Did you have "ceiling soffits" above your existing cabinets before?
by
Melissa
+3
I want to remove my soffits above my cabinets and add more cabinets to extend to "real" ceiling.
6 answers
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I have had them in the past, but you'll need to make sure they are not being used for wiring or other hidden house hold necessities before you rip them out. If you built the home, hopefully you kept at least one copy of the blue prints (which are now black on white). If not contact your local building permit office and see if they have a copy available. If it's not possible for you to remove and add more cabinets, and really there are better places in most cases to store things than just below the ceiling, I'd be happy to help you find better solutions for your storage needs. I'm quite obsessive about organizing space and find it fun finding new solutions for others right her on HT.
Z
on Sep 28, 2015
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Although this blogger used open shelving rather than more cabinets, you might be interested in the soffit demolition of her kitchen makeover. http://www.beneathmyheart.net/2015/02/diy-ing-basic-brick-ranch-cottage-dreams-part-three/ Becky is definitely right though...you need to be absolutely certain those soffits aren't hiding any surprises before you take the sledgehammer to them.
Shari
on Sep 28, 2015
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Personally I would just make sure the soffits are not in anyway structurly related. I remove mine and put the cabinets up as far as I could go. The problem I ran into was all the walls were crooked.
Janet Pizaro
on Sep 28, 2015
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Sometimes the soffits are used to channel the ducts from the stove exhaust fan, or they have plumbing in them which mine have both problems and there is no real solution since the second floor bath runs utilize some of the space to reach the stack.
Peter Zbasnik
on Sep 29, 2015
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When we did this, the first thing we did was to make sure that the cabinets had been properly attached to the walls and each other. Then we opened the sheetrock carefully in case someone had just laid wires loose in the soffit cavity. Once we were satisfied that everything was OK we took the rest of the sheetrock down but left the structure there until we could assess whether we still needed it. Remember a lesson that we learned early. A lot of real BONEHEADS could have worked on your house before you and they could have been really lazy folks who just weren't worried about doing it right. Be carefull when taking things apart.
Shari Coppinger
on Sep 29, 2015
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My sweetie was a builder and he says that sometimes the soffits hide mechanical systems and that sometimes the ceiling doesn't go all the way to the walls and you will have an opening to the attic if you take soffit out. I want mine gone, but he's not in favor and i'll go with experience most of the time. Especially if it can be a me$$ to fix if I guess wrong. I lived in a bonehead house once and someone took every shortcut available. So I'd heed Shari's warning
Em Hooper
on Oct 03, 2015
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