Kitchen Demo Phase 1

Our home is 23 years old. There are a lot of things that I wonder about since we moved in almost six years ago. 

1. Why on earth did the contractor place certain electrical boxes in strange places?

2. What the heck was the soffit hiding up there above my cabinets? Wasting space in my 

     opinion.

3. When would Rob want to start ripping cabinets and other items out to find answers to 

     these questions?

Well the answers to the last two questions were figured out on Sunday. The first question will never be answered probably.  The day after the ice cream party Rob took on the task of ripping out cabinets and soffit. First thing that came out was the small cabinet above our enormous refrigerator.  It served no purposed when even I at 5'10" could not easily reach it.

Thankfully the old fan above the stove was coming out as well.  It was gross and I wanted to somehow put a microwave up there in the future. We are tying to figure out now how we can go about putting that into the plans. Considering microwaves are actually less expensive than range hoods I may get my way.

Taking the soffit out was no easy task. However, we are glad we uncovered it because we found many surprises behind it that should not have been back there.  Including a hornet's nest and stink bugs. Can stink bugs just get up and leave already? I'm sick of them.

We finally figured out what the soffit was hiding. It was a simple pipe that jutted out just next to the window.  See it below in the top left corner of the photo? No electrical wires that were too complicated existed in there.  Thankfully we know of an excellent plumber who does work on the side. He came over last night and simply drilled a hole in the two by four above it and moved the pipe up. That way it can be in between the ceiling and the drywall.  He also did it record time too.  

The next steps are having an electrician come over to make some changes in the lighting and placement of junction boxes.  Rob hopes to start dry walling the now uncovered soffit and missing ceiling after that is all figured out. This project is going to take a while that's for sure. But, it will be worth it.

I do have two questions though...

What is your favorite counter top product?  & Have you ever purchased butcher block counters from IKEA? Any advice on either of these would be greatly appreciated!

Total cost for this project so far is $20 since the demo was free. :)  Thanks to my father-in-law for hauling away the debris and we are keeping the old cabinets to place in our garage for storage (at some point)

Thanks so much!

Megan