My first remodel

Finished project first.

How it started: Jan 2020 woke up to find find my kitchen floor was squishy and water creeping up beneath the boards. Cool, almost felt like Jesus walking on water. If you unmute you can hear it sloshing around.

Found the culprit behind the dishwasher: the water line to the fridge was chewed through. Gotta love the old 70’s style carpet and wallpaper

While I like to say I live in a 1,500 sqft house in a gated community, the truth is, I live in a trailer in a trailer park.

This is what my kitchen looked like before, stupidly setup in a circular shape wasting a ton of space.

Complete with a faux shingled roof as part of the dropped ceiling (this photo is from a neighbors with the same layout but in a lighter color cause I didn’t have any of my own pics of the stupid shingles)

After I found the leak, I started to pull up the floor and found water was trapped under the barrier because the leak happened behind the dishwasher where the old flooring remained.

Pulled up flooring and the vapor barrier till the boards were no longer wet underneath, then bought some fans to try and dry it out.

This is what it looked like under the house after a few days of drying the floor with fans. Wood was soft/malleable, not good. Also around this time is when I caught the FUCKER that caused all this pain.

So with the help of some friends, we decided to demo the kitchen for a few reasons: 1) I hated that stupid layout; 2) to ensure it dried fully under the cabinets; 3) we were hoping to move and wanted to increase the value of the place.

We also had to repaint, texture and install new lights in the ceiling for the huge kitchen/dinning/office space because the faux shity shingle dropped ceiling left holes in the ceiling once it was removed. I paid my neighbor (he’s a contractor) to do this for me after I spent a few days doing a shitty attempt at it.

When we started to install the new flooring though, we noticed the floor sagged and “squished” when we walked around. Soooo we ended up replacing a portion of the subfloor too. (Which was reassuring in some ways to know that the damage was bad enough that it required the subfloor to be replaced)

I also paid neighbor to install drywall and cut out/run wires for new outlets. Everything else was done by me (with some intermittent help from hubby and plenty of advice from neighbor) Subfloor being put down.

View from under the house which I saw when I accidentally fell through the under layer of the house.

Ceilings done, floors in, now it’s IKEA to the rescue! Started to assemble and arrange the ikea cabinets. Note the stupid black pipe under the window. It was a pain to calculate into the kitchens layout so it affected as few cabinets as possible.

It was also a total pain to measure and cut out the back for the super odd shape. Luckily I was able to get the whole pipe to fit into this single cabinet frame and just used shorter drawers with it so it’s still a functional space. Also the ikea rail system was super easy to use.

Ugh the window. Getting the cabinets to be equally distanced from the window was a complete pain. I took down and put back up those cabinets SO MANY TIMES because they both attach to cabinets on the far side. Ended up adding an extra piece of wood to the left cabinet.

Ran new wire for the oven in the island, hung the range, got new oven in, dishwashers in, cabinets up, March 2020 was looking good! Then everything shutdown and I had to live in a kitchen like this till the end of April cause the countertop company (CounterFit, punny name) closed for a while.

This is what my improve kitchen looked like from Jan-April while the demo was underway. Repurposed some bookcases for food and appliances storage of the essential stuff. Everything else went into boxes. Note the cardboard project board repurposed into a backsplash

Didn’t have a sink for 4 months either, so metal water jug on the left offered quick access to drinking water without having to walk to the bathroom to get it. Also did all the dishes in the shower this whole time.

April 2020: Counters and sink are in!! The left cabinet door hit the light when it was opened, so it had to be changed out, thus it has the blue protective film on it still. Once I had counters and a sink though my drive to get the project died and I left the backsplash on the “to do list” for a year...

Till today!! April 2021, finally got the backsplash in!! It’s sooo exciting to FINALLY HAVE IT DONE! Wanted to share my year long remodel cause I’m soo fucking excited it’s DONE!

Side by side of the before and after. Sooo much more room for activities!