KITCHEN TILE AND COUNTERTOP DEMOLITION! ASH SMASH!

Demolition is awesome! Demo could possibly be my most favorite part of DIY projects besides the end result. I love to bust stuff up. You can get an awesome workout from hauling stuff and swinging a sledgehammer. You can take out anger, frustration or a strong hatred of 2×2 and 1×1 countertop tile that you have to vacuum to clean it..like me.

As a reminder here is the before picture of our kitchen. The first part of the kitchen reno is to remove the countertop, backsplash, and chair rail.

Warning. Warning. Cautionary tale here. Tile and drywall make a ton of dust! Like we still have dust in our house from this project. We blocked off all of the vents so dust couldn’t migrate to other areas of the house. Still…Dust get everywhere. Make friends with your Shop-Vac. Be prepared. This has been a public service announcement.

So we started by trying to demo the countertop. Trying is the key term. We determined very quickly that the tile was grouted to a backer that was screwed into the existing laminate countertop that as screwed to the cabinets in spots that we couldn’t see. Here comes the pry bar and the mallet! One of the only good things with this demo is that the tile backer wasn’t secured to the laminate countertop well so the tile came out in large pieces. We were then able to get the screws from the tile backer out and find the screws for the existing countertop so we could detach it from the cabinets.

So we got the countertop tile off. We decided after taking the under the tile laminate counter off that we should keep it loose on top of the cabinets so that all of the backsplash tile wouldn’t fall into the base cabinets and cause an even bigger mess.

The backsplash almost killed me. Our house was built in 1954. I think that was the first transition between lath and plaster and the more modern gypsum board that we use today. First we determined that there was a ridiculous amount of grout on these 1×1 mosaic tiles. We thought we were going to be able to save the wall and not go back to the studs. Wrong. Big mistake. Huge. The original gyp board had a troweled on cementitious coating that bonded to the tile. The whole wall came right off with the tile when you hit it with a hammer!

We ended up taking the whole backsplash are down to the studs. I got really good at installing gyp at uncomfortable angles and mudding it to blend it with the existing gyp. Not the same depth as old wall gyp either…so that was fun.

During the backsplash demo we found some funny things. One of them is the capped switch for the exhaust fan that we couldn’t figure out how to turn on. We uninstalled an over the range microwave and there it was!

We also removed a chair rail that was on the two walls that didn’t have cabinets. This showed me how many times the room had been painted because I had to take a orbital sander to the wall to blend in wall where the chair rail is gone with the existing brown wall.

Our kitchen has been painted a bunch of different paint colors from over the years. I think at one point the kitchen was painted yellow. We found yellow, brown, white, and blue at least. Its cool to think about all of the other families that have taken the time to freshen up the kitchen over the years. We didn’t find any wallpaper so either the kitchen never had it or someone was nice enough to put in the sweat equity for us and took it down prior to us owning the house.

 

We saved as much of the existing walls as we could. I had fun patching the large portions of gyp board. I have a new respect for the art that is the fine finish of drywall. It takes a lot of precision and patience to get the piece to be smooth and look seamless. I got super sore trying to finish the new drywall under the upper cabinets. It is extremely difficult to contort your body into the right position to get it perfect. It took me 4 rounds of applying the mud, smoothing, and sanding to get it right.

Now on to sanding cabinets! Stay tuned for the next step…turning the tan cabinets to a bright white!