A Battle of the Sexes as We Demolish the Kitchen

         

Gary, Nancy and Larry (the Crew)
Have Breakfast on the Front Porch

It's Memorial Day weekend and the "crew" is having breakfast on the front porch. We were thankful Nancy and Gary (my sister and significant other)offered to come down and help demolish the kitchen and complete some other “little” jobs. Since we need to be able to stay at the house while we work on it, we moved the refrigerator out onto an enclosed area of the front porch and we set up a microwave and coffee maker in the family room. After assigning tasks to "Team Boys" and "Team Girls", work began.

Each team reviewed their lists of tasks and challenged one another to see who would be the first to finish. "Team Boys" got all the heavy lifting and removing tasks, while "Team Girls" was assigned those tasks that required a more gentle touch. From time to time, new tasks were added to ensure neither team finished before the weekend was over. (Hey, it was free labor!) While we came to demolish the kitchen, we realized everything in the laundry room (part of the porch that is being incorporated into the kitchen) needed to go too, except for the 45 gallon electric water heater that is eventually going to be replaced by a gas tankless model. By late in the afternoon, all the old appliances and cabinets had been removed from the kitchen/laundry room and placed in the car port where they would await pick-up by Habitat for Humanity.  With both rooms completed, "Team Boys" decided it was time to call it a day and returned to the front porch to enjoy a round of beers before we all headed to town for dinner.

Nancy Removes
Wainscoting Shadow Boxes

The next day, “Team Girls” and “Team Boys” continued to make their way through their respective lists. Like any home improvement project, every task took twice as long to complete as expected and we had to make numerous trips to Kellogg’s the local lumberyard/hardware store. Despite a change in ownership, this is the same lumber yard that was once run by the original owner of our big yellow house. Don't you think we should get a discount to support our renovations?

Gary and Larry Hang the
Living Room Chandelier

By the end of the weekend we saw light fixtures removed and installed, wainscoting shadow boxes and shoe molding removed, several doors detached from their hinges to make for a more open floor plan, bushes trimmed and the walls of a storage closet torn apart to confirm it could indeed be re-purposed into a “butler’s pantry”. We all went home sore and tired but feeling like we had accomplished a lot. Most importantly, Scott’s crew could start building our new kitchen.