2022 Spring One Room Challenge Week 3 | Vintage Red Kitchen

Man oh man, do I have an update for you! If you thought last week was boring, buckle your britches because this week was an absolute whirlwind.

We left off last week with hopes of installing butcher block countertops and cabinet handles. Little did we know, this project was about to take a drastic turn. To install countertops, we first needed to mount the cabinets to the walls. And to mount the cabinets to the walls, we needed to remove baseboards. Keep in mind that we are installing a kitchen where there wasn’t one before, so baseboards were still very much intact.

As we attempted to pry the baseboards away from the walls, the entire wall begin to come out with them. It was then that we realized that there was very extensive rot and damage to the lower portion of this wall. We could not move any further without repairing the damage, which we would soon find out continued into the water closet on the other side of the wall.

A few major points before I continue:

1. We are professionals who own a home remodeling company, which is the only reason we feel comfortable tackling this damaged wall in our own home. If you run into something like this in your home and don’t know what to do, we highly recommend calling in a professional for help. Better safe than sorry!
2. Always be wary of mold in a situation where there is extensive rot and water damage. Thankfully, we did not run into any mold. Just very, VERY rotted wood the consistency of potting soil.
3. This wall is non-load-bearing, which essentially means it is more of a partition wall than anything. It does not provide any support to the building whatsoever. If this had been a support wall, it would have been a much more serious issue.

The further we tore into this wall, the more issues we began to uncover. There had been years worth of plumbing leaks underneath the platform floor in the water closet. We are grateful that we found this issue before it got any worse. Unfortunately, however, this did set the kitchen renovation back by a few days as we repaired all of the damage.

It was never our plan for this project to be able to see into the water closet from the kitchen, but life happens and old buildings definitely aren’t perfect. We have learned to roll with the punches, and in this scenario, the punches included totally rebuilding the flooring for the water closet, repairing the plumbing, and re-framing the kitchen wall.

Now that things are FINALLY getting back on track, we are looking forward to installing a backsplash, butcher block, cabinet handles, and the oven hood vent within the next week. Stay tuned and don’t forget to check out the other Spring 2022 One Room Challenge rooms at the link below!

xoxo

Kate