Noggins

Now that we've gutted our kitchen, time to put it back together. We're really excited to finally get to the fun stuff, and seeing our visions become a reality.

We took down the side wall slowly, first by opening up the wall to see what was inside (electrical conduits and 3 studs, 1 of which is load-bearing), and then opening it up to a window, and then taking it all down. Now we're going to build it back up, to match the bar counter height. This will hold the light switches and outlet, offer a little extra surface area, and hide the side and sounds of the dishwasher. In order to make it stable, we had to screw into the concrete foundation, thank goodness our Makita drill has plowed through every task we've thrown at it. We also added some horizontal support in between the studs for additional support, these are called noggins according to Australian and British websites. Does anyone know if there's a different American name for those little guys?

We also built up the little 'column' that is the load-bearing stud in the corner. We neatly tied the eletrical cables along the studs and drywalled over it.

Tip: drywall screws are far superior to nails.

Now that we have concrete floors and bare studs showing, have rerouted drain pipes and welded new copper ones, why not allow ourselves to be nitpicky? The white trim around the soffit gave it a nice finished look but deep down inside I longed for a clean drywall edge instead. And now that it's done, I can sleep at night :)

We also took this opportunity to put matching dimmer switches here to go with the ones we installed for the patio lights. We also put new white GFCi outlets to replace the almond ones (does anyone use almond outlets anymore?) and moved the old almond ones to replace non-GFCi switches that were not visible.

Here are the pics of our progress.