Well, yesterday my kitchen ceased to be a kitchen. It is now an empty room with some future delusions of returning to kitchen-hood. I invited a crew of friends and family to help me destroy it, and from 2:00 to around 6:00, that’s exactly what we did.

There were crowbars and hammers and scrapers and a Sawz-all, (reciprocating saw – really useful!), and lots of muscle-power. People arrived gradually, and started by prying up anything that looked like it might be pry-able, some starting with the door casings and crown molding, and others assaulting the cabinet doors, and then the cabinets themselves. One friend showed up and immediately took on the task of scraping up the final layer of linoleum. And then there were 9 people in my kitchen, all intent on destruction. My mom and one of my friends soon decided that they’d be more useful giving me a jump-start on cabinet construction, and set up on the living room floor.

I’d had some thought that the cabinet hardware might be salvageable, but those tiny little screws were not about to budge – so door removal involved a good bit of brute force. I do have a nice stack of doors, though – good solid slabs of knotty pine that I can use for future construction projects. The cabinets were stick-built in place, so didn’t come down as complete objects, but rather as various chunks of wood with lots of pointy nails sticking out – we piled everything in the basement, and there’s quite a mountain of wood down there.

Once the molding was down, we started prying off paneling. It was solid, three-quarters of an inch thick, tongue and groove paneling. We now have a running joke that whoever installed this kitchen had a mortal fear of wood, and was convinced that if you didn’t nail it every 4 inches, it would leap off the wall and eat you. Or something. There were a lot of nails. Here, see how many nails/screws have come out of my kitchen – that’s from the floor, the paneling, and the cabinets, but there are also a lot of nails still in the wood we took down.

The upper cabinets came down fairly easily, and then it was time to take the sink out – luckily, the cutoffs on the pipes under the sink worked perfectly, so after turning those off, removing the drain pipes, and unscrewing two large screws and ten little undersink clips (this required me to lie on my back in the sink cabinet – I am so glad I’m not a plumber!), it lifted straight out. Daddy was happy.

Then it was time for the base cabinets. It turns out the Formica was glued, not nailed down, so the Sawzall became incredibly useful – by cutting off the tops of the cabinets, you could then take off the countertop, and deal with the cabinet body separately. Even so, the base cabinets were very firmly attached to the wall, and took some major prying to remove.

With the cabinets all out, the paneling was the last thing to finish – just before the end, we had a minor moment of drama when an outlet sparked – I was facing away from it at the time, but saw a flash, and it was described to me as “a mini firework.” So I went and turned off the breaker, and we disconnected that outlet entirely – I’ll end up with a new one anyway, since it used to be a countertop-height outlet, and it needs to be a floor-height one instead.

We did have an amusing moment at the very end where everyone was standing around watching one person work, because there just wasn’t space for more people to be useful. And then the final piece of paneling came down, and the pizza arrived just a few minutes later, so we sat around and had beer and pizza and admired the emptiness of the kitchen (which seems a lot bigger without anything in it!), and also admired the seven (!) cabinet boxes that got constructed while the rest of us were ripping things apart.

So the demolition party was deemed a success, with good friends and a really impressive outcome – this is what the room looks like today (after some serious sweeping up):

And my contractor’s coming at 7:30 tomorrow morning!