Major Change To Casa De Chaos

The work is never done here at Casa de Chaos!  It had been 1.5 years since we had made any major changes to Casa de Chaos, so we thought it was about time to start our next project!  And our next project.... the kitchen!  We're not done yet... so this will only be post one-of-a-few of the kitchen remodel, but I wanted to post some progress shots to make it easier for me to wait for it to be finished! (all "before" photos are from the first day we moved in)

To start, Dave tore out the white pantry cabinets... apparently I never took a photo of those directly, but you can see them in these photos- The cabinets on the right are the cabinets in question.  They were great for storage and I loved them... but we had a plan to make it even better!

  
Here are the cabinets from inside the kitchen.  You can see how removing them would open up the kitchen a bit!

 And "before" pictures of the cabinets and counters

 

After Dave ripped out the cabinets, we kept going and ripped everything out!  My dad came over and helped us remove one set of cabinets, leaving the counter intact and moving it to the garage, and Dave and I took the rest of the cabinets down before Dave began ripping out the floor... or rather, floors!  There were so many layers of floor under there it was quite ridiculous!

How, you ask, did we manage to do a kitchen remodel while living in the house with two small children?  Well, it wasn't easy!  We moved the fridge to the dining area, used the dining table as a counter, and folded up the treadmill and put some of the cabinets we removed in that corner and used it as our makeshift kitchen.

I hated not having a kitchen!  We ate out a lot, and ate a lot of quick microwave meals on paper plates and plastic utensils.  It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though it did get old!  I thought it was going to be more stressful than it was, but we managed ended up being so busy during most of the remodel that it wasn't that hard to keep the boys out of the kitchen and out of Dave's way.  The hardest part was when Dave needed my help, since Sam doesn't let me out of his 3 ft radius and he really was not happy when I had to put him down in order to help Dave.  He never did accept the safety gate we put up to keep him out of the kitchen... not if I was on one side and he was on the other!  There was a lot of this going on (taken with my cell phone)... 

... with crocodile tears if I was in there without him!  He did enjoy watching Dave work, though.