I wanted the kitchen wood removed:
The primary reason for removing the kitchen cabinets and counters is to eliminate pest nests, leading to the installation of open shelves and floating counters. Food is currently stored on beds, in closets, and in the living room due to the rat infestation since Napoli Assets LLC opened holes into the house for pests in 2014. By removing rat and roach nests from the kitchen, aka the cupboards that they nest in, we could regain usage of the kitchen. The push to reclaim the kitchen space arose from my desire to convert the ‘2nd kitchen’ back into a closet to address the severe lack of closet space because my family currently stores clothes on windows, and beds, aka roach breading spaces. With the closet ready I could then cover clothes in plastic containers to keep roaches out of them.

Here’s what the “wooden” cabinets look like which are home to pest nests. This cabinet will continue to attract pests as long as they exist. Nothing can be stored in these cabinets because they are soaked in pest chemicals that attract future pests.

Why specifically does it need to be open shelves and floating counters?
I explained to the landlord via e-mail about this idea. Pests love dark spaces to nest and live, by making everything open and off the floor we will therefore allow light and air to those places. Pests leave chemical trails which they return to, so if pests get into closed porous spaces, those areas will not get properly aired out and hold the stench for decades, thus continuing to attract future pests. We also can’t run a broom or vacuum in tight closed-off spaces. Aside from the fridge, stove, and sink around 90% of the kitchen has been unusable, which includes cupboards and cabinets made of wood over the last 20 years. These issues have been hard for my mother to manage.

Now we know pests will continue to run rampant in this specific house. What matters is simply how we and them can coexist without losing the functionality of the house or suffering damages. With open shelves and floating counters on both sides of the kitchen, the kitchen will be usable again. Primarily because it will allow us to store things in containers on the open shelves, will be easier to clean, and we could run a vacuum where needed.

The picture below shows how limited the space is in the current kitchen set up as of December 2023. You can see that we had to put our own temporary table just to have space for food prep.

The image below shows my idea to add more counter space and we needed open shelves on the walls above the counters for food storage. The position of the fridge in my drawing below shows where I put the fridge in 2014 after I cleaned pounds of rat shit out of the kitchen. As people think they know better than I do, the fridge was moved to block the walk way after I moved it in 2014.

The slideshow below shows how we’ve had to store food and our kitchen items. Mainly everything is being stored outside of the house on the patio and in the “2nd kitchen”. What I refer to as the “2nd Kitchen”, is just a closet with floating counters that could be uninstalled to become a closet for clothes again.