One of the first things we knew we wanted to do when we moved in was redo the kitchen. The old kitchen had honey colored oak cabinets, probably from the late 1970s, white porcelain back splash tiles with flowers on them and an ugly, off-white laminate counter top. The stove that came with the house was a 36" wide stove, probably from the mid 1960s - and only 2 of the burners worked on it. The fridge was OK, but was in a bad location and certainly did not fit with our remodeling plans.Since we needed a new stove, we bought a new Kenmore gas range and a Samsung fridge from Sears, along with a matching Kenmore microwave range hood for above the new stove. We sat down with a Home Depot kitchen designer and came up with a layout that was a combination of the existing kitchen layout but also with a lot of similarity to our old kitchen (2 glass door cabinets, quarter round shelving on the ends by the kitchen window etc.). The door styles are also very similar to our old kitchen on Mermaid Lane. About 3 weeks later the cabinets were delivered (and have taken up all of the living room with the boxes) and May 21, 2010 construction began!
We knew that the kitchen floor sloped a bit towards the outside wall, but had been told by the previous homeowner that the floor joists had all be repaired and sistered with new joists for support. On Monday the 24th the carpenters had finally started to removed the sub-floor to expose the joists - and it was ugly! The 
original joists - 2x8s - were rotten on the outside end where they joined the sill plate. Some of them had as much as 3" or 4" of rot on the bottom. This is why the floor was so sloped. The "repair" job was a joke. Most of the new boards that were sistered in were only about 12" long and had anywhere from 0 to only 2 carriage bolts joining them to the old joists.After pulling up more of the old flooring, it was decided that all of the repair job that was done before we bought the house was shit and needed to go. Our contractor's plan was to properly sister in about 10 new floor joists going back a full 8' - not the 12" that was previously done. The center beam that runs perpendicular to the joists would be increased from a single 2x8 to a tripled up 2x8. This repair throws us about $1,800 over budget.
The next "disaster" we found was that the outside wall - where the kitchen sink is - has suffered some termite damage. The framing in some places is completely shot. The framing around the window is completely wrong (even I can see that as a non-carpenter!). There's missing supports for the header, 2x4s that are cut and then nailed midway through that don't go floor to ceiling and thus transfer none of the load weight. That whole wall needs to be reframed - another $900 to add to our overages!
