Kitchen Progress 1

I’m so excited to finally share some photos of our kitchen renovation, which we have been working non-stop on for the last couple of days!  We had a nice break from all the tearing out, cabinet building, and painting while we were in Houston, but as soon as we left my parent’s house we were back in renovation mode.  We stopped in Dallas on the way home and picked up the final load of boxes, which included the two floor to ceiling pantry cabinets that will sit on the far side of the fridge.

Okay, so I’m going back to the beginning for now, and I think it will take me 3 posts to get you all up to date.  When we left off last time we had just taken out the wall and were ripping out the last of the lower cabinets.  After we got all the cabinets out, we had to remove one layer of tile, one layer of laminate, and one extra layer of wood (that we might have been able to refinish had it not been rotting).  This was a lot more work than I thought it would be, but we got it all taken out just hours before they were coming to install the new wood floor.  We literally took out the last board at midnight, and then they showed up at 7am to start the installation.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that while we were taking out the old flooring, we went ahead a ripped out the plaster on two walls because it had some holes in it and other issues.   Here’s what it looked like with most of the plaster and wood strips gone.  You can see the tile on the left that used to be behind the stove.

You can see how dusty it was in the room…

Here we are getting out the last bits of the last layer of floor.  We felt like celebrating, but we were too tired.

And there is the pile of new flooring which we picked up from Lumber Liquidators.  They have great prices for unfinished hardwood flooring, and we ended up paying $2.50 a square foot for premium quality red oak.   We picked the wood up the two days before because they recommend that you let it acclimate to the temperature in the room before installing it.

The next night, we rented a sander from Home Depot and sanded the top to get rid of any unevenness.  The floor seemed pretty smooth to me, but apparently there are little spots where some wood sticks up just a bit higher and you won’t see them until you apply the glossy finish. Here it is after using a satin polyurethane finish and one small can of golden oak stain.

Next Jimmee put insulation in the open exterior wall because we could feel a draft of cold air coming in.  The insulation was surprisingly easy – it comes in a roll that’s already the right size and you just push it into the space between the studs.  We didn’t even need nails to hold it up, and it definitely helped to keep the heat in!

What do you guys think of the new floor?  It turned out to be a pretty good match to our existing (60 year old) red oak floor.  I’ll post some photos that show where the old floor meets the new floor in an upcoming post.

Next up is the dry wall installation and then cabinets and appliances!!

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