Demolition begins. Goodbye trashy counters and sink. That one square of green plastic backsplash remains to taunt me…
Now to find out if Hidden Horrors lurk below the surface. With luck, the structure revealed by the removal of the soffits existed purely to form the soffits. It doesn’t appear to be weight-bearing, but The Experts will advise us tomorrow.
On the other side of the room, my back-door cabinets are also gone. Totally gone. 
(Yes, the active laundry was removed long before the crew arrived.)
More updates as things develop further. Photo credits and thanks to the Resident Male, for documenting today’s progress.
String-Or-Nothing 
Fingers crossed for no structural complications and no rot.
I have photos here someplace of what the contractor found during my bathroom renovation. It was not pretty.
Good news! Nothing found was indicative of a structural complication. After inspection by the crew boss, the team cleaned out the remaining framework for the soffits. I am waiting for dawn, so there is enough light to take pix, but the room is big and bare, and empty. Waiting for the next step, which should be removal of the pink tile floor.
I can hear the sigh of relief across the country!
Absolutely! I was quite worried.
Pix tomorrow. It was a grey, dark, drizzly morning, and I couldn’t get anything useful before I left for work.
Interesting. Our kitchen counters are orange (ugh) and the floor is splotchy beige — and we don’t like either. It also dates from the early 80’s and was the previous owners dream kitchen; it actually looks exactly like “The Brady Bunch” kitchen! The house itself dates from 1879.
Our previous homeowners hadn’t updated the place in decades. Everything was pink, peach, and mint, and very, very dirty from years of cigarette smoke. There were ruffly pink chiffon curtains on the kitchen windows. The living and dining room had heavy, lined taffeta drapes covering their diamond mullioned windows, also in blush pink and grey stripes. There was overstuffed furniture packed so tightly in the living and dining room that you couldn’t walk across it – all done in giant peony patterned chintz, and sitting on a pale green shag carpet worn so thin that strips of bare backing showed on all the places one could walk. Oh. And jigsaw puzzles glued to cardboard and a mosaic made from folded gum wrappers were the main wall decorations. Between the clutter, horrible decor, and the amount of things that needed immediate repair or update, it was no wonder than the house languished on the market for months at the height of the Boston area mid-90s housing boom.