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....