we had our 4!! carts of boxes ready to be picked up by mid-afternoon. it took us some time to load up the trailer, but we were back home by 9pm. it was a long day, but i was glad we were able to get it all done in one day.

next, we removed the existing upper cabinets. and discovered that the existing wall had a lot of deflection in it. great... we were not planning on removing the drywall on this wall, but i did not feel comfortable hanging our new (much heavier) cabinets on a wall that had so much movement. all of our upper cabinets will be supported off of this wall. plus we needed to do some electrical work to re-arrange outlets, and get ready for the under cabinet lights and range hood. we decided it was best to remove the drywall, re-work the framing, and do the electrical work on the open wall.

i was worried that i would have a hard time covering that window back up after seeing it uncovered. it does bring more natural light in to the kitchen. and it does make the space seem a little bigger. but, the plaster around the wall is in bad shape and would require a lot of work if we wanted to keep the window. i also confirmed that the placement would be difficult to work around with the kitchen layout. i'm not happy about it, but i think i'll be ok to cover it back up. in the end, i think it is going to be more important to have a fully functioning kitchen (window or fridge??), and we do have another window and the back door has a window. plus, the door and window are on the south side so they at let in light all day. we did pull the original trim from the existing window just in case we need it somewhere else in the house.

we were able to access everything we needed for the electrical work, and i re-built the framing in a few areas to strengthen the wall.

i think i'm going to go ahead and add some blocking for the upper cabinets, but we're almost ready to put up new drywall and move on to the cabinets! we left our sink cabinet in place and have been working around it so far, we're hoping we can get the new uppers installed before removing our sink.

meanwhile, our dining room looks like this:

i strangely enjoy putting together ikea cabinets...

cooper has been surprisingly around during this whole process. he normally is afraid of anything different or loud, which means he spends the day upstairs hiding in the bathroom. or outside. but he's been brave and keeps coming down to check on us.

as for murphy, he's a curious little guy, so we have to attach his leash to something in the living room or else he'll be right in the middle of it all. i caught him trying to lick the drill the other day! he keeps sneaking up on to the couch when we're not paying attention. he's technically not supposed to be on the couch, but he looks so cute, we usually forgive him.

that's the update for now. we did find some interesting things written inside the wall once we removed the drywall, but i need to upload the pictures from my camera. let's just say that even though we didn't find a date, we think the kitchen was last remodeled in 1965...