Kitchen Demo Surprises

So the past few days have been filled with demo-ing the kitchen. At times you think you can just take a sledge hammer to the whole thing and it will be complete in a few hours. But at other times, we seem way in over our heads. Deconstructing an old house is definitely a learning process for two commercially trained architects. Here are a few before demo photos

The first little surprise came with the trim tile along the kitchen tile. I love these little pencil rail tiles that you prominently see in post art deco homes. I had envisioned saving these tiles and making something with them, maybe lining the matte of a framed sketch of the home. When I came to remove the tile from the wall, I then realized that the tiles themselves were embedded in concrete and the plaster filled in around the tiles. There was no saving of these tiles.

The next little fun surprise came with removing the tile from the floor. We had known that the kitchen floor was significantly higher than the surrounding floor. It wasn't until removing the multiple layers that we knew what lay below. From top to bottom there was a layer of tile, plywood, MDF, linoleum, a backer layer, and a wood floor. It was really interesting to see the red trimmed linoleum floor. But nonetheless it is all coming out!

And the last, not so little surprise, was the duct work running through the wall we are removing. We had previously guessed that there was a supply duct for the kitchen running through the wall and two return ducts from two separate upstairs bedrooms traversing through the kitchen. Little did we know that there was another supply duct running through the wall to the upstairs bedroom. While not a catastrophe it does change our initial kitchen plans.

Currently we don't have a solution until we can get a HVAC contractor out to look at the house. In the mean time, we have a few options to work around the problem. One being to leave the duct in the wall and scrap removing it all together (not going to happen). Another being to possibly move the duct, shift the planned island, and add some additional cabinetry. The last being abandon the duct and add a complete separate unit to the third bedroom, probably our least favorite choice. We will keep you posted on the outcome!