Post 5: Demoing the Kitchen

After scraping the wallpaper on the rest of the first floor, and thinking I could save the plaster walls in the kitchen, I set my sights on taking out the disgusting vinyl tile floor to prepare for building the kitchen back up.  This turned out to be only the first of several steps (still not completed).  

Let's look back to the kitchen as it was when the house was purchased, but had been cleared out shortly after I bought it:

With a blank slate, we decided to start on the floor, and Brian (hubs) was available to help me. Here's a video:

So we thought...we'll take up the floor, cover the walls with drywall, and be off to the races.  Ha.

After taking up the floor, we realized that covering what was left with drywall would result in uneven walls that would exceed the plane of the existing openings. This left us with no choice but to take all the plaster and lathe out of the kitchen. It wasn't hard, but it was messy. Here's another video:

And I'm actually really glad that we were forced to remove all of that. There isn't any insulation in this house, which is so awful, and this will give us a chance to insulate (at least in the kitchen) and put in some additional outlets.  There is some modern wiring here and there throughout the house, but there is a lot of knob and tube left.  But the kitchen looks great now and drywalling can begin soon.

One fun find was an inspection sticker from 1924 on the heating duct in the walls of the kitchen. As soon as I touched it, it felt apart, but here's what's left: