The kitchen was rather disgusting. In fact it was really disgusting. Your feet stuck to the floor as you walked. The cabinets had years of grease on them and the windows were filthy…one of the windows was held in by expanding foam a previous owner had used to fill in the holes in the frame.
Inside the cabinets, the previous owner had lined them with a sticky back plastic film…hunter green for the sides/walls, and white with green flowers for the shelves. You could see quite clearly where insects had walked. The smell was really not very nice. We did our best to try and clean things, but soon discovered that just cleaning was not going to work.
Here are some before pictures of the kitchen.
Original dishwasher which even had some dirty plates in it…
An outlet and wall covered in fly droppings
A good picture which demonstrates the foam under the window and level of grim that was on the kitchen floor and cabinets.
Even with all the grim, I could still see that this kitchen could be reclaimed. Eventually of course we will put in a brand new kitchen, but we were working on a budget and figured that at least the cabinets would work for us for a few years.
Just look at the color of the water in the red bucket!!! Yuck!
Betty trying to clean the floor with her tail!
The fan with pretty gross too – we decided to throw away the fan because after trying to clean we knew that it was too far gone!
Below is a picture of Betty trying to hinder our chances of working on the kitchen cabinets!
So, Charlie, who is an awesome little worker, decided it would be his job to pull up all the nasty sticky linoleum from the floor. He ended up having to pull up 2 and sometimes 3 layers of linoleum from the floor. I think it took him 3 days to finish. Once complete the floor finally looked clean, and then we moved onto the cabinets. I removed the doors, and removed all the sticky back plastic from the shelves, walls, and drawers.
Again we were hoping to just be able to clean the doors, but we had to scrub so hard to clean, the doors were losing the polyurethane finish and were patchy and really did not look very nice. For a couple of weeks we had doors stacked up on the front porch in varying levels “donedom”.
Between Jessica, Sam and I we managed to get the all the doors sanded, stained and clear coated the doors, drawers and cabinets.
Below are some pictures of the kitchen in varying stages.
