Our first week of renovations has begun! And what better way to start, than by using a sledge-hammer and crow-bar to rip out a kitchen. You may recall that it previously looked like this:
Well, not anymore. Matt and I went in on Sunday and pretty much ripped out the whole thing. Our builders were starting on Monday, so we wanted to get some of the demolition work done before they arrived. This meant we saved ourselves a whole lotta money in manual labour (no pun intended;)
The first thing to come off, were the cupboard doors. This was a job I was able to help with, as it just required unscrewing brackets with an electric drill. That I can do!
Initially we tried to sell the whole kitchen on Gumtree for the bargain price of $100. but honestly, who wants a kitchen this old? We didn’t have any nibbles which was a shame… mainly as we would have saved ourselves the cost of disposing of it. In the end, we had to pay $380.00 for a skip bin.
While Matt did the physical labour or taking off the cupboard doors, I made myself busy with a few odd jobs. These included trimming our potted Ficus Fig trees. They were growing so big that I was worried they would split the pots they were in. So I did a bit of pruning. After living in the concrete jungle of NYC for 4 years, gardening is such a novelty!
Since the house has been vacant for a few months, we’ve had some scally-wag kids come and break one of our french-door windows and set up a cubby house in the empty living room. Unfortunately for the kids, this needed to stop. So, I boarded up their sneaky entrance using 6 screws from the kitchen cupboards and a drill.
We were concerned that ripping the splashback tiles off the kitchen wall would be a massive job and may require some electrical tools. But after knocking one off with a crowbar, we realized the glue was so old that they fell of really easily. This was another job I could do.
In the meantime, Matt used a sledge-hammer to knock all the cupboards out and carried them into the backyard, ready to go in the skip.
We decided to leave the sink in place for the professionals to remove. Neither of us have any experience with plumbing, so didn’t want to burst a pipe in the process. It would defeat the whole purpose of saving ourselves some money!
After ripping out the cupboards, we discovered something very exciting. There were original floorboards underneath the lino floor in the kitchen!
This is awesome news, as a section of the kitchen is going to become part of the hallway… and our hallway has original floorboards. We can now polish up these old floorboards and they will match the entire length of the hallway. Yippee! (You can see the existing hallway floorboards behind the bin in the photo below).
All in all, a very productive day! Ready for the builders to start:)
– Penny xo
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