How to Gut Your Kitchen Before a Remodelling

Doing a lot of the work yourself is one way to save a lot of money on a kitchen remodelling.

However, you need to know what you are doing beforehand.

This is a quick guide to removing the existing kitchen before beginning to install the new one. It assumes that you wish to literally remove the entire kitchen including appliances.

Step 1: Clear the Decks

Pretty simple, if it can be removed, remove it. This means unplugging all devices, boxing up cutlery, crockery, and other utensils. You can move these into storage in the loft, garage or elsewhere until they are ready to be put back in.

Step 2: Turn off your Utilities

It will be essential to turn off your water supply and gas supply if you are making modifications to supply or removing related appliances. You’ll need a bucket to collect water still in the tap and pipes relating to the sink and possibly any washing machine or dishwasher you may have in the kitchen. Turning off and removing any gas/electricity supplies to the room will need specialist help; especially if you plan to make modifications.

Step 3: Unhinge, unplug and Unscrew

Basically at this stage of kitchen remodelling it’s time to unplug and remove the larger items and to remove the doors from your cupboards, remove drawers, and easily removable shelves. This means wheeling out the fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, and stove. You can also remove the taps from the sink too. Save any screws, knobs, door handles, and so on – these can be very handy in the future.

Step 4: Remove the Countertops

Carefully remove the existing counters from atop your cabinets. Depending on the material these may be recyclable or could be re-sold. Do some research especially if you have high quality wood, granite or marble tops.

Step 5: Destroy those Cabinets

Okay, so first level of destruction time. Now it is safe to rip out the cabinets in preparation for kitchen remodelling. Probably best to start with the top level ones. It’s easy to rip off the main bits but there may be elements screwed into fixtures and fittings to keep them in place. Of course be more careful if you want to re-use them in the garage or garden shed. You might need saws and a sledgehammer to remove some elements of your cabinets.

Step 6: Remove the Flooring

If you are planning on reflooring the entire kitchen, which is often a good idea, now’s the time to take up the old one and return the kitchen to its basic, concrete floor. You may or may not want to re-concrete the floor before laying down a new surface, so that’s worth considering too. How you pull up the floor depends on what you have – tiles can be sledgehammered, but other surfaces need to be cut and peeled back (linoleum for example).

Step 7: Strip the Walls

Simple final element – remove any tiles from the wall, scrape off any wallpaper and things still attached to the walls like fixtures, fittings, and so on. If you intend to remove a wall, now is the time too but this is part of kitchen remodelling rather than stripping back. It’s also a good time to remove or move any sockets which will be in the wrong place or redundant though get a professional electrician to do this for you.