Pepper Design Blog

Week 2 of the New Kitchen: Time for New Walls!

Week two of building-a-kitchen-from-scratch is coming to a close… this week we made progress on the electrical work, reframing of main wall, addition of sheetrock and installation of a new whole-house fan – and it looks great!

See ‘before’ den pictures and a break down of week one here.

I’m so proud of Kevin – it has been his week! He’s on fire. As an architecture student that loves to get his hands dirty, this kitchen has been his baby from the start. With the exception of the electrical work he’s completed 99% of the project on his own (don’t worry, he has experience working on all of the above) and his buddies have been more than helpful.

Let’s take a look:

Day 7, 8 & 9: Install electrical wiring for kitchen outlets and appliances, put can lights and pendant lighting up and install switches. Clear out old framing material (see those thin wood strips lining the walls? Our home has original lithe and plaster walls – some of which badly needs replacing).

Install whole-house attic fan (we live in a temperate climate that calls for AC only a few weeks out of the year. This new fan circulates air in the attic and can cool the entire house down in minutes – plus it saves major dinero since we’re not running the air conditioning all summer long). Our cabinets have arrived too! There they are in that middle picture, all stacked and ready for install.

Day 10, 11 & 12: Install insulation (believe it or not none of the house is insulated, it’s too old. This will be the first room!). Put sheetrock up along walls, and finally up on the ceiling.

12 days down and we are on time and on budget to complete the new kitchen by October 1.

Next up: have tile delivered, order selected counter tops (Hanstone quartz counter tops in Tiffany Grey) and pick out backsplash for behind the counters.

We’re taking the weekend off from construction and heading out to Arizona for a baby shower with Kevin’s family – Happy Thursday!

First 6 Days of the New Kitchen: Demo Time!

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this day for over two years… we are demoing our beloved little home (at least a decent portion of it) to make way for a DIY kitchen, bath and master bedroom.

Step 1 is the kitchen. Last week sledge hammers were swung and {huge!} holes were left behind.

We decided to go the unconventional route of building our new kitchen in one of the old bedrooms. The previous owners had turned this bedroom into a den of sorts which has sat unused by us since we had purchased the home (we never did need a second living room area and the walls to recreate a bedroom had already been moved). Plus, our current kitchen is a teeny 10×10′ space and we loved the idea of building one from scratch.

Here’s what the back room looked like before we moved in:

This room sits in the very far left corner of the house with easy access to the backyard and our newly renovated outdoor bbq area so it was an ideal location to transition a kitchen into.

To make it a bit easier on the eyes  right after we moved in {read: not so dark and dingy} we painted the walls white and tore up that rainbow striped carpeting right away.

But then it sat… and sat… and those poor original wood floors just collected more dust. The ‘kitchen’ project was moved to the bottom of the list as we saved our pennies and finished more immediate updates. We did, after all, have a wee little kitchen in the other room.

And then the glorious day came when we decided it was time!! Here’s our first six days in action…

The paneling came off first… and then the lithe and plaster revealed not-so-pretty framing that has sadly not lasted the test of time. This was going to be a bigger job than imagined.

Next up was to knock monster-sized holes in each corner wall. We had a team of boys over here for hours – I think they loved every minute of it.

Large window panels and sliding doors eventually filled those holes to create a new ‘outdoor-indoor’ feature to the kitchen. Since our kitchen would now sit directly next to the outdoor bbq area, we wanted to be able to open both doors and create a functioning outdoor-indoor space for entertaining.

Day six took a break from demo while we waited on electrical work to get caught up. Instead, here’s Kevin re-plumbing the entire kitchen to get ‘er ready to go. {That’s Kevin under the floor – and Bodie finding the one hole where he can hear Kev’s voice. Such a loyal dog.}

And now you’re caught up! Putting together the inspiration board now… we still have many choices to make in the flooring, lighting and tiling departments but it’s an exciting process. Hmmm, maybe minus the layer of dust in every other room of the house.