It's gone!

Renovating an old house is a little like excavating an archeological site. You never know what you're going to find, how layers there will be and how far down it goes. The kitchen demolition went off without a hitch. I wanted to be home to take part but there was too much going on at work. R was home, though, and got to swing a hammer and destroy some stuff. Very satisfying for him.

Before the kitchen was gutted, we noticed that we had a regular mouse visitor in our sink cabinet. How do we know? There were chew marks on the garbage bag and little bits of chewed plastic around the garbage bin. One morning, I went to open the bin to throw out some garbage and came eye to eye with a cute little brown mouse sitting on top of the garbage. It was a toss up as to who was more surprised. We admired him, even as we evicted him from the house (he was really cute!). I don't think he understood he was being evicted, though, since he was back a couple nights later. Now that the kitchen is gone, our running joke is that he poked his head up, looking for the garbage bin and thought "What the...! Where's my garbage?"

Bryan demolishing our kitchen

Off to the dump!

So what did we learn from gutting the kitchen? Kevin found a few layers of door framing around the two doorways into the kitchen. There was the original door frame that was put in when the house was built and then a couple more nailed on top of it. He was able to reclaim a few inches of doorway. There was, again, some questionable wiring in the walls and ceiling but the real bonus was the discovery of asbestos vinyl floor tiles. Lucky for us (or should I say Kevin and Bryan?), the vinyl tiles were glued to a plywood sub floor that was very loose so they pulled it up and disposed of it. No more asbestos!

The asbestos vinyl floor tiles

Day 1

Day 2