Kitchen Demo

We've finally decided to take the plunge and begin the real work at the Woodbury house. We're going to get a construction loan to get everything done as soon as possible.

Today we started on the kitchen. In it's present state the kitchen measures 10'5"x14'10". Ten feet is just too small. We tried a hundred different cabinet configurations over a weeks time on the CAD program but nothing really worked.

What we have decided to do is move the wall between the kitchen and dining room. The dining room is currently 14'6"x14'10". We're going to move the wall 3'4". This will make the kitchen 13'9"x14'10" and the dining room 11'2"x14'10". Here is the wall in question from the Dining room side:


I hate to lose the original plaster on the dining room side and I'm going to have to remove the wainscoting very carefully so as not to damage it, but at least now I'll have close to 7' of spare wainscoting and a lot of spare oak flooring.

I guess I should describe what this kitchen will be like. In the Oxford-Boynton house we did a country style kitchen with white, slatted door cabinets that I made. We really like our kitchen and spend a lot of time in it but this time around we're going high end.

I'm starting with a slate floor with 12"x12" slate. The cabinets will be either cherry or Italian Hickory. The countertops will be granite. The backsplash will be tumbled marble. And of course the appliances will be high end stainless.

We spent the morning finalizing the cabinet layout and finally came up with this:


We will be going with a Farmhouse sink, side by side fridge, double wall ovens, and an electric cooktop with a wood and stainless hood vent.


Even going with a complete gut and rebuild we still have to work around some of those old house issues. Just beyond the fridge on the left is an original window, it is over 7' tall. I want to preserve this window. Because of this we cant do a U shaped kitchen. The window over the sink was shortened a long time ago so it's ok to put the new sink there.

Unfortunately we're going to lose our pantry, it's behind the fridge in the plans above. It's not original to the house though and I'll be able to reuse the wood and trim from it.


The shot above just shows the basic cabinets, we'll be adding crown, a valance above the sink, fluted casing on either end of the wall oven cabinet and the fridge cabinet, and the sink will have turned legs on either end.

That was the fun part... this afternoon we went out to the house to begin the demo. Here is the kitchen before we started the demo:


Isn't that lovely? Time to go bye-bye...





That's as far as we got today. We'll be out there first thing in the morning to get the wall down and moved.