Alright… So… We got the floor to a good spot to get the rest of the kitchen ready for new floors and cabinets. They were still working on the electrical and plumbing at this point and I didn’t want to put new floors in while they were still tracking around a bunch of crap.

During the patching process I found some plaster pulling away from the chimney. I always knew there was brick under there but wasn’t ready to undertake the job of removing all of the plaster. I told my dad about it and he was all excited about it! I was more than willing to let him chisel away at the chimney because then I wasn’t responsible for any errors made that I would eventually have to ask him to fix anyway. 😂

IT. WAS. MESSY. We put up plastic over the doorways to try and contain most of the dust but it still got everywhere. Thankfully there wasn’t any furniture in there at the time, or anything for that matter. Definitely would recommend covering EVERYTHING before tackling any plaster removal in a home. You definitely need a mask which Dad learned after about the first five minutes. The only tools needed for this project were a chisel and a hammer. Seriously, that’s it. Dad brought his grinder but honestly it created a giant dust cloud and wasn’t any more efficient than the old fashioned way.

We filled the hole in with expanding foam insulation and covered it with a steel plate dad had made.

I had plans for the icky wall that needed excessive amounts of patchwork. We were covering it with shiplap. Dad had never heard of shiplap. I repeat, my dad had NEVER HEARD OF SHIPLAP! Has he been living under a rock?! I explained and showed pictures, so naturally, my dad’s little engineering mind went into overdrive and he took over that project.

Patching the walls was no simple task, but we were covering most of it with beadboard and shiplap, so it was a good way to practice for future projects. After some trial and error I figured out my favorite combination for patching larger areas. Joint compound and plaster of paris. I get as much as I can from Walmart’s home improvement section because, well, it’s cheaper and it’s the same as the stuff in the home improvement store. Putty knives, painters tape, joint compound, plaster, mineral spirits, cleaning supplies, gloves, all of it comes from Walmart, and it’s cheaper by a few bucks here and there. To me, it’s worth it. I spend my money on good paint, paint brushes, and things that are not disposable.

For my “skim coat” which essentially is just covering large areas where thirty layers of paint used to reside, is a mixture of products. I don’t have exact measurements but I usually start with a scoop of the joint compound, not spackle, spackle won’t hold up over large areas. Also, I tried the powder joint compound and that was way too hard to manage because it dries too fast. So, a scoop of the joint compound and then I throw in the powdered plaster of paris, equal to about 1/4 of the amount of joint compound. I slowly add water and mix it until smooth with my putty knife. Depending on the amount of area I needed to cover determined how much water I wanted to add. The larger the area, the thinner I made the mixture because you will need to do multiple layers of the skim coat to get everything level and even. I have a large section in my living room that will need to be patched as well so hopefully I can get some more pictures and a more detailed post on it later. I like the fact that the plaster of paris makes it hard like the original plaster, it just felt different than using regular spackle or joint compound, it was smooth.

The picture on the left shows where the old shelving was. There were so many layers of paint between the shelves that there were dents where it used to hang. I had to smooth it out if I wanted it to look good painted. Spoiler alert: I turned out pretty good. Can barely tell that it was patched. Make sure you scrape/sand away any loose material on the walls before patching. Doesn’t hurt to wash it first either.

After everything was patched I used a mold killing primer(found at walmart by zinnser) on all of the walls. Was it overkill? Probably, but I wanted my kitchen to be clean.

Dad took over the shiplap project so I can’t give any insight to the process there other than the wood was from his property. He planed it and did something else to it. It’s red oak so for now I’m not painting it because I like the way it looks with the brick. That’s all I got on that project. After the shiplap was put up dad caulked around the chimney to seal everything up.

I think the finished product looks pretty good! What do ya’ll think?

The demo continues….

We cleaned up all the NUTS as featured in the last post and kept on ripping out the old and grungy. The old lower cabinets were out and next was the old sub floor with the stick on tile. That is where we found the old original hardwoods and a lovely deteriorating layer of linoleum. Unfortunately they were beyond repair due to previous water damage. What was really interesting, and fun, about the old hardwoods was that they still had the square nail heads that were individually hammered into the subflooring. They were a b**** to get out, and poor Josh was out of commission for a few days after our demo day. I was hauling all of the debris out of the kitchen as he was breaking it all down, so I felt pretty good. 😎

We were hoping the water damage wasn’t too bad underneath the hardwoods but Josh learned the hard way that we were going to need to do some repair there as well.

TA DA! Josh’s leg went straight through the floor! Thankfully he wasn’t hurt!

I continued to clean everything up after we cleared out all of the debris. I sprayed some bleach water mix EVERYWHERE. There was old mold I scrubbed away, and I vacuumed the whole area probably 600 times. The baseboards were beyond saving. The random shelves on the wall to the left in the picture above were removed (not easily) as well as the shelves that were above the washer. This was all part of my kitchen rearrangement. I wanted the fridge to go where the washing machine was, and I wanted an L-shaped kitchen space. I didn’t want any upper cabinets on the walls that didn’t have any already, mainly to keep the space less cluttered looking. I can find storage in other parts of the house for kitchen stuff. I just thought uppers would have been too cramped for the space and placement would have been difficult since I wanted to keep the original cabinets above the sink.

Back to the floors… Everything was cleaned up and ready for repairs. Josh repaired the sub floor with some deck boards that we picked up from the home improvement store and then we secured some plywood that was approved for subflooring.

There she is! A walkable surface! 🤪

I promise I will get into more “tutorial” style posts as this goes on. I’m back tracking from where I started so I don’t have a lot of step-by-step pictures. I’m trying to keep the posts short and easy to read because I hate long drawn out posts myself. Ask me any questions that you may have!