So This Is How This Is Going To Go: Kitchen Remodel Edition

Last Sunday my mom came up to the farm to “help me with the kitchen remodel” which basically means she brought up a bottle of wine, and we drank half of it while sitting at the kitchen table talking about life before I finally got up the courage to say, “Fuck it, let’s take these cabinets out.”

And we got about this far before we were like… we probably need pizza and more wine before we do any more, right? Right.

Then she helped me leverage this 200 lb oven/microwave out of the wall and take the big cabinets out to the garage.

Incidentally, I’m not sure how many times in the course of this blog I’ve said, “can we just take a minute to acknowledge how awesome my mom is?” But, like, can we just take a minute to acknowledge how awesome my mom is? Because I’m 100% sure when she found out she was going to have a daughter, she did not expect that a couple of decades down the road her motherly duties would include things like fence installation (uh, more than once) and kitchen demo.

And yet, here we are. I’m lucky in that both of my parents don’t just accept this strange thing I’ve chosen to do in my spare time– not get married, have kids, settle down…oh no, instead I tear houses apart and put them back together again while hoarding farm animals–but they both actively support and participate in this craziness. Not just once, but for a decade.

So. That’s awesome.

Anyway, back to the crazy at hand… Taking those existing cabinets out was so easy that I was like, “Let’s get a quick win and put the new ones in!” Which would have been a quick win…

(We were so close!)

If it hadn’t ended up like this…

Because I’m an idiot and I was drinking.

In the course of trying to secure those cabinets I snapped the heads off two screws and one is embedded and stripped (but not fully tightened) between the stiles of both those cabinets. This is likely because I didn’t pre-drill the stiles with the right bit(s), and the one I did use was fairly dull. Lesson learned.

Ugh.

Ugggggggghhhh.

That’s the sound of me not losing my shit over this, but also spending a week+ cooking microwave dinners by connecting the range/micro combo in the middle of the floor to power via extension cord.

While I death-glare across the room at those cabinets.

Just… here’s what my amazon shopping cart looked like the Tuesday after this adventure:

Yeah.

Just for the record neither the VamPLIERS or the “damaged screw remover” set proved to be useful in this particular case.

Luckily I haven’t done any damage to the actual cabinet box throughout all of this, so my options are to 1.) accept a slightly imperfect joint between these two cabinets and just hang them up on the wall, or 2.) try to cut the head off the stripped screw and pull the cabinet off of it, and then cut it down without damaging any of the cabinet wood and try this again.

Ha.

So. This is how this is going to go?

Fine.

Here are my goals for this weekend then:

1. Replace the sanding pad on my orbital sander and prep/paint enough of the wood paneling to make me not feel like a slacker.
2. Install the uppers and lowers on this side of the kitchen by any means necessary.
3. Remove the tile backsplash in the entire kitchen.
4. Build a cabinet for the microwave. Maybe.

It’s clear there isn’t going to be fast progress on this kitchen, so I’m just going to have to take it how it is. And that’s how this one is going to go…

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