The Bonus Kitchen

The bit where we broke the bench.
When we move into our house we will be immediately ripping out the filthy kitchen, bathroom and laundry to make way for a new back half of the house. Initially we were planning to buy a cheap, secondhand kitchen to install temporarily until the structural work is done and the shiny, pretty, complete-with-dishwasher kitchen is ready to go in. 

But... we are lucky enough to have a friend who is renovating his apartment and getting rid of his kitchen, and who was happy for us to take out his current quoite noice kitchen for free as long as we got it out ourselves. 

So this week off we all toddled to take out a kitchen. I went there with no knowledge or skills in kitchen removal. 

Things I learnt about taking apart a kitchen: 
  1. Don't wear your nice pants. 
  2. It's not hard at all. 
  3. Find the things that hold the kitchen together and take them apart. This might be scraping away glue, unscrewing screws, yanking things from sticky places, etc. 
  4. Kitchen cabinets are heavier than you think so have a spare person around for that moment when the last screw holding it to the wall comes out and the whole thing comes crashing down. 
  5. You need to turn off the water main to undo all the taps and disconnect the dishwasher. 
  6. Boys will ask you to clean stuff but maybe they should clean stuff while you drill stuff or whatever. 
We had the help of 2 extra people when we worked on this. We spent a quite a while taking apart the kitchen, cleaning off old grease and other delicious jobs like that, then carried it all down 3 flights of stairs, tetris-ed it all into a 6x8 caged trailer and drove it home to squeeze it into our current garage, where it will live until we move into the new house and put it all back together again (hoping we can remember how it all fits together). 

It was really fun to work on something for the house, since we don't have a lot of jobs we can do until we move in.

 Cost of intermediate kitchen project: $80 ($77 for trailer hire, $3 for gas line cap).  
Time taken: 10 hours (6 hours to dismantle kitchen, 4 hours to load and unload trailer).

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