Blood, Sweat, and Tears

This past weekend was dedicated to kitchen demo. This was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. I thought moving ourselves in alone was grueling but that was NOTHING compared to this weekend. When all was said and done, we experienced blood (Jeremy’s dad’s finger was sliced open by a nail), sweat (no need to be graphic but we were both dripping), and tears (Jer accidentally hit me in the head with the back of the jackhammer and I was so startled and exhausted I burst into tears). So what did we accomplish? They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m way too tired to write so we’ll let the pictures do the talking.

We went from this:

To this:

And ended with this:

And, here’s the bathroom view. This is a terrible “before” photo. This bathroom was so awkward to photograph.

We started with this:

Last week it looked like this:

And this morning it looks like this:

And here’s a shot from another angle:

Not only did we tear out walls but we also pulled up the tile floor. This was the biggest pain of the weekend. On Friday night, Jeremy ripped up the tiles in the kitchen. He started with a sledge hammer which had worked well in the bathroom but it wasn’t going to cut it in the kitchen. We rented a jack hammer to speed things along.

See how cloudy that picture looks? There was dust everywhere. When I threw my clothes the hamper a big poof of dust flew up…just call me Pigpen.  We tried to limit the dust to the kitchen by hanging plastic over all the door openings. It worked marginally.  As always, I was in charge of the clean up and, after this job, it wasn’t fun.

We had enough debris to warrant 3 trips to the dump on Saturday.

Remember how proud I was of bringing 500 pounds to the dump last week? Well, that was nothing. We brought 3,100 pounds on Saturday. We’re on a first name basis with the crew at the Duxbury Transfer Station.

Sunday we spent the day working on the kitchen lights. Did I mention Jeremy is doing all of the electric work himself? That’s a post for another day.

When all was said and done we:

·    Spent 32 hours (6 hours Friday, 12 hours Saturday, and 14 hours Sunday, which was a 23-hour day) working

·    Paid $320 on debris removal

·    Moved 3 major appliances (a full refrigerator, washer and dryer)

·    Took 3 hours to re-label our circuit breaker

·    Rented one power tool: jack hammer

·    Took one trip to our favorite home improvement store to buy a new shop vac and some new 2 x 4s.

·    Pulled hundreds, if not thousands, of screws up from the sub floor

·    Installed 10 recessed lights in the kitchen

·    Ate 4 meals from fast food restaurants. Gross. I hadn't eaten 4 meals at a fast food restaurant in the past 4 years.

I couldn’t be happier that this weekend is behind me. I was actually looking forward to work this morning! Jeremy assures me that this was the hardest work we’ll have to do and that the worst is behind us. I certainly hope so!