Kitchen Deconstruction

Existing Kitchen in New House

We started taking apart the kitchen in the new house today. There is nothing really wrong with it, it has all the modern conveniences and everything works. The biggest problem is that it's out of style. My main sticking point was that if we were going to move to another house, it would need to be better than what we have now. The new house has a view and a couple of big rooms and that was enough for me, but my wife has her own opinions and the big issue for her was the kitchen. So, new kitchen.

The kitchen has granite countertops and you think oooo, granite countertops, but granite comes in all kinds of mixes of colors and this one is just difficult to like. Drop any small thing, like a screw, on it and it just disappears. The color mix makes it impossible to find that screw. Of course you aren't normally going to be dropping screws on your kitchen counter, but I'm using the kitchen counters as a makeshift workbench while I am working on the house and screws are part of everything I work on. I imagine you might have similar problems with preparing food there, but we'll never know. The kitchen is being replaced and first part of that is taking the old one apart.

I expected the countertops to be attached to the cabinets with screws that screwed into blocks that resided in cutouts in the granite. I don't know why I thought that. Possibly I got the idea from watching too many shows about building ancient stone temples. Whatever. That was not the way it was done. They are glued to the cabinets with silicon adhesive and that silicon does not want to let go.

I was originally going to have ReStore remove the old kitchen, but a confluence of factors persuaded me to tackle it myself. But I am not seeing any way of getting these countertops loose, so I call ReStore and ask them how they handle it. The guy who answers the phone says he 'isn't afraid of granite countertops, he has a sledge hammer'. Okay then. That's one way to handle it, but I have this, probably wrong, idea that somebody might be able to use them. It's probably wrong because countertops are custom made for each kitchen and it is extremely unlikely anyone will be able to use them as is. And cutting them to accommodate a different layout is problematic, to say the least.

In any case, I want to get them loose from the cabinets without breaking them. We succeeded with two of them by pulling the cabinets out from under them. We only lost one small cabinet in the process, so we are getting there.