Greg Laden's Blog

First, the Carnival of the Liberals # 54 is here, at Neural Gourmet. It's a good one, and I'm especially proud to have gotten the Best Title Evah award for this edition. Very prestigious.

Now, about the kitchen. If you currently have a kitchen with soffets over the cabinets, and you plan to replace them with cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling, be careful. When you rip out the soffets, you may find that the space they enclosed was used for wiring. It might be the case that the wires are placed in such a way that they can't just be pushed aside to make way for the new cabinets that are being custom built by your favorite cabinet maker. You may have to completely rewire the kitchen.

That, of course, will be most easily accomplished if you take off a lot more of the wallboard than you were originally planning. It is a lot easier to rip off some drywall and put new stuff back on than to fish around for wires, if you are planning to do some drywalling as part of that project anyway.

You may then find that the vapor barrier was incorrectly (or at least strangely) installed, so you might as well fix that up as well.

It is also entirely possible that the same lumber used to build the soffets, which extends below the plane of the ceiling and thus needs to be removed to fit the cabinets, is holding up most of the insulation blown into this part of the house. That insulation will fall down on you.

Once you've cleaned up the insulation, don't put it in the dumpster, because it is possible that you will find out, after you did that, that you are not supposed to put insulation in the dumpster. The insulation will have worked its way down to the bottom of the dumpster, beneath all the ripped out cabinets and wallboards and stuff, so you will have to take everything out of the dumpster to get at the insulation. Then you may have to find a place to put the insulation.

This Old House, which was one of my favorite shows before they started only working on houses owned by extraordinarily wealthy highly materialistic freaks who need to own everything they see in every magazine, and they read too many fancy magazines, has a special way of handling this sort of problem. They edit the show. You can't edit real life. Not when it comes to home improvement, anyway....

But, please don't think I'm complaining. It was a lot of fun. It is especially fun because it was not my kitchen!