Kelly Clarkson sang this so well and could easily adopt this song for the kitchen remodel project that I took on.  The friend I did the mirror frame for, Vicki, has a great deal of faith and belief in my skills.  She is one of my greatest cheerleaders and just before New Year asked if she could give my number to a friend from church who needed some work done at her mother’s house.  I was flattered, said yes, and within a week went and met with Jackie at her mother’s house.  Two rooms needed attention, the bedroom and kitchen.

The bedroom just needs painting, but the walls and ceilings were severely peeling and in need of patching in many areas.  After showing pictures to my dad, he confirmed that there would be a lot of labor and time to get the walls paint ready, so I told her I couldn’t start the bedroom until after my house was ready.  MLK weekend I started work on the kitchen. I projected 4, full, days, maybe 5 to repair cabinets, paint, lay new peel and stick flooring, and replace the countertops.   I was off by about 3 weeks on the time frame.  I had not planned to post this project, so I did not take a lot of before or during pictures to share.

What could go wrong, went wrong with this project.  I started with the cabinet bottom.  After years of heavy items and dripping water the bottom was completely sagging, so I told her I could replace the bottom.  Piece of cake, I’ve done the same at mine and my neighbor’s house across the street.  Not in this case.  The floor underneath and wall behind many parts of cabinet did not exist.  Fortunately with the wall missing the stud was revealed, so I ended up taking a 1×4 piece of wood and nailing it the length of the back wall to create a ledge for the new bottom.  I then took scrap 2x4s from my house and screwed them perpendicular to the 1×4 and kick plate to create more support for the bottom.  The bottom I had to install in 4 sections, but we covered it with adhesive paper that overlapped the seems.  This simple project took most of one day, but turned out great.

The original plan was to apply the peel and stick flooring on top of the existing tile floor, but as I was working on the sink I realized that too many of the old floor were loose.  I told her I had no choice but to pull up the floor.  More time, but easy.  Well that was until I reached a patch of black mold in the center of the room.  I got all the tile up and went to Home Depot for a product to treat the mold.  I applied that and left for the day.  The next day I returned to find sections of the floor buckling.  Turns out the old tile was laid on top of 1/4″ plywood, which I had to remove also.  More time and not so easy.  My floor demo tools were at my house, so all I had was a 15″ crow bar.  My back and arms burned by the end of that day, but I got it all up.  Underneath the tile and plywood were at least two more layers of tile.  Fortunately they were adhered well enough that I decided to lay on top of that.  Removing the plywood forced the need to remove all the baseboard, which was not part of the original scope of work.

Three weeks of working on different aspects of the kitchen happened between taking up the floor and laying down the new floor, but the new floor looks wonderful.  The day I put the flooring down I started at 9am and did not leave until 8:15am the next day.  I had set that day as the day I was putting down the floor and refused to leave until it was done.

To be continued……………….

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