Bunker Hill Remodel: D-day turned into D-week...

Demolition. You'd think it would be easy to just break everything out of the kitchen with a sledgehammer and voilá.. but no.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the demo part was pretty easy just slamming things out (especially for me because I was "actively participating" by watching with a glass of wine in hand at all times), but then we had to get all the parts OUT. I'm not sure why I didn't think about that part, but it was definitely hard work! In total, I think we took 2 full truck loads of debris to the dump. Cray.

So, we began the demo by taking off cabinet doors and the tiles off of the countertops. Basically, everyone took out some aggression slamming everything with a hammer! Brad's mom definitely had a great time!!

After the tiles were off the counters, we could rip the rest of the cabinets off too!! The cabinets were more difficult to remove than they should have been only because they were NAILED into the walls, not screwed in. For this reason, the boys were using crowbars and hammers to pull them down, rather than just an electric screw driver. They came off though!

Then we removed the ugly tile backsplash!!

I know it looks bad, BUT I am assured that it will only get better from here. The reason we have holes in the walls is because the tile was applied to the wall with that cement and when we pulled off the tile, the drywall came with it! For that reason, we decided to rip down and re-drywall everything so we will have completely new walls and we won't have to match the old texture. This should make it a little easier, actually! So to clear out all of the debris, we used small boxes (that way they weren't too heavy to carry to the truck) to fill the truck up. And as I said before, we dumped 2 FULL truck loads, which was about $20 for each, but was important for my sanity. All I want to do is dust... And sweep... And vacuum...

As the floor demo though, we rented a 37 pound demolition hammer from Home Depot because there was quickset under the tiles, cementing them down. The machine made the job A LOT easier for the boys and since Adam does floors for a living, he was our guy.

The most important thing to remember while using the machine is to wear eye, ear, and lung protection. The air became extremely dusty and it was actually painful to breathe in the house. Brad and Adam both wore respirators, gloves, ear plugs, and goggles while doing this and opened all the windows and doors.

If we had to do it again I would definitely go buy some fans to blow more of the air out of the house. Also, we moved most of the furniture into our bedroom to avoid dust, but if I had to do it again, I would just cover everything in plastic to make living easier..