Weekend Update (minus Tina Fey)

Several steps of our kitchen process were not documented on the blog, so in this post you'll see two steps we took that were not previously documented. Here we go:

Insulation Install


After we tore down the '50s motif wall paneling, we discovered that the current insulation was pretty nasty. We should have expected it I suppose, since our house is old and hasn't been updated in decades. When we pulled it out we found most of it was flat and starting to deteriorate. I'm also pretty sure the pellets I found belonged to a rodent at some point in time. I can't find the pictures I took of the process but here are a couple of the new, fluffy insulation:

This is an interior wall that was previously an exterior wall. We removed the insulation from this wall, and Andrew started work on the electrical. 

Turning a window into a door


When Andrew and I first talked about redoing the kitchen, we couldn't decide what to do with the large window. You can see it in this picture back behind Sherpa.

To the left of this window was the door out to the deck. It and the basement door opened into one another--a small problem but not one that we initially felt we should address.

As we made plans and had the fabulous Rachel Whitehurst draw up plans for us, we talked about maybe putting in a smaller window. That way we could possibly put counters underneath it or put a bookcase or something else. Rachel drew up a plan with the same size window and one with a smaller one. We finally decided to just leave it the way it was.

That was until we were at the Bargain Outlet (where we purchased our beautiful cabinets for $3,000-5,000 less than our other estimates) and saw some sliding glass doors for pretty reasonable prices. We decided to buy one and get rid of the window. The decision also solved the problem of the basement door opening into the deck door--we'd just board up the deck door.

We finally had a sunny afternoon so Andrew and our neighbor Vinnie put in the new door. Andrew started by removing the siding on the outside of the house.

He took out the window and then cut a larger hole in the house.

Then Vinnie got here, and he and Andrew put in our door. They built some supports above the door, too, but I don't remember what they're called :)

Here's a view of the door from the outside:

While we were at it, we replaced the other kitchen window with a newer, more energy efficient window:

We finished up the day by caulking around the new door and window. It's not the first time I've done this, but I'm not fabulous at it as you can see by the gobs of caulk on the floor: