Oopsie!

So I have been working this week on organizing my kitchen and pantry. The idea was that I would be able to take out some cabinets that have been bothering me since we moved in. My kitchen is small enough without having those cabinets hanging there making it feel smaller. And 90% of the time, all they were doing was picking up clutter because it was a flat space to put things on when I was trying to clear the counter. So tons of the stuff I got out of there should never have been there in the first place. But I was able to reorganize my pantry and cabinets so that those cabinets were incredibly pointless! YAY! 

This is where I started. Sadly, not the same angle, but I wasn't about to take a picture of the mess in my house today! Those cabinet doors came off about a year ago. There's no glass in them. If there had been glass, I might have left them, but the previous owners had never bothered to get the glass for them. I really don't know why the builders said that they'd supply the doors but not the glass. It's bizarre to me.  But I wanted to be able to get to things more easily, so I took them off. I don't think I've got a picture of that. But today, this is what it looks like.

Looks better right? Look closer. See that, just above the window? Here, have a close-up.

Yup, there's a hole. In my ceiling. We were thinking they were just cheap, until we looked closer and realized that it was cut out AFTER the ceiling was textured and painted. Turns out that the builders didn't measure very well when they were building the frame for the cabinets. So they had to cut out a big bunch of drywall in order to add 2x4's to support the cabinets. It's kind of funny to look at it closely to see just how many screws they put in before they realized that they weren't hitting anything.  On the bright side, a giant hole in the ceiling is kind of just what we needed. You see, look back at that first picture. The light switch for the kitchen is between the couch on the right and the banister just past it. If I'm in the middle of cooking something and a cloud covers the sun and the light's not on, I've got to hope that my kids are in a good mood and will hit the light switch for me. So we're hoping that we'll be able to wire a switch in that's IN the kitchen now that there's a hole to work with. We're also hoping to take out the soffit. I've always hated it and would love for that part of the ceiling to be flush with everything else. So I'm hoping that my dad will be willing to help me with that since we have to patch, re-texture, and paint anyway. And I have a couple of holes in my wall that need to be patched while we're at it. I'm blaming the previous owners for mounting odd things in HORRIBLE ways, leaving giant holes in the wall.  So we're in for a bigger project than I was hoping for, but it fixes some of the issues that we've been having, so I guess when one door closes, another opens, right? In the meantime, my husband stapled some plastic over the hole so we wouldn't have to have insulation falling out until it's fixed. And I should mention that he did a great job of catching the cabinets for me. Although, I wouldn't have laid down on the counter and held up my hands and feet if I were him. But it was amusing. It's too bad my hands were too full for a picture!