Things Never Go As Planned!

Yesterday I was supposed to go shopping for kitchen appliances with my mom.  I was at Home Depot picking up new locks for the door when Peter calls.  "Plan has changed, Do Not buy appliances.  We have major water problems in the kitchen, it must be gutted first."  I arrive back at the house to find this:  All of the lower cabinets were filled with mold, the floor buckled because of water damage.  There were multiple leaks from multiple sources. 

 This is what the kitchen looked like while there were still people living in it.  The pictures really look much nicer than it was in person.

 

 

I told Frank-our guy doing the fixing-to remove the upper cabinets too.  I want everything in my kitchen to match, and I really didn't like the cabinets in the first place, I was just going to make them work for me...and now I don't have to.

This is the dining room...or at least this was the dining room.  It was also a very small room right next to the kitchen, but since we were remodeling the kitchen we decided to make it larger.

So we told Frank to take out the wall.

 

Here's Frank taking out the upper cabinets.  You can also see how small the kitchen was from this viewpoint.

Did I mention there was water damage in the walls-up 4 feet!  Isn't the kitchen just lovely?

The black stuff on the wall is smoke damage, so there was also a fire at some point that they tried to cover with ugly appliances.  The stove and microwave were there.

I am standing in the dining room taking a picture of the kitchen.

And now I'm standing in the kitchen taking a picture of the dining room.  I told you they were both small.

So since we are turning the dining room into the kitchen, we are knocking out another wall-the one on the left is going too and the area between the window and the other wall is going to have a wall.  And if you can imagine it...there will be two pantries there.  The windows are going to be shorter, but up higher and there will be cabinets under them.
This is what the windows looked like this morning.  They don't look like that now though...I'll take more pictures tomorrow.  Frank hopes to have the support beams in, the windows redone and the walls done.

Everyone has been working really hard the last two days and there have been great improvements already.  The backyard is looking much better as we took out A LOT of ivy and cut back many plants that were overgrown.  We filled up all 7 of our trashcans.  Then I borrowed four from the neighbor (they're super nice) and filled those up as well.  We still have bushes that have been cut, but no more cans.  I might ask the other neighbor too.

The house is being tented on Monday so work will stop tomorrow afternoon and resume Thursday.