Preparing the Kitchen for Destruction (weekend of 2005-07-16)

The biggest problem with remodeling your kitchen is you have not kitchen for months!!! As they say, the kitchen is the center of the home. With no kitchen, there is no center! Well... with no kitchen, we all starve anyway. Before we could destroy the kitchen we had to figure out some way of at least keeping the refrigerator available. We figured we could use the grill for most of our cooking. Our original idea was to put up plastic to divide the kitchen and the living room and make the living room the kitchen. That would have meant we would have to go outside just to go get something out of the fridge - the only way to the living room is through the kitchen! It would also have been in the way, making working on the kitchen harder.

So, we came up with the idea of converting our hallway and our tiny laundry room into our "kitchen". Surprisingly we fit our microwave, toaster-oven (which works great as a mini-oven - it can do so much more than just toast, and of course, the fridge. We were also able to keep the most important food-stuffs available by making the laundry room into a pantry. We are now living out of a Kitchen-in-a-Closet!

As we "built" our "kitchen-in-a-clost", we cleaned everything out of the kitchen. Whatever was left was going to the dumpster. Here are a set of pictures showing what the kitchen looked like in raw form:

There were some things we no-longer had space for. The problem is this house has very little storage, so we did have to put some stuff in the living room on its nice new floor. Instead of walling off the whole living room with plastic, though, we just covered the few things stuff in the corner. The range, couch, and many boxes of non-essential kitchen-ware and books fit just fine:

There was one last task before we started destruction. We had re-built the living room floor but not the entry way's floor. We still didn't know exactly how we wanted to do that, so Shane made a stop-gap measure so we had something to walk on while hauling out mounds of garbage. 4 2x4s and a little partical-board later, we had our "bridge":

That's it, all ready to go. Hopefully destruction won't take 3 months like it did in the living room.