The idea of a "green remodel" started after I got laid off. Yup. Me no workie. Which the "no workie" part was quickly leading to insanity with all the time at home and me being, well, restless.

I've been intending to remodel my kitchen, living and dining rooms now for over a year. I decided to make good on those intentions with all my new-found time. But with no job, I was forced to seek alternate ways to complete the project without spending a lot on materials.

So I came up with the notion of doing the remodel with used materials. All of our kitchen cabinets can be re-used, and Portland has an amazing resource, the Rebuilding Center, where I can buy most of the rest of the materials I need at 10-30% of market value.

There will, of course, be some items I will buy new, for example the counter-top granite. But the bulk of the materials from flooring to sheetrock to lumber to the kitchen cabinets I will seek from stuff I already have in my house or from the Rebuilding Center.

This blog charts my progress and will log all my expenses along the way. Hopefully this experiment will be a good example that you can learn from for your own future projects. To learn more about my project plans, click here.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Day 2

Day 2, still demolition, was more arduous than I anticipated and I accomplished about 1/3rd of what I wanted to do. But I conquered (yes I said conquered) the sauffets in the kitchen. The "arduous" part was because I discovered that they were actual structures of the ceiling. I thought they were built after the ceiling and attached to it, and would be relatively easy to remove. But as you can see below, they left behind some gaping holes. Thank goodness for sledge hammers!!




I also started working on a new set of floor cabinets for next to the fridge. I'm making them from other cabinets that I won't be using. For example, in the picture below you see what used to be the lazy suzan corner cabinet in our U-shaped kitchen. I've stripped down all but the facia and the sides, and will fashion a new cabinet from it. Using that plus what used to be a wall-mounted one (sitting in the background of the pic), I'll have 42 inches of cabinets for next to the fridge.




We ripped this corner cabinet out because Camila hates the little garage thingy at the bottom. I'm going to cut it off and reinstall the upper portion of the cabinet. This cabinet sits next to the sink, and you can see that over the years, water that got on the countertops has already started to rot the wood, so this was a good move.


Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)