After a lot of early salvos, the kitchen war has finally begun.  First, let’s look in horror and disgust at the kitchen that was.  Painted 1980s particle board cabinets with rotted bottoms, dark blue peeling paint, and no flooring.  Not a pretty set of pictures.

Don’t look too long, you will hurt your eyes.  Granted the next set of images aren’t that much better.  I happily smashed cut and dragged out all the old cabinets, and peeled the various paint layers off.  At least it looks a lot brighter in there.

Most of the kitchen stuff and appliances had to be spirited away to back rooms and the porch.  What was left was the bare essentials.  I call it Kitchen Base Camp Alpha.

Next came the sanding of texture.  When the house was built, some kind of roll on orange peel texture was used.  In decades since installation it has turned to powder and sluffs off in chunks.  Every square inch of wall had to be sanded back to the drywall.  It was messy business.

Next came patching of various issue areas, priming, more patching of missed issues, and then two rounds of the brilliant blue/green color that was in the living room.

At this point I got a lot of plumbing and electrical fixtures changed, and even a bit of routing done to account for changes in cabinet location.  With the walls complete I could scrape the floor of any glues or gunks and get to tiling.  As usual odd walls and squareness issues confounded me, but I was able to stitch it together pretty well with the existing living room tile I did last Christmas break.

I could now work on the small pantry without any fear of getting in the way of cabinet installation.  It would give us a place to put back some of our boxed junk and help out in minor cooking adventures at Kitchen Base Camp.  I went with adjustable wire shelves and wired an under-cabinet light in the top that goes on with the lights over the stove.  Some basic molding happened on the inside, but most will wait till I can do everything after the cabinets are complete.

Until the cabinets get installed we got to move a few essentials back into the new area.  I call it Kitchen Base Camp Beta.