Getting to Mexico 1 - the kitchen

How to describe the month before we left Portland? Hectic.

We had decided to remodel the kitchen at our house, figuring that with Luis' experience in dry wall and my experience in cabinetry, it would be.... not easy, but not overly difficult either. The first step was pulling the old cabinets and flooring out. Until we pulled the countertop off, I considered keeping the same cabinets, just updating the doors. Then the countertop came off and exposed the cheap building process that had been used. I couldn't, in all good conscience, put those cabinets back in. So out they went into the back yard, and a call was made to the Rebuilding Center which is a local company which promotes reusing materials pulled from houses. They came and took all but one of the cabinets - the one having suffered from rain damage while in the back yard, and further damage by one of their employees when he was moving it.

Next was the old wall board. I went to work one day (I was working my day job throughout all of this) and Luis tore the walls out of the kitchen. What remained was old insulation in the ceiling, tongue and groove siding on three of the walls, and what appeared to be external siding on one wall. There wasn't a bit of insulation to be found in the walls, which is common for a house built in 1897. Ever since I had purchased the house, I had assumed that the kitchen had been added to the original structure at some point. But we found out that it was original and had probably been a porch. The floor had a distinct slant away from the back of the house, which a porch would have had to keep the rain draining away from the house. We also found newspaper (a common insulator at that time) on one wall with a date of 1897. We cut one board out and saved it, the rest was unsalvageable, and pulled all the tongue and groove off the walls.

We carefully took a bit of subfloor off to see what was underneath it. We found what appeared to be wide fir boards. Man, we were excited about that. We had been planning on tiling the kitchen, but now we could sand and refinish old growth fir, original to the house! The next piece of subfloor we pulled up exposed a hole that had burned through the floor when the house had suffered a fire some years ago. (The fire wasn't a surprise, i had known about it since I had purchased the house.) Instead of patching and fixing the hole, someone had put the subflooring on and then put awful laminate over that, which is what I had inherited.

So we had to pull the whole floor up, down to the joists. I came home one day to no walls and no floors in our kitchen. Truly gutted. Luis decided that while we had access to the joists we should level out the floor and insulate it too. That took a few days, but we (he, really) got it done. Then he drywalled, taped, textured, primed and painted the whole room.



A few days later we went up to the Rebuilding Center to see if they had any used cabinets that were in better shape than ours, and within a reasonable budget. No go. But we found a fresh pile of old growth fir flooring that had just arrived that day. It was reasonably clean, and would look better in the kitchen than the tile options offered at Home Depot. It was also cheaper than tile. So we bought it and Luis brought it back to our house the next day where it sat, wet and slowly drying, in our Jeep Cherokee since there was no other place in the house to store it and it was still raining outside.



We ended up finding a guy to install and refinish the flooring. While he was at it, we decided it would make sense for him to also sand and refinish the back bedroom floor which had been painted at one point. And, heck, since you're here why don't you also refinish the maple flooring in the living room?! Basically we gave up the space of three of our five rooms in the house for a week. The cats were sequestered in our bedroom (along with their food and their litter box - ugh!), we brought the stove, dishwasher and futon couch into the bedroom too. It was snug.

When he was finally done, the floors looked great, but he was 3 days beyond his original finish date. We were supposed to stay off the floors for at least 24 hours, and be gentle to them for 48. Twenty minutes after he left we were moving stuff out of the bedroom. The floors stood up to the activity and we all stretched out a bit.

Now the pressure was on. We were leaving November 28th. My last day at work was November 23rd. We started to install the cabinets on November 19th. Somehow we actually got it all done.



Around midnight the 27th, we finished the install of a whole new kitchen. The dishwasher (which had been donated to me by a friend) didn't work, and the new garbage disposal sounded like it had a fork in it, but.... it was done.

The next day we packed all our stuff into the two cars (the Jeep and the Murano), put the bike rack on, then the bikes, and by 2pm we were on the road.

continued....