Renovating my house in the suburbs

[KennyG]

That's the trouble with good work - it's hard to destroy. I'm not sure I've ever seen glued and screwed cabinets. I once ripped out a tile floor that I found had been installed directly over a vinyl floor. Came out with a small hammer and chisel in no time. I appreciated the installers incompetence

 

[Muhammad]

Into day 3 now... which is actually the second full day. Kitchen demo is continuing but now facing the soffits with extreme body ache.

Under the kitchen sink... I'm curious as to why they have that extra line running at the bottom of the cabinet. But my gut feeling is telling me that they had a slab leak and just ran the repipe through the cabinets. Not good.

Today we got the kitchen down to the walls and I also took out the fireplace brick that we'll later replace with tile.

 

[Muhammad]

Opening up the walls reveals that this house is actually properly insulated...

My plan is to "simply" remove the soffits and cut off the one at the end of the kitchen. We'll see...

Today also cut out the existing opening into the kitchen. It'll be 72" once we're done.

As you see we have to move the bank of switches so I'm thinking a j-box in the attic for that.

 

[Muhammad]

My new ride... the home depot rental truck. I didn't do this damage but just showing someone else's bad day.

Since I don't have a truck these come in handy for hauling materials for $20 rental. I've got one home depot about 6 min away and another 10 minutes away plus a lowes 10 minutes away.

 

[Muhammad]

Okay so... got lucky here with the pocket door situation. They already have a header here so I'll just need to move it up about 12" then put it all back together.

Best tool for framing... passlode nailer. Love this thing.

 

[dodge man]

Congrats on the new baby and the new house. You spilled blood for it(the house that is), it is yours now.

It is a shame there was a natural gas explosion in the kitchen right after you bought it.:laughing: Good luck on the renovation. It never ends.

 

[Muhammad]

We decided that the wall with the future arches should be thicker for anesthetics as well as necessary to do a pocket door archway so we're going to frame out a 2x3b wall and attach it to the existing 2x4 wall.

In this process we found that the studs directly under that large header beam were out by an inch over eight feet. An inch! Not sure why but we banged them level and tied everything together.

Keep in mind that there is a crawl space above this ceiling and the header beam is supporting only the ceiling framing. The roof trusses are above this and NOT sitting on that header beam. So I wasn't too worried about the wall being plumb.

 

[Muhammad]

Framing for the archway that will have pocket doors. This was quite a bit of work, from raising that header to framing the second wall and then of course the arches.

Also getting 30 can lights installed.

I seem to have lost track of the days already.

 

[Muhammad]

I'm sure the ocd readers and pro framers will cringe at something in this picture.

 

[Muhammad]

Back into the kitchen... days have gone by getting this cleared out but we've got the soffits out.

The mess of wiring wasn't really as bad as I thought it would be. I mean yeah it's all crossed over but unless I want to literally rewire the house I'm going to kind of put it back where it was and make sure nothing is pinched and call it a day with the electrical wiring.

Big disappointment today was discovering that indeed the house still has pipes running in the slab. I can't put down an expensive floor and run the risk of a slab leak so we went ahead and repiped the house. Here's the good look of all the slab pipes cut off.

Framers must be so sad when plumbers come in and just chop their work up like it's unimportant.

While I did hire plumbers to do the repipe, I stopped short of having them run the extra lines for the ice maker and pot filler in the kitchen. They wanted $600 extra to run just those two lines which would be as easy as plugging into this 3 way. I did it myself in 20 minutes and $10 worth of supplies plus a $60 pex crimp tool.