Tear Down This Wall!

I honestly hear Ronald Regan everytime I think about this project and how I want to tear the wall down with my own two hands. I make it sound all dramatic in my head as if I could will the wall to come down by itself - it never does. So we hired a contractor and he will tear down the wall instead.

Every television show about Real Estate tells you that Kitchens sell homes. I laugh every time I think about that because our kitchen sucks. I can’t even come up with a more lady-like way to describe why it doesn’t work for us – it just sucks.

For one, we don’t even have a dishwasher. I take that back. We got a great deal on a dishwasher on Black Friday and it has been sitting in the box in the sunroom since it was delivered. So yes we have a dishwasher but it is still in the box. In trying to figure out how to fit it into our kitchen layout (without moving plumbing and gas) we came up with some other mind blowing ideas for our cavernous kitchen. Our cabinets are awful – particle board construction with plastic laminate. Our countertops are white with fake gold veining running through them…also plastic laminate.

We don’t have the patience to do a full out addition off the back which would easily solve all these problems and I actually think that the kitchen layout is quite efficient as it is, albeit claustrophobic. Open living is all the rage now, so we are seeing this as our chance to take a 1940’s kitchen give it some Botox and let people think it is not the original kitchen and that it is much younger than its 73 yr old bod.

We had this brilliant idea of knocking down the wall between our living room and kitchen in an effort to bring open living concepts to our 1940 cape cod and move a doorway to create a spot for the dishwasher yielding more counterspace.  We really didn’t know what we were doing or what we wanted  but after interviewing a bunch on contractors and gathering ideas from each of them we decided we were sold on taking the wall down. All I knew is that we wanted to fit the dishwasher into the kitchen and didn’t want to move around the plumbing or gas. The sink is right at the window where it is supposed to be and I can’t even bring myself to move around gas lines.

As we were interviewing contractors we taped up our “vision”, using painter’s tape showing how we wanted the space to look. I highly recommend this approach since it can be difficult to explain to someone what you envision in your head; at least it is for me.

 

RC is most excited about being able to see the TV while cooking. I am most excited to have a dishwasher.

Follow us as we live blog every day of the Demo and re-build of our kitchen.

Here we go.