Demolition Derby

Finally, we're back to getting work done! It has been a while since we've done anything of consequence, little things here and there, of course, but not much real progress has happened since around mid January. Well the impetus for getting a move on was that our new kitchen cabinets were delivered about two weeks early! Our garage is now piled so high with boxes you can barely get through it.

As you can see, not much room left in the garage.

This past weekend we got a move on with ripping out the existing kitchen. We hired a friend of a friend, Dave, to help us with the demo and rebuilding. Dave used build houses for Habitat for Humanity, and has remodeled much of his own home. He is an aspiring teacher who's having a hard time landing a job with the economy being in the tank and all, so we figured why should we have all the fun with this project? Let's spread the love.

So with Dave's help on Monday I demolished what was left of our kitchen. We took down about 1,000 lbs of sheet rock and plaster, knocked down some studs and opened the whole thing up.

This is what it looked like while we were ripping down the sheet rock. Yes we wore masks. Our whole house is covered in a thin film of dust.

Dave brought his trailer over so we could make a run to the dump to unload all the drywall (I wasn't kidding about the 1,000 lbs of plaster, it cost about $60 to dump it all). If you've never been to the dump, you should go; it's an interesting place to go to get perspective (unfortunately I didn't bring my camera along, but just picture piles and piles and trash). For me it brought up issues about how we use things, and how we produce things, and just how wasteful our society is.

We have this linear system which extracts materials from nature and transforms them into "disposable" commodities, and at each step of the process we emit toxins into our air and water supplies. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. I could probably write for hours on this topic, but I'll save that for another forum. If you want to explore the issue more, check out the book Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.

In the mean time, back at the ranch walls have been removed, wiring exposed, plumbing ripped out to make way for what will be our new kitchen/dinning/living great room. We had an electrician come by yesterday to give us an estimate and some ideas. He might be starting as early as tomorrow while Dave continues to reshape the bones of our kitchen and gets started on our plumbing. The ball is rolling, we are on our way. We'll keep you all posted on the progress.