More destruction

Unfortunately--but in hindsight not surprisingly--we've had to do a little more demolition of the cabinets than we'd planned. They're 80 years old and had been assembled off-site before being installed, which means that they've been difficult to disassemble and quite delicate. This translates into having to disassemble 4 boards just to remove 1, and possibly breaking one in the process. Also, for some reason, there were pine tongue-and-groove floorboards in the cabinets, identical to the kitchen floorboards and sitting about 2 inches above them. ??? I have no idea why. We ended up sawing them off while leaving them in place, because the only other way to get them out would be to take apart the entire cabinet. They needed to be removed because the dishwasher installation guide makes a point of saying that the floor under the DW must be at the same level as the rest of the floor.

Our dishwasher arrived in one piece, though, and it looks like it's going to be really great. We briefly contemplated buying a new fridge, too, to take advantage of the Memorial Day sale at Sears. During our home inspection, our inspectors estimated that our current fridge is about 15 years old and could die at any time. It also probably takes as much energy to operate as a small freight train, which is what it sounds like when it kicks on. In the end, we had our choices narrowed down to two but decided that we should probably wait just a little longer, for the sake of our pocketbooks.

Anyhow, here's the current progress of our kitchen:

[left] Our progress by the end of Friday: the sink was out (and is now sitting in our back yard), the counter was off, and some parts of the cabinets were removed to make room for the dishwasher. After the countertop was off, we found some pieces of cardboard that had been placed between it and the wall, and one of the pieces had an old mailing label on it which said "10/18/1953". I love it when we find things like that! That takes the guesswork out of when the counter had been installed, more or less. [right] On Saturday, we accomplished more demolition of the cabinets, which revealed some areas of water-damaged plaster. B. is in charge of drawing up the plans for the new dishwasher spot, and I'm in charge of patching the plaster wall.

Just for kicks, we slid the dishwasher into it's future spot after our long day yesterday, just to see what it looked like and whether it would work. After all of our work, it fits fine. Now we just have to rebuild the cabinets! (And have it done by Wednesday, when the soapstone countertop templaters are here.)