Our Home Renovation

And the creep goes on. Sunday afternoon was to be the day that we removed the old sink and countertop and installed the new ones. All started well – the countertop came out pretty easily and we were able to leave the sink mounted to it and carry the whole 10′ long beast right out the door.

Once the old countertop and backsplash were out, it became apparent that there was drywall put up (pretty thin – only 3/8″) on top of the plaster between the contertop and the bottom of the cabinets. What is it with layers upon layers of stuff in old houses? Our kitchen floor – ceramic tile on top of lino on top of plywood subfloor on top of old lino tiles on top of plywood subfloor on top of the original hardwood – almost an inch thick total! Anyway, I digress.

So we removed the flourescent yellow plastic (!) tile that was the backsplash, then we ripped out the drywall that was under the tile. No big deal so far; not too much of that evil OHSC – yet. Now it’s time to pull out the electrical outlet, which was a GFCI but apparently wasn’t wired properly, as the GFCI part wasn’t functional. So, we shut off breaker #2 which just happens to have most of the house on it, including the refrigerator, and I pull the outlet out to see what was up.

You know how you always (I do anyway) try to think of the worst case scenario, then when it’s better than that, you’re happy and when it’s the worst case, you’re prepared for it? Well, I thought the worst case scenario was that it would be the old, original knob and tube wiring still. No, it had been updated, except that the wire had the outer housing stripped back quite a ways and had been pulled through the metal box, presumably when they put it in) and BOTH the neutral and hot wires were nicked and exposed quite a bit from being pulled through the sharp opening in the box.

So, it was time to re-wire the kitchen. Not something that I had been planning on for Sunday. As with everything like this, in the end it’ll better, and we’ll know that the wiring is safe, but STILL, can’t something be easy?? Stay tuned for Part 3, which may come later today – you’ll find out about our adventures with lower cabinets that were “custom built” 2 inches deeper than standard. In the mean time, here are some photos of the kitchen before and as it is currently.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 7:09 am and is filed under Kitchen, Our House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.