Joni's condo kitchen remodel: Light goes up, cabinet comes down

Patti here, blogging about the kitchen remodel I'm helping my friend and fellow nurse Joni accomplish in her SoCal condo. I blogged about the beginning of this project last week. On Saturday my husband, Gary, and I stopped by to help. And Joni's next-door neighbor helped as well.

I appreciate all your votes on the new light. As it turned out, Joni was partial to the nickel-looking track. I found some "a la carte" pieces at OSH that gave us some freedom to chose different lights, so we chose that option.

The harness box in the old ceiling light was so brittle that one of the screws just pulled out without being unscrewed. Fortunately, Joni had kept all of her parts from other fixtures she had replaced so she had another suitable box which we installed. This took almost an hour since it had to be modified to fit the hole in the ceiling.

The track went up easy enough, and the little lights are very bright. I bought samples of several different lights to choose from. Joni and I liked the same smaller light so we went with that. This job should have taken about 30 minutes but took an hour and a half due to the broken harness box (if that's the correct name for it). So it is with do-it-yourself projects; they always take longer than expected.

We had about 15 minutes to spare in our budgeted time so we ripped out the cabinet. (Click here to read the rest of the story.)

Check out this minute-and-a-half slide show of the day's events (and turn up the sound):

Joni's neighbor had a tricky little saw that Gary thinks is called a "saw-zall". (A bit of trivia from Kathy: From the pictures, it looks like a Makita reciprocating saw. Sawzall is a term often used generically, but Sawzall is a brand name, and it was invented by Milwaukee tool company. So unless it's a Milwaukee, it's a reciprocating saw. And now back to Patti's story . . . )

The cabinets were held up with nails into the ceiling and into the adjoining cabinet. We pulled down on the cabinet and made a gap large enough to slip the saw blade into, which enabled us to simply cut the nails. It was very easy. The nails to the adjoining cabinet were a little trickier, but not too much for the team. We had the cabinet down in about 12 minutes start to finish. There's nothing, NOTHING like having the right tools for the right job.

The kitchen looks so much brighter and more open with that cabinet down. As hoped for, the natural light from the back yard just floods right into the kitchen.

Also, the track lighting provides more than enough directional light. So far, so good. Next step, check paint colors for the cabinet in the new, brightly lit space.

(Want to share your remodel with other Pardon Our Dust readers? E-mail podblog@aol.com to discuss your project.)