Category: Kitchen Remodel

Rebuilding

Kitchen Cabinets

With the kitchen torn down, now it was time to start rebuilding. Making cabinets, running electrical, and building the small wall for the breakfast nook. In building the cabinets, I wanted to start from scratch, so I made a few trips to the local Home Depot bought some 2X4’s, 2X3’s and multiple sheets of plywood. The cabinets were mostly made with 2X4’s and plywood on faces. Knowing what I know now, would have probably just kept the construction of them to solely plywood.

At the start of building these cabinets, I din’t have any table saw, however so a lot of the cuts were made with a jig saw, and a straight edge. Luckily, my brother gave me his table saw around half way through so I was able to make some straighter cuts and rip some 2X4’s to size.

Installing wall cabinets, without cabinet jacks was quite the task, to ensure that cabinets are were leveled I used a combination of milk crates and scrapped wood. Installing them onto the wall, I screwed into studs whenever possible, otherwise I used a heavy duty drywall anchors.

Wiring

Having taken down a wall, I needed to rerun some wiring to close off circuits that I had opened, this was an interesting task. I mostly used a multi-meter, to test for continuity, and voltage. Re-running electrical wiring, meant I had to climb up into the attic a few times to run, and splice wires, a very uncomfortable task as I live in south Florida, and the attic is as hot as the Sahara. 

Walls

Having eliminated a wall, now I have the task to rebuild the breakfast nook wall, as well as replacing drywall. To rebuild the breakfast nook wall, I purchased metal studs, and concrete anchors, as the base connect to the floor. When it came to drywall, this was my first time installing it, it’s truly a tedious task. Tedious as it requires a lot of patience, since there is a lot of mudding and sanding, over and over again. 

Kitchen Now

Things left to finish:

•  Back splash
• Cabinet doors

Kitchen Tear Down

I bought a house a few years back and decided I wanted to take a stab at remodeling the kitchen myself from scratch. So I did a couple of trips to the Home Depot and got started, on this project. Lets first show a couple of pictures of the kitchen before anything was done.

So the kitchen looked like your typical, late 1980 kitchen made with white what seems to be MDF boards, the kitchen was also enclosed making the it look less inviting with an elevated breakfast nook. We knew this all had to go, as my wife and I wanted an open kitchen, and these cabinets had seen way better days, with decades of small water issues, the structure of the MDF was very compromised. Not to mentioned an roach infestation that was found when tearing the kitchen apart.

So the first step here was to take down all the cabinets, and fixtures, afterwards take down the wall that enclosed the kitchen. Taking down the cabinets was a straight forward process, pretty much you unscrew them from wall then pull them down, the lower cabinets took a bit more persuading, but came out easily nonetheless. When it came to taking down the wall, I was thinking using a sledge hammer, and going at it as seen on TV. However, swing a the sledge hammer against the drywall as satisfying as it was, just results in a lot of more drywall dust, much more mess to clean up. My recommendation here, is just use a utility knife or dry wall saw and just and cut the drywall off, this was the method I started using after making a sufficient mess swinging away.

Next it was time to start building the cabinets, run some electrical wiring, to replace the ones running through the wall I took down, and build a small wall for the breakfast nook section. I’ll cover this on the next post of the Kitchen Remodel. However, here is a list of tools I wish I would have had at that time:

• Table Saw
• Pocket screw jig
• Electrical fish tape
• Right angle clamps
• Cabinet Jacks