a sledgehammer would have just been irresponsible

DEMOLITION. i wish we could have, but alas, we wanted to keep the drywall (and what we could salvage of the wood) intact. mom and dad came up from murrieta both to see melissa (they had just found out about the little one) and to help us with anything we needed fixed in the house. we didn't tell them we were re-doing the whole kitchen until they got here. HA! they got bamboozled! :)

check out the wall cabinets that my dad's trying to pry off. It took us FOREVER to try to figure out how there were connected to the wall. thus taking almost half a day just to get them out.

just the beginning

the countertop, drawers, and doors were easy enough to take off. there were also 2 modular cabinets that the old owner inserted at the far left of what you see below. it's the ORIGINAL cabinetry that we had trouble taking out. this stuff was nailed right into the subfloor and studs so there was no chance of trying to take this out in one piece. bummer. i wanted to move it downstairs.

nailed to the wall AND covered with a quarter inch layer of plywood.

the plywood (mentioned up top) actually put me in a little bit of a dilemma. at the time i was under the delusion that we'd be able to take the whole unit out in one piece but the valves would definitely get in the way of this objective. there wasn't a good way to cut into the plywood without damaging the drywall or studs behind it. SO... i took to shredding the stuff with a wood chisel and a hammer.

hmmm... remove the hardware... or shred the plywood?" width="414">
looks ugly, but we were able to pull the plywood off without having to turn off the water :)

subfloor? must have been original stuff." height="500" width="375">
after finding out it was pointless to remove the whole unit, we took it apart piece by piece.


ahh... it's gone.

next chapter: prep work