Soffit-B-Gone

Over this past weekend, we put to action the first baby-step of our house plan.  After deciding to wait until summer/early fall to add on our big family room, we figured we could knock out some of the 'smaller' projects in the meantime.

I say 'smaller' because this is kind of a big project.  Much bigger than we thought it would be.  But oh, soooo worth it.  We decided to knock out the soffit in our kitchen.

The soffit is the area between the tops of the cabinets and the ceiling that is drywalled in for absolutely no apparent reason.  It was the 'thing' to do in the 80's and early 90's, so lots of houses have them.  If yours has never bothered you before, I'm sorry...you might want to knock it down now.  We have always hated ours {hello...let's take a house with short ceilings anyway and make them even shorter by adding a soffit}.

Anyway.  I did the appropriate google-based research, and discovered the following:

1. Most cabinets are screwed into the soffit.
2. Many soffits are conduits for electrical works, plumbing, and even heating/cooling in some cases.
3. Most soffits are just framed drywall work {so constructed like a wall, with a framework of 2x4s with drywall overtop}.

We arranged for the beloved Bampa {my dad} to take the kids on Saturday and got to business.  Here's a general idea of what we did and how we did it.

To start, we removed everything from the entire kitchen and removed the doors and hardware from the upper cabinets.  Basic prep work.  We also killed the power to the kitchen to make sure we weren't accidentally drilling or pounding into a live wire.

Then I carefully inspected the cabinets and discovered that they were actually secured to the wall, not the soffit.  Every kind of tutorial I could find about removing soffits took down the cabinets.  I absolutely didn't see the point, so we left them up.

Now for the fun!  I took a huge hammer and pounded into the soffit.  Nothin'.  Okay, so I hit a stud.  I moved over a few inches and.....nothing.  Another stud?  Impossible.  I let Nic have a swing and he wasn't getting anywhere, either.  We got out the power screwdriver and drilled into the wall.  Apparently the builders of our home were preparing for a major earthquake {in Indiana} because the entire soffit was a solid 2x8.

So we spent most of the day trying to hack the thing down.  With every bit of wood and drywall we could get down, huge loads of that terrible gray insulation would fall down.  It was terrible.  So messy and so uncomfortable to touch and breathe.  I was so glad our kiddos were out of the house.  We definitely should have had masks on, but compromised by opening up all of the doors/windows at a balmy 25 degrees.  I also wished we would have closed off the rest of the house with plastic.  Hindsight.

This is that insulation {the gray stuff}.  I think we filled about 6 extra-large garbage bags with it.

We did encounter a few things behind that soffit.  There were three different electrical lines that just needed re-routed.  There wasn't enough slack in any of them to actually move to another place, so we took the lazy/not-recommended/not-to-code route.  We just created a small trench in the framework so the wires would fit between the framework and the new drywall.

At long, long, long last, all of the framework was down.  Time to party!

From there, we measured and cut our sheets of drywall and screwed them into the exposed framework.  After spending the whole day elbow-deep in gross insulation, this part was actually pretty fun.  It seemed like we were finally seeing some progress.

At this point it was just a matter of finishing off the drywall.  I used drywall tape for the first time, and loved how easy it was.  I'll do a tutorial on that another time.  The drywall process does take a few days, because it is really important to let the drywall compound fully dry in between coats.

We actually ended up doing a few projects all at once, since it made sense to tear apart the kitchen just once.  We also added a broom closet at the end of the refrigerator, added crown moulding to the cabinets, and added a built-in microwave above our stove.  You can see those things in some of these photos.

It was so exciting to do what feels like such a huge transformation.  It may not seem significant, but to us it makes the whole kitchen feel so 'nice'.  Very fancy.

We've looked at hundreds of inspiration photos and toured lots of homes {both spec homes and 'real' homes}, and decided that one big 'key' to having a nice-looking kitchen is multi-level cabinets.  So when we installed the microwave above the stove, we made sure to hang the cabinet a little higher.  Another 'key' is having a built-in fridge.  I really wanted a broom closet, too, so we're currently working on finishing that up.

I'm not ready to share the finished photos yet, since I'm also painting the cabinets, but this should give you a good idea of how to hack into that ugly soffit.