A Weekend in the Kitchen

Our kitchen redo started in earnest this weekend. I was a little concerned after the Gun Club on Friday, as several guys 'in the know' announced that tearing up the existing tile would be something like getting bamboo shoots under my fingernails, except not as pleasant. I worried about it all day. When I got home late Friday afternoon, I decided to give it a try - fully expecting the tiles to shatter into dime size pieces.

I was shocked to find that they popped up intact. I would guess we broke less than 10% of them. This is a testimony to shoddy workmanship; when you don't glue tiles down well, the next guy can pop'm off easily.

Like any good leader, I quickly delegated this job to my underlings. Both Grayson and Zion dove right in. Jackson was a bit too smart for my Tom Sawyer "Boy, it's fun to whitewash this fence" approach, and mumbled something about having to get ready to go somewhere. That's Grayson there removing the tiles - this picture would probably send OSHA into convulsions. Note heavy duty, steel toed Safety Croc's. Also note shirt-off, construction worker look.

It was funny to notice how differently the boys worked. Gray would pop the tiles off one after another. Zion would pop a tile off and carry it outside to the pile, then return, see Grayson's tile, carry it outside, and the come back and pop another one.

Having fully removed the tiles, I saw that the quickset was so thick that it would take a ton of time to remove it from the backer board. (If these are new terms to you and you intend on reading this blog for the next few days, I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with them. Plus, I like to sound like I know what I am talking about. I do not.)

Rather than scrape the backerboard, I opted to remove it. Ugh. This had the effect of dumping two five gallon cans of dust in our main living area and blowing it around with high powered fans. As you can see in the photo, we hung some plastic to limit the dust, but didn't think of it until the second day of work. Duh.