We did demolition on the whole rest of the house a few weekends ago. Thank goodness for the long weekend, as we needed every moment of it. I wanted it to be like HGTV, where you pause and blink on the demo and you are on to picking the backsplash. I was missing the cast of thousands they have working on the demo for that to happen, I had my loving husband and my devoted mother-in-law and I have to say we did an amazing job.
The kitchen we are replacing was original for the 1960’s that was ‘updated’ by the sellers with some eggplant purple rustoleum spray paint and a very uneven backsplash. What we found was priceless.
Now I have never the opportunity to remove a kitchen nor do I know anything about what that entails. “How hard can it be to take something out?”, me at 8 AM. 6PM me had a few other choice words.

There were gas lines, water to disconnect, nails to step on and a serious amount of concrete and chicken wire to deal with. We started with what seemed like the best idea, remove the doors.

The rest of the demo was not as easy as the doors. We have been clever enough to hire a professional for such simple tasks as relocating gas lines and properly venting the oven through the roof. Basically, things we know nothing about nor are interested in reading the code about. Now there was no actual plan for how to take this down so here it goes in pictures.
We disconnected the hood.
Remarked on how lovely the wallpaper from the 1960’s was.
Cleaned out the gross stuff the old owners left. This made my husband super happy about our purchase.
Removed the wall oven. This was a special discovery as it is was just vented through the cabinet to what had been the refrigerator. Luckily, our contractor had stopped by and was able to confirm that was not up to code and help us safely remove the gas line while we all agreed it was luck the house was still standing.
Removed the water filter, which they had running from a line in the garage and just drilled through the floor to get it into the kitchen. Also up to code.

The air chisel made a re-appearance for this project but was not as effective as we wanted so we went to my favorite the sledge-hammer. It was cheaper than therapy and a better workout. 
After lunch we went after the cabinets, again with no plan. I am sure there are teams of people with crack plans on how to take out kitchen who get it done in like an hour. We were decidedly winging it. The chisel and hammer seemed to work best for us.
At this point I was mad. Mad about the kitchen, mad about the process of getting the house and the mess it was. This was supposed to be my dream house. So I did what every self-respecting girl from the mid-west would do. I told my husband to stand back and channeled by angst out on some 1960 tile. It was amazing.

I ended up taking the cabinets out below the counter and brought it down from the top. It felt good. It felt really good.
Things I had not thought through. All these items needed to be moved outside the kitchen and would need to be disposed of. My observations, concrete is heavy even in small amounts and chicken wire it very sharp. Will get that corrected the next time I renovate a kitchen.
The last piece.

9 hours later victory and a very empty kitchen was ours.
Now onto weeks without a kitchen. Happy PB&J Tuesdays.
Here we go.