catching up: the cabinets

We last left our renovation adventure in a sea of plastic. After we covered everything it was time to start the fun of demolition. Or, rather, attempting to carefully remove our contractor grade cabinets from the wall without causing too much harm to ourselves, the wall, or the cabinets-- especially since it is not part of our plan to buy new cabinets just yet.
So here's where we started:

Our little closed-in kitchen of days gone by

Then with our cordless drill, box cutter, and a few choice curse words we got to work. First the Man turned off the power to the stove and vents. After that, while he wrangled the stove away from the wall and worked with the Dad to safely remove the light and vent over the stove, I took to the caulking along the countertops with a boxcutter. It seemed as if the previous owners decided to caulk everything in place.. or maybe we can blame the intial contractor for that.

Nonetheless, after uncaulking, the Man crawled in the cabinets and got to unscrewing every last stripped screw to be found. From there, we just had to peel up some of our awesome flooring and give the cabinets a good tug.

Forgive me for not taking better step by step pictures. The Man and I just dove into tearing everything out and I didn't think about it until afterwards.

The upper cabinets came out pretty much in the same manner: the Man with a drill/screwdriver and me attempting to support the cabinets with the Dad supervising and stepping in when cabinets were too high for my 4'11" self to reach.

Do you see what I see? Is that a shred of the 1990's peeking through? Let's look closer...

Once the cabinets were out, we had some lovely leftovers staring back at us. I'm not sure who chose this, when, why, or even how it ended up behind the countertops (where the previous owners had not painted.)All I really knew or could think at that moment was wallpaper. We have wallpaper.

There she is, in all her ivy and mauve glory....

It's not so bad, and really it could work in some of the cute cottage style homes I've seen. But I've heard the horror stories about wallpaper, though it does seem to be making a comeback.

I think for now I'll be doing good if I can just pick a wall color.