Painting the Kitchen Cabinets Pt 2 - Cabinet Removal

Here was my game plan for the kitchen cabinet project:

Round 1 (Thur-Sat, an hour Th, a couple hours on fri, then the rest sat afternoon/evening):

• remove doors/hardware
• clean
• sand (to remove the polyurethane coat)
• prime

Round 2 (hopefully sun):

• paint (2 coats, but I don't plan on painting the cabinet interiors)

Round 3 (the following sat&sun)

• put down contact paper
• install new hardware
• rehang doors

I'm naive. I thought removing the cabinets and the hardware was going to be easy, if a bit monotonous. I actually thought I could get all 20 doors removed in an hour last night. I grossly underestimated.

Actual cabinet doors removed: 11
Actual time spent: 1.5 hours

Remaining Cabinet doors: 9
Remaining hardware removal from doors/drawers: 40 hinges (or put another way, 120 screws) and 25 handles (or 50 large bolt screws)
Time remaining: I bet it's more than an hour

Stupid screws. And I only would have been able to remove the lower ones had Adam not given me his ladder when he moved to Australia. Thanks Adam! I tried doing the upper cabinets with just my little IKEA step stool, but reaching above my head to remove super tight, semi-stripped screws was not working. Thankfully the ladder gave me the leverage I needed, but my arms and hands just couldn't take doing all 20. Not to mention, every time I was on it, just on the second step with one foot on my counter, my brain was half occupied with thoughts of the ladder collapsing and me breaking various bones. I have decent balance and am probably less clumsy than your average person thanks to volleyball and surfing, but I swear, you raise me 20 inches off the ground and all of a sudden I get locked knees and my legs are shaky from the effort of trying to hold myself still.

So instead of taking one night to get the cabinets down, it will take two. I'm doing it manually with a screwdriver because it didn't look like a drill could reach the screws on the hinges (TIP: I switched to a short neck screwdriver, it's about 3.5 inches long, and it makes getting the tough ones out much easier!). Plus me operating a drill is about as successful as a dog opening a jar. I just can't do it. Which friend am I going to pay low wages to help me rehang them because that will require drilling? =)

I got half the cabinets down!

Needless to say my planned schedule is already shot since I overlooked little details like: how much a screwdriver hurts my hands after an hour, the fact that I have to fill and sand all the holes left by the screws, and how long it'll take to hand sand the archs and edges on the doors (at least I have Adam's hand sander for the flat stuff). I'll be lucky if I can even get to priming this weekend thanks to the hardware!

In the meantime, my cat Jackson is enjoying the open access to the lower cabinets which he likes climbing in the back of (he does it when the doors are on too, using his little nose to work the doors open. Yes, that means there is cat hair on my baking pans. And yes I rinse them before I use them. Most of the time...)

And for anyone concerned, don't worry, I numbered my doors and made a map so I piece this puzzle back together correctly!