Kitchen Makeover | Part 4: Expect The Unexpected

For an entire year we lived with our kitchen looking like this:

Not too shabby, but we knew the ceiling & floors had to go.  The thing holding us back that year wasn't the task itself, but rather knowing the time needed to finish it.  We love weekend projects here~ it allows you to make a mess, finish the task and have it all cleaned up before the start of a new week.  With removing the ceilings, we knew it was going to be super dusty and super messy, and the thing with a smaller, older home, is that no matter how hard you try, dust and dirt go everywhere in the house.  So, we figured if we were tearing down the ceiling we might as well rip up the floors at the same time.  Make one big mushroom cloud of dust and complete the projects in one big go.  And that required both of us taking vacation time from work.  So after putting it off for an entire year, we finally planned a week for us to tackle the task!  

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When we purchased the house, pretty much all of the rooms had popcorn ceilings.  They hadn't been installed properly so all of them sagged and dipped in the center, making for a pretty obvious eye sore.  When tearing down the guest bedroom ceiling, we were pleasantly surprised to find the original wooden slat ceiling underneath and we also found the same in the dining room ~ so when it came to the kitchen, we expected to find the same... 

Yeah, not so much.  When we took down the popcorn ceiling, we were more than shocked to find that with the ceiling, came down a whole lot of dirt, dust, old insulation, and dead bugs but NO original wood ceiling.  Brian & I were already cutting it super close to get everything done within one week.  We had planned to spend only 3 days on the ceiling ~ day one, taking it down and cleaning up debris ~ day two, sanding and filling in gaps in the original wood ceiling ~ day 3, painting.  This timeline gave us 4 days to complete the floors.  But with the discovery that we now had no ceiling at all in the kitchen (it just went straight up to the roof) ~ we had to make some adjustments.  The next part was pretty much a blur and I'm thinking I may have even blacked out: I remember a couple frantic phone calls to my dad, multiple trips to Lowes, a hilarious incident of installing insulation for the first time, my Dad somehow showing up and the three of us nailing bead-board onto the ceiling.  When I finally came to this is what I saw:

Yah!  A bead-board ceiling!  That was easy ~ well not exactly, but we made it work!  

Now that we were behind schedule, we were only left with two days to complete the floors before our vacation time was up....

We'll be back Monday with Part 5!