Before

We are now 12 days into our remodel, and I'm looking at these before pictures vacillating between, "Thank God that crap is all gone!" or "Oh, I remember when we used to have a kitchen! We could eat hot food then! And we didn't have to wash dishes in Maggie's bathtub! And the laundry room!!! We used to wear clean clothes! And the office! We used to have a printer!"

Well, they weren't that good, truth be told. Here's a recap.

Coincidence that CHOKE rhymes with OAK? I think not.

If this little tile tableau was not on the wall behind our dangerously unbalanced cooktop, the idea for the kitchen remodel might never have been hatched. But, spend a few years stirring spaghetti sauce and cooking up fried eggs looking at this little beauty and just try to keep yourself from spending thousands and thousands of dollars and risking months of familial stress to just MAKE IT GO AWAY.

Here, I've backed up a bit to show the triumverate of evil, ugliness and woeful inadequacy. From the top down, the cheapest "hood" known to man (the word "hood" must be used in quotation marks because it is only tangentially descriptive of the fanlike device above the cooktop). Moving down, the peasant picnic tilework. One worker has said, "Wow, someone spent alot of money on that." And he was serious. Different strokes, as they say. And finally, the cooktop that I believe was inspired by someone's trip to the South Pacific. Little, dangerously steep and uneven islands of fire arising from the Pacific Ocean of lovely tile countertop - ready to erupt at any moment to send a skillet of scrambled eggs tumbling ever so noisily onto the floor (and the cook). Surely, this area was the epicenter of all that was wrong with our kitchen. But, it was not by any means, the ONLY problem area. Moving on...

How is that oven hovering in space like that? Ours was clearly an antisocial wall oven - He didn't want any cabinets or counters nearby. Nope, he wanted to be by himself. Kind of like a wall flower, but hotter. But, not THAT hot, because no matter what temperature you set him at, he was always a bit of an underachiever. And then he'd lie about it. "You set me at 400? I'm at 400! Really! Don't you trust me?" NO I DON'T. That's why nobody wants to hang out around you - You're a liar. You are not a degree over 350.

And next to the oven is the pantry. It only had one remaining hollow core door when it was removed. Jay got mad one day, and the door lost. I don't think it put up much of a fight. Nice how that wall blocked off almost all access to the dining room from the kitchen, isn't it?

But, let's say you tried to make it into the dining room from the kitchen. You would have had to walk past Jay's wall art, a masterfully done paint transition that was created years ago with lots of patience, swearing and masking tape. I loved it. Sadly, it has been a casualty of the remodel. I fought to save it - to try to get it cut out and hung over the doorway to the laundry room/bathroom hall area. But, alas, it was directly over a stud and couldn't be removed. So, it's buried under a coat of Athenian Green paint. The green from the dining room now extends around the corner into the hall area.

By the way, nice floor, huh?

Here I am in the dining room - on the wall behind the wall oven/pantry in the kitchen. I am sitting in the "Jesus Niche." We named it that because the only thing we can think of that would go in there with any sense of purpose would be a 3-foot tall porcelain Jesus sculpture. Since we don't have one of those, we just took out the whole wall.

There's the dining room from the great room. I brought the table and chairs with me from a past life, and I am years removed from my old furniture in dark cherry phase. But, the feature about this dining set that sealed its fate was the fact that the table was 48 inches wide. The average dining table is more like 40 inches wide. This meant that if you happened to be the poor fool stuck in the middle seat on the left side of the table, here's hoping that you hadn't had too much wine... because if you had to relieve yourself in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, you might have had an issue trying to get out of the room. God forbid we ever had a fire during a holiday gathering. There would surely have been at least one death by familial trampling.

And, wouldn't wood floors look nice in the office? And, maybe built-in bookshelves instead of the Easter Island thing we've got going on? Do you see the Easter Island thing? A bunch of individual tall shelves looming over the room? And, is that more OAK I see? I do believe it is.

Basically, we've had some issues. And, we're figuring we might as well deal with as many as we can while we're all turned upside down in the middle of August. We have a grill, a garden hose and an outbuilding with most of the comforts of home. So, here we are. In this last photo, Jay is waiting for the "boys" to come on the first day. Demo is imminent. And there is tension in the air at our house. But, rest assured, demo happened and it was as if a gigantic cloud had lifted and we were off on our journey. More photos soon!