The Kitchen - Week 3

Months ago I spent lots of tine encapsulating the crawlspace but one of the things I didn't do was buy and install a dehumidifier. It took a while to figure out what size was needed, and how it would fit in the crawlspace since it's a bit tight down there. In the end I wound up buying a Santa Fe Force. Here's a shot going in that should give an idea for how hard it is to move around large items down there.

The dehumidifier ran for about a day and a half straight. It was needed pretty badly.

By this point I'd replaced every joist to one wall so now it was time to head the other direction. There were only two joists I could remove before it was time to start dealing with cabinets.

This was taken from the same location I took another picture from with a level and tape measure. The new joist is the same height as the floor was when it was new; the old joist shows that it deflected about an inch and a half over time.

One of the things that caused me a lot of concern was whether the addition was the same height as the original part of the house. This was able to put my mind at ease - the wood in the family room is at the same height as the top of the subfloor in the kitchen in an area where the plywood was replaced. The new flooring will be able to cross the line from the original house to the addition seamlessly.

At this point there was nowhere left to go but to take out the old peninsula. This would have been faster if I realized that I was NOT going to be able to put the old base cabinets back together to donate them to Habitat. These were installed in 1979, and didn't go in the way modern cabinets do. They were built on site.

At least I got to have a better look at some wallpaper.

This is going to take a while...

I wanted to keep the sink and dishwasher around as long as possible so I replaced every joist that was possible until I could work no more and had to remove them.

The dishwasher had no shutoff valve; it was plumbed straight in. This was a horrible idea. Another problem was that it never really worked very well. I blamed the dishwasher, but it turned out there was a ball of solder nearly blocking the water line in. The plumbing in this area was really bad. Someone who knew what they were doing wouldn't have needed to make this much of a mess.

I also got my first look at the color the walls originally were. The wallpaper was added at the same time the flooring was changed out in 1970. Combined with the color the paneling was, and it really didn't look bad when the place was new.

This is where I finished up at the end of July. Unfortunately what took hours to do in San Antonio took weeks to do here.