Kitchen make over - Post #2

Well as promised below is another update on the kitchen renovation.
To summarise the project started as a cabinet replacement and turned in to a full blown rebuild. I ended up taking down all the drywall, ceiling, floor and insulation.

In this post I will run you through the East wall (Garage side) of the house. This first image (Same as the first post) you can see our starting point. On the surface it doesn't look too bad, the cabinets were made from a pretty good quality and the doors are as solid as you can get but they were not the right type, colour or layout. After removing the bulkhead and peninsular cabinet, I was surprised to see that there was no vapour barrier or adequate insulation between the house and the garage. Not a good starting point. The amount of cold air that was coming into the house was huge which made keeping the area warm almost impossible and potentially very dangerous should any car exhaust fumes leak in. One thing to note is that our house has a wood burning fire place so we do get a fair amount of negative pressure in the house which makes this problem even worse.

This second image basically shows the wall prior to adding the insulation. To get this far was allot of work. All the electrical wiring had to be re-routed correctly, some of the old wiring was fed over some of the studs and there were a few crossed hot and neutrals. I did spend allot of time marking all the wires and making sure that I knew were all were fed from and to, once the spray foam was added I was glad I did it was worth the extra effort.

I also carefully measured where all the cabinets were to be installed so I could add 2x4's horizontally to take screws rather than trying to find studs once the drywall was fitted. I notched out all the walls to take these horizontal supports which is fine as the wall was made from 2x6's, I made sure that they were all fitted tightly to make sure that the structure wasn't compromised.

This next image shows the first sheet of drywall fitted to the wall, a huge mile stone in the project, its good to turn the corner and start the assembly process, you can see that my faithful helper was at hand all along the way.

Behind it you can see the spray foam insulation. Not the cheapest part of the project but I think its definitely the way to go. This was done by "Insta Insulation" they took about two hours to complete the job and after it was done we had to leave the house for 36 hours.

I used 12x4 sheets of drywall which makes perfect sense for a 12 x 12 kitchen, but they are not so easy to move around. That being said after a few sheets it did get much easier.

This final image shows the east wall fully drywalled and "mudded", not sure if that's a real word.

And once again my faithful helper not far away!

This image also shows the floor which as you can see is still to be done at this point. I wanted to leave that until closer to the end as dropping tools on a hardwood floor isn't a good idea, the floor has now been laid for around 6 months and I needn't have worried, it seems that the kids don't have the same concerns about dropping hard objects on a hardwood floor. At least it now has some character.

In the next post I will walk through the next stages of the project.

If anyone would like more details then let me know?

B...