Kitchen Entry Makeover – Day 1 – Demolition

If you’ve been following me on Instagram or Facebook, you know I’ve been working on a kitchen entry makeover. I didn’t plan on taking a multiple-week detour from my studio project.  I planned on spending one day on this little makeover.  I kid you not!  But, as projects seem to do around here, this one it just kept growing and growing once I got started.  It started when I decided to tear out the bench I previously built.

Remember the kitchen entrance I added while building my kitchen? Originally this little “mudroom” was a doorway into the dining room and there was just a window looking out toward the driveway.  I closed off the dining room doorway and replaced the window with a door.

Then I built the bench area which is our “drop zone” in addition to where we keep the dog supplies.  I consulted the whole family before building this area because I was torn between doing a bench or a kitchen height cabinet.  We all decided a bench would be most useful so we could have somewhere to sit while we put on our shoes and put the dogs’ leashes on before walks.

Well, this is what the bench looks like 99% of the time.  It has been used for “sitting on” — precisely zero times.

I don’t want to store dog food in the pantry so here it sits.  We’re all too lazy to open the door and walk the extra 5 feet to the recycling sorter I built for the side porch.

(Speaking of the side porch, that is a WHOLE other project with it’s own special problems.  I’ll tell you about that later.)

Back to the bench.  I got sick of looking at the mess and decided to just to spend a day doing a little kitchen entry makeover.  My plan is to pull out the bench and replace it with a cabinet.  Easy peasy.

I started by clearing everything out!

Kitchen Entry Makeover  #DemoDay

My Trim Puller came in handy for all the demo which started with removing the board with the cute little doggy themed hooks.  These are actually drawer pulls.  

Turns out drawer pulls are not a good idea to use for hooks on a board that you permanently secure to the wall.  Because you screw them in from the back of the board, if they fall off you can’t access the back to re-secure them!  (Another reason I wanted to tear into this kitchen entry makeover.)

Then I removed a few rows of my planks to make removing the bench easier.  I removed them up to the height where the new cabinet would sit.

I had installed the door trim after installing my bench — so in order to slide the bench out I had to pull the door trim off.

The bottom door hinge was also in the way so I had to remove that too.

After all that, I finally pulled the friggin’ bench out!

I’ll leave the base in place and use it for the cabinet I’m planning to build.

I figured I could re-use some of the plywood so I did my best to disassemble the bench as gently as possible.

I was able to salvage the top and bottom pieces.  The wood glue that I used when building the bench really did it’s job — so there was some damage.  I’ll just flip it over and use the other side to build the cabinet.

Next post:  Kitchen Entry Cabinet.