catching up: a little dap will do ya

At this point, we have a fancy hole in the wall and two arched doorways.  The Man and I were surveying our space, and trying to decide what comes next.  We knew a new floor was in order, and were debating on whether to lay the tile around the cabinets that were left or go ahead and gut the place. 

Can you guess which we went with?

Just to brag on the Man for a minute: not only did he remove our dishwasher and garbage disposal without flinching, he also fixed a few leaks that we managed to start when messing with the sink hookups. And he did all this in a few hours with minimal obscenities.

It became apparent pretty quickly that neither of us are plumber material.  We tried for a while to remove the shutoff valves (so that the cabinet could be pulled away from the wall easily) and realized that our limited plumbing skills, tools, and YouTube advising was no match for the copper compression nut of doom. 

It was time for plan B.

Yes, plan B for removing the kitchen sink cabinet did consist of a borrowed jigsaw (thanks, Dad!), lots of cursing, and cutting a hole through both the back of our cabinet and a good bit of the drywall behind it.

Add that to my and the Man's newbie cutting technique, the spectacle of two grown adults trying to fit into the cabinet under the sink while holding a tempermental flashlight and very powerful jigsaw, and a severe lack of patience and you get a pretty entertaining afternoon for the Dad as he watched us struggle, cuss, and boldly attack our bedraggled cabinet.

Thankfully we had already invested in the jumbo sized version of this guy:

Meet DAP, drydex spackling.. our new best friend.

I thought it was a pointless splurge at the time, but after patching a few large holes and numerous smaller ones-- I'm a big fan of the color-change indicator.  It's nice to know when it's safe to walk through the kitchen again without fearing an aerial attack from the droopy spackle.

Oh, I didn't mention we had to patch holes in the ceiling too?  Yup.  Of course we did! But I blame that one on the Dad and his brother-from-another-mother/best buddy and their technique for finding studs in our ceiling.  I mean, what works better than poking nails and a bent clothes hanger through the ceiling and "wiggling it around a bit"?  Who needs a stud finder when I've got those two to determine where the nail-poking holes should be?  After about 30 minutes and 8 holes later, we found the stud and were able to get back to work. (And I got back to spackling)

We also had this beaut to fix: 

 

I'm not sure what the previous owners did to make this hole, but a quick self-adhesive mesh patch and liberal spackling later and we almost had a semi-smooth wall again.

Oh, then when trying to pry the base molding away from the floor and the perilous grasp of two layers of linoleum we had another little incident with the pry bar and the wall. But thankfully, spackle saved the day again.

Super Spackle to the Rescue!! (yes, I'm a nerd.. and you know you love it.)

Overall we've gotten pretty good at patching holes (I'm sure it's a skill that will come in handy someday). I think we've patched somewhere around 15 or so just in this one room. Some of our must haves for this are:

I think we've torn out everything but the floor.

No worries, it won't be much longer until that dual-layered disaster is gone too. It's only a matter of time, single-square-stick-on-flooring. 

Only a matter of time...