Stick a fork in us (photo heavy)

We're done!  Well, at least with demolition.  Here's the progress so far:

Last night, the children drew on the doors with chalk.  It looked pretty good, too bad we didn't try it earlier!

This morning, we got started removing doors

It was amazing that these cabinets are all open.  The top cabinet has a total run of 14 feet- one plank!

I got to stand on the counters and do demolition- well, more deconstruction.

By lunchtime, we had moved appliances (we didn't get around to that last night) and the top cabinets were gone.

After lunch, the heavy equipment came out.

We didn't end up saving much from the bottom cabinets.  It was really disgusting the amount of mouse poop that fell out of those cabinets when we took them apart.  It almost made me sick to think that we had stored food in them.  Of course, I had cleaned the shelves well and we had stopped up the holes where the mice were getting in but it was still really, really gross.

By mid afternoon, the cabinets were history.

And we got started on the floors.  Below, the most recent flooring is on the right, the next layer down on the left.

Yup, another layer underneath, with a subfloor all of it's own that had to come up.

THAT was the back breaking work.  We took turns.

We got it down to the original linoleum that is glued directly to the original subfloor.  We were originally planning to rip up the original subfloor as well but, except for under the sink, it looks to be in better shape than we hoped.  The old linoleum won't come up without more work than we want to put into it so we are changing plans.  We will put our tile backer on top of the old floor and tile.  It means that the kitchen floor will still be higher than the living and dining room floors (which it has been).

Now, we're all exhausted.  We put in an 8 hour day of demolition today.  But tomorrow, I will paint and maybe we will begin staging a few cabinets.  V had to do some patching on the walls so I'll have to paint with Kilz first and then our paint that we've chosen.  Cabinet installation will probably start in earnest on Monday

The poor animals are terribly confused.  The whole house is in disarray. Take a look at my 'kitchen'.  The crock pot on top of the stove in the living room.

Now, I'm tired and off to bed early.