I don' think they have taken down the sheet eock in my kitchen, but I am not there until tomorrow to see......the picture I have shows that they have cut and framed for the new window, and the plumbing and electrical are as done as they can be without an actual kitchen plan!

They did comment on how difficult it was to get the tile countertops out, because they had used so many finishing nails on the decking, so my cabinets did not just fall off easily.

We did tear up the sheetrock taking the site built cabinets down in our current house, though, because they were glued in also.

Hope this helps! Good Luck!

Walls came down for us for a few reasons. First, we actually moved the kitchen within the house. We also took out an old window and put in three new ones. Taking down the soffits would have meant drywall patching anyway. The tile backsplash removal would have done some damage also. Our cabs were site built and damaged the walls a little when removed, but DH didn't have to be careful because off the other construction issue I mentioned.

I think if you aren't doing any electrical, HVAC, plumbing or the like and don't have tremendous damage from taking out old cabs or backspslash, you don't need to go done to studs. BTW, stick to your guns on IKEA cabs and whatever else you want. I think those contractors you've met have never worked with IKEA cabs so have no idea what they are like. I also would have assumed that they are junky based on their furniture, but not so. There are many a fab kitchen here with IKEA cabs. Good luck!

Our walls and ceiling came down for several reasons- installing recessed lighting and running electric wire, removing a window,removing sofits,and moving a wall. Trying to match up old and new drywall is difficult. But if you are staying with the same footprint and dont need to run new electric you should be good with leaving your sheetrock in place. Don't let the contractors scare you off Ikea. Lots of people buy them and love them. Ikea can give you a list of installers.

We've done two kitchen remodels -- one in an older plaster-walled house and one with drywall. In both, soffits were removed, recessed lights were installed, and electrical was moved, and neither time did we go down to studs. In both cases the contractors patched the walls. I think it just really depends on how much is being moved.

Don't rip out your plaster unless you can afford to replace it with plaster. It's a luxury surface compared to sheetrock. It can be patched where it's dinged-up by cab removal. Most cabs are actually hung on the wall with screws, and sometimes on a screwed-on ledger board, so removal is not that hard, or damaging.

These days most people who have lived all their lives with drywall think nothing of ripping out to the studs. But savvy owners of real plaster know what a fabulous thing they have and try very hard to conserve it.

It's much quieter, more thermally steady, more fire resistant, forgiving of small wounds and the need for repairs, more resistant to molds and mildew, and for those who recognize it, more beautiful.

Beware of any tradesman who suggest or implies you should just tear it all out, for "convenience's sake".

L.

Most of ours will probably come down, because the cabs were built on site -- they are not regular boxes, but are a continuous line. Getting them out will probably trash the plaster. If it doesn't we'll keep it, but replace whatever the precursor to sheetrock was that's on the opposite wall.

In a long ago renovation in a different old house, keeping the plaster intact wasn't a problem. Boxes came down, and new boxes replaced them.

So keep the plaster if you can, patching where you need to, and hire the handyguy.

If you are doing major electrical and plumbing upgrades etc, it usually is more cost effective to take down the drywall. You don't have to, but drywallers charge a whole lot less per hour than electricians do. If you have access from above or below, that can make things a whole lot easier to keep the walls intact.

Old plaster is a treasure and I wouldn't destroy it if at all possible. (assuming it is in good condition - you never know what you'll find though as you start ripping things out.)

i wasn't intending to have to remove my plaster walls but ended up doing it after the extensive electrical work damaged most of the "keys". The keys are the slopped over plaster that locks the plaster onto the lath. If too much of the wall looses its integrity because of banging around then I think it is safer to take it out. You'd hate to have plaster calving off of your walls (like an iceberg:)

I'd definitely go with your handyman, whose work you know. We're no carpenters, and we installed our own Ikea kitchen with some customizations. It would be easy, basic stuff for him, and he could certainly do as well as installers on Ikea's list.

We have plasterboard, which is an odd in-between item only used for a few years in the 1920's before commercial drywall became widely available. It's heavier & thicker than drywall and a lot more crumbly, so we also wanted to avoid taking it down.

We only made holes where necessary, and did not take it down to the studs except behind the sink cabinet for plumbing reasons. This is made easier in old houses with no insulation in the walls, of course -- have you been able to ascertain what's inside the plaster? If it's hollow, you're golden. If it's got retrofitted insulation, it will be much harder.

In our hollow old walls, our experienced electrician was more than able to run lines from new hole to hole without causing an unduly higher bill - you want to find someone that doesn't mind working on old houses and has a few good tricks up his sleeve, rather than a newer guy who only works with drywall/sheetrock.

Thank you all! We will definitely have some wall repair to do (seriously, gluing plastic laminate permanently to plaster ought to be against some rule, ha). I just don't want to get the cabinets out and only then find out that the walls are going to have to come down too. Well, I realize we won't really know until we are there, but it sounds like there is hope. These aren't the original cabs so they aren't built in.

One electrician has already told me he can run the new wiring with the cabinets in place (that was from me thinking I might leave the uppers alone), so at least for him it sounds as though the walls wouldn't be a problem. Electrical quote #2 comes next week so I will see what he says too. I will have to ask our plumber, but there is access through the basement so I am hoping he can just make holes where he needs them.

The nicest, most on-the-ball and probably best contractor who came out here told me his least expensive kitchen to date was $30K. The one who said he could bring it in near the low low price I mentioned turned out (on a Google search for reviews) to live a couple streets over from us, which would be fine except that now I know whose house it is that has been sitting there on exposed foundation piers and clad in Tyvek for the last 3 years or so. Hey, I don't judge. Shoemaker's children and all that. But still.

Thank you all for the encouragement! I will have to tell DH that our slightly wavy out-of-square walls that you can't find the studs through (there are studs, not laths) are valuable. :)

Like the others mentioned, our walls were torn out because of new window, moving a door, etc. But, on the plus side, we finally were able to add insulation to those outside walls. Turns out, in our 1939 house, there wasn't any insulation in the walls. We assumed that there was at the very least SOME insulation. Wrong!

p.s. Oh yes, about the insulation vs hollow walls -- you know, I'm not sure. Part of me doesn't really want to know what's behind them. Electrician #1 said he was pleased to see that the wiring behind one of the switches was original because that meant that nobody unlicensed had been working on it in the years since. Maybe that is a good sign.

p.p.s. kammererk -- just saw your note. I just asked DH (he has lived in this house nearly 30 yrs) and he says there actually is some kind of insulation in them. But our house has been added onto and the kitchen walls are no longer exterior, so it wouldn't matter so much if the insulation there is a bit thin. I just hope there isn't anything worse... the old extension cord he once found inside a porch wall (being used as the "wiring" to the porch) was probably the worst so far. Second would be the snake in the basement wall but at least he wasn't hurting anything (except for nearly causing a couple of heart attacks, lol). But I digress.

No insulation at all? Good grief. Sometimes it turns out to be a lucky thing to have to do more demo than you expected.

Our drywall stayed up, though thirty-year old builders' grade cabinets were taken out.

I believe that plaster dust is more abrasive than drywall dust. Am I correct?

I also believe that drywall dust is more likely to go into the air than plaster dust because it is lighter in weight.

If I am correct about these two dust-generating substances, I recommend that you work to control dust and larger particles whether you have plaster or drywall to destroy, and remember that the plaster dust can scratch even more severely than drywall dust if you don't control and remove it properly. Also, use a face mask no matter which dust-creating activity you are involved with. They both can go straight into your lungs.

We created what we called "dental assistant mode" which was my taking up the hose of the Shop-Vac while DH cut with power tools into plaster or drywall. I would hold the mouth of the hose or an attachment adjacent to the cutting blade or the hammer or other tool being used to take down existing walls. It is my feeling that we kept major nasty stuff out of the air, including particles of lead-based paints.

Most recently, we used same technique during destruction of cement hump at top of basement blocks. Cement looks to me like another abrasive source of dust and particles, but this stuff doesn't send quite such a cloud into the air.

waterdamage -- Thanks for the input! I hope the same will be the case here.

florantha -- That sounds very sensible to me. I don't know the differences between plaster and drywall dust (physically speaking) but I wouldn't want either one in our lungs more than necessary. What one of our children had trouble with before was the sanding of the joint compound, or whatever it is they use to patch drywall and cover the tape. That was even with the room sealed off with plastic and the A/C system turned off. (We didn't test wall demo on the kids -- they went to their grandparents' house for a week when that was going on.) I don't think it was anything in particular about the joint compound dust, just the volume of it and the fact that there were particulates in the air. I can't imagine what asthmatics go through during a reno.