showed the age of the house with the gold/yellow colored counter top, and dark walnut stained plywood cabinet faces. Add in the stained glass-looking lamp, and cabinet hardware that was falling apart, it was time to do some work. We looked at replacing the hardware, and refinishing the face of the cabinets, but decided that we wanted something that would add to the value of the house, and "make a statement". After looking through the pictures, I think you will agree that we succeeded.

All images below are thumbnails. Clicking on them will bring up a larger picture.

	Here is really the only picture that we have of the old kitchen. Notice that there are soffets above the cabinets. This was a popular building style in the 70's, and necessary to hang the center cabinet. We got the idea to remove this center island and put cabinets on the opposite wall from our neighbors who similarly redid their kitchen. Of course this means removing the soffets, which means fixing the sheetrock, certainly no simple "rip out the old cabinets and hang the new ones" remodel.
		First thing we did was rip out all the old cabinets. We found a lovely hack job of wiring behind the microwave. Then came tearing out the soffets. One of my favorite tools, the sawzall, greatly assisted. Less pleasant was the "shortcut" that all the wires took that went from the ceiling to the wall. Also, note the 3" vent pipe that goes around the top plate through where the soffet was. More on this later.
		After discovering the mess of sheetrock behind he old cabinets, instead of trying to patch in the top 12 inches above the cabinets, which would leave a tape line right at the top, and trying to paint and make flat the wall between the top and the bottom cabinets which had varying coats of paint on them, I decided that taking the sheetrock down 6 feet from the ceiling was the right thing to do. This way I could put the seam between the two sheets right in the middle of the top cabinets, and give me a nice flat surface between the top and bottom cabinets.
		Since we were putting in a skylight, after the hole for the skylight was cut and the holes that the soffets left behind, not much of the original sheetrock remained. I decided that it wasn't worth trying to patch in sheetrock with so little original ceiling there, so I removed the remainder. This gave me one nice straight edge to tape, instead of seams all over. It was 10 degrees outside, so we had to put in plastic right away to try to prevent some of the heat from escaping.
		Here you can see the rough-in framing for the skylight.
		The ceiling was then sheetrocked, including the skylight.
		The base cabinets were then removed, and the wall was removed down to 6 feet from the ceiling. You can see the framing for the 45 degree box that I built to go around the vent pipe. I couldn't really relocate it anywhere, so I decided to just sheetrock around it.

Continued on page 2...

Mail me!

Back to Mike's home page!