It is a truth universally acknowledged...

... that every house blog (even one as crappy as this, updated on an apparently yearly basis) must have a kitchen redo.  A proper blog, of course, would take you through the blow by blows, but I've been too exhausted working on the kitchen to write about it.

When we bought the house last year, the kitchen looked like this:

Okay, so it's a bit dark for a north facing room, and the former owner is once again demonstrating her love for all shades of orange, but everything looked functional and reasonably nice and there was a very exciting hood thingy that started whizzing when you opened a cabinet.  Much chic-er than our old place!

After we moved in, some of its foibles became apparent--drawers that wouldn't open more than three inches, a basket system that would collapse if you dared to put oatmeal in it, a corner cabinet you couldn't really get into, an oven that sounded like a plane taking off.   You get the idea.  But I thought, "no biggie, we can live with this for a few years until we figure out what we want out of a kitchen."

Then, sometime around October, my helpmeet popped into my office and said, "When I left the house this morning, the kitchen floor was squishy."  "What do you mean by 'squishy'?"  "I don't know, squishy" (this is a man with a PhD, folks. And not in the natural sciences.)

I got home that day, anxious to investigate, and the floor was indeed squishy.  As in, water was squishing out of the rubber underlayment when you stepped on the laminate.  Whoops.

Water isn't one of those things you can ignore and just hope it goes away.  So I started pulling up the laminate, hoping the problem would be reasonably isolated and I could just mop up and go back to my semi-functional kitchen.  I pulled up more, and more, and more.  First the laminate came up.  And I realised the rubber underlayment was soaked through.  Then the rubber underlayment came up, and I realised the thin plywood underneath was pretty soaked as well.  Then I pulled up the plywood and discovered this:

Ah, bless the little charmers who put on our kitchen extension back in the 1980s some time.  Apparently they decided that using non-waterproof chipboard was an acceptable way to cut corners.  In a room that contains a sink, washing machine and dishwasher.  I touched that water-logged stuff and it crumbled like the sawdust that it is. Nothing says, "Hey, I'm ready for winter!" like a giant hole in your floor, am I right?

And thus began the great kitchen renovation of 2012-2013....

Scraping the woodwork

The woman who lived here before seemed to have a strange obsession with the colour orange. I'm not even sure she realised, but it's everywhere.  Apricot coloured drapes, rust coloured kitchen, peach roses.  And, my favourite, the pumpkin coloured bedroom.  Being more of a cool colours girl myself, the orange is making me a bit loopy.  The pumpkin coloured bedroom is a particular sore point.  But since my mama raised me right, I can't just throw a coat of my favourite paint up there and call it good.  No, I've got to do prep work.  Lots of prepwork.  And I have to do it properly, or the angels might weep.

The thing about prep work is that every job seems to lead to another job:  in order to paint the walls, I need to prepare and paint the woodwork.  In order to prepare and paint the woodwork, I need to get under the carpet. The best way to get under the carpet would be to remove it in anticipation of having the boards sanded and varnished.  Which probably means the SO will kill me.

Still, you've got to start somewhere, so I spent the day burning the paint off around the doorframe.  My trusty heatgun, plus a couple of paint scrapers and my exciting new profile sanders by my side.  It took forever, and I accidentally set off our house alarm (umm, yeah, we don't know the code.  And the neighbours want to be best friends with us now!).  But, the thing is, it is sort of starting to look okay.  On the downside, I've got five doorways upstairs, and I've only done half of one.  Uh oh...

The lady not only liked her orange, she liked her bronze effect trim on the skirting boards.

Almost there!  The cool thing here is that there's so much more definition to the woodwork now. To the left you can see the dreaded alarm panel, just waiting to wreak terror upon the townspeople.

The side of the door is sanded, the top isn't.  I tell myself you can tell the difference.  The alarm went off shortly after this and I lost my will to decorate.