Spackling and Starting The Kitchen Tear Out

Hello everyone.  It's time for another quick update in the Mike and Lisa World.  As you know Mike and I were not going to do the kitchen for quite sometime.  Well…that has changed.  Now that we want to match all the main floors in the house Mike said we have to get the new kitchen cabinets in before we put a new floor down.  So we have been shopping and looking at different choices.  I was going to get my cabinets from the same place that my stepdaughter did as hers are beautiful:).  Unfortunately we have no way of getting them shipped here.  So at the time of the following pictures I was comparing costs for some local cabinet dealers, Lowes and Home Depot….although I gotta tell you, I'm pretty darned tired of Lowes and HD cabinets, lol.  The search is on…but for now let me show you some of the work we have been doing.



Mike has been a busy bee with the dreaded spackling and sanding process.  This is not something we like to do.  We get up in the morning, make our mess and then move on with our day:)


He got a first coat on all the seems and did a first sand.  Now it's time for the metal corner bead:

Doing the metal corner beads around the fireplace:

Spackling the corner bead:

Adding the paper tape to the ceiling and wall inside corner:

While Mike was in drywall world I decided to start taking the hardware and the doors off the kitchen cabinets:

I am only doing the one side that won't interfere with my cooking yet.  OK…don't yell at me.  I know I had my flip flops on but I just wanted to see if the counter top would budge…no it did not:

While I got my sneakers on Mike took over.  I knew he couldn't resist if I took the sledgehammer out, lol:

This was not an easy counter to to get off.  Next up the cabinets themselves which were built on site and have a ton of nails.  This is not like the fall apart particleboard cabinets we are used to doing demo on:

Mike trying to break the bottom shelf off:

One small section down…next up the pantry:

After a lot of wiggling around Mike is finally getting somewhere:

Yay…a couple of cabinets and one pantry are gone, lol:

Now for the ceiling repair.  We bought a different brand of ceiling insulation and we will not be buying it again.  Yes it is the same R value but it looks like it is dirty and really old.  I'll stick with the pink stuff, lol.  If I saw this insulation in a house I would think it was at least 10 years old.  Ugly stuff:

I got the insulation in the ceiling and Mike works on the patch:

We ran out of drywall so we had to make a Lowes run…again, lol.  Now we can finish covering the red brick:)  Mike adds the adhesive:

And the drywall goes up.  He makes a pilot hole and adds some screws to hold it tight:

And back to the next pantry which used to be the wall oven many years ago:

Woo hoo….one side of the kitchen is almost out.  Sadly the walls are in rough shape.  I will work on those before any cabinets go in:

Thankfully it's the last of the red brick…say goodbye:):)

Mike installs the last piece of drywall over the brick:

That was just a quick update.  We have been shopping, making decisions, and doing all kinds of work. We are trying to right the wrongs of this house.

Have a great weekend and I will post again on Monday.

Lisa:)