Changes Afoot

As some of you might know (since we've been talking about it incessantly for 6 months) the Dickson kitchen is undergoing a bit of a remodel.

The original plan was to paint the cabinets and put down some new linoleum. We were afflicted with 'scope creep', however and before you could say 'amateur remodeler' we were, among other things, stripping and refinishing cabinets, laying ceramic tile, and taking down a wall.

The picture to the left shows an early stage in the project. The open space on the wall was where the fridge used to spend it's time. Here, Lucas is taking down a portion of the yellow tile backsplash.

Next was the task of removing the upper cabinets from the wall. This took a lot of work. They were very sturdily mounted. Our best guess is that the buiders wanted to ensure that the future homeowner could store his bowling ball collection there. Despite this, Lucas, armed with his crowbar, got them down.

Since we kept to a pretty tight budget, these cabinets were re-used as lower cabinets. Lucas built a platform for them which allowed us to elongate our countertop workspace.

Then the wall came down. Every step along the way has had some combination of improvisation, learning a new skill, buying a new tool, or doing it wrong the first time. Some steps had all of these elements.

Here is a picture of the current state of affairs. As you can see, there is still quite a bit of trim work to do but the kitchen is functional now. The sink and counter tops are installed making food preparation a lot easier than it was for the majority of the summer. Drop by sometime, we'll give you a tour.