Tag: House Tour

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House Tour: Kitchen After

Christine

I took these pictures early one Saturday morning, before I got the kitchen really messy again with cooking for a crowd.

We did so much to this kitchen, I hardly know where to start.

I’ll just do a quick run down, details to follow.

New:

plaster
garden window
beadboard walls
crown molding and plate rail
structural support beam
lighting, general and task
door and window trim
knobs, pulls, hinges
counter
sink and faucet
dishwasher
range hood

Nearly New:

fridge (one year)
stove (three years)

Revitalized:

cabinets
wood floor


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House Tour: Kitchen Under Construction

Christine

Kitchen in progress…
The new garden window; a view from outside.
Evidence of a window to the back porch. Vinyl floor torn out, ceiling tiles gone.
The plethora of wall surfaces we encountered. Notice the pink peeking out before the last couple of runs of beadboard were installed? That was sparkly linoleum.
Newly covered with beadboard.
The loss of lower cabinets for the sake of a dishwasher- well worth it. And the loss of upper cabinets because of a necessary new structural support beam- not really missed.

New blueboard with plaster skim-coat. New structural support beam. New recessed lighting. New crown molding and plate rail.
Another upper cabinet gone. Not a loss, really. It was impossible to reach without a ladder, an awkward size, and it made an already tight spot even more claustrophobic. (The cabinet was above the doorway to the entry- the one on the left. The doorway on the right is to the dining room.
The never ending tower of drawers waiting to be sanded, primed, and painted.
More to come…
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House Tour: Kitchen Before

Christine

The kitchen in September 2003…
While the kitchen had a lot of cosmetic issues, it had one good thing going for it: all those cabinets.

Now, I don’t think they are original to the house, but I suspect they date to the 1950s. The hardware that was there was that black stuff often seen between the 50s to the 70s, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but at some point someone decided it would all look better if spray painted gold. But then the gold started to rub off and you could see the black again. Nice.

Then there is the “trailer window”. It was placed too high for me to see out of, didn’t open for ventilation, and didn’t let much light in. I would hate to think this was original, I sort of doubt it, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Speaking of the lightning, there were only two light sources in this kitchen: the fancy swag light, not placed near any work surface, and the scary flourescent tube above the sink, with its brittle cord you had to plug in to turn on. The previous owners left all of the kitchen appliances. The fridge, which is on its last legs, the electric stove, which was in full working order, the gas stove, which had never been used (did I mention they had a fear of losing electricity?), and the roll away dishwasher. I did appreciate the dishwasher, but it really made for a crowded workspace with all these extra appliances.

Also, please note the lovely laminate counter and walls. They had streaks of “gold”. That must have inspired the repainting of the knobs and hinges. While we are talking about the surface coverings, don’t you just love the 1970s paneling on the walls? And the ceiling tiles? How about the vinyl flooring, with the rectangular cut right in the middle? Really special.

I took great pleasure in tearing the flooring out myself. The ceiling tiles came down after we realized the intake water supply to the upstairs toilet was leaking. Right onto the kitchen counter, right about where the green fan is sitting.

Have I mentioned how much the previous owners liked shelves?

And there is a good shot of that swag fixture, casting more light than it did in real life.
The door way above leads to the back porch room, now known as Oliver’s room.

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House Tour: Dining Room After

Christine

And now, today…
The walls are painted a very soft shade of spun pink. I wish the color was a bit more obvious, but I was afraid to go much darker. In a room this size that had the potential to be too much pink. I just wanted a blush of pink to set off the couple pieces of pink depression glass from my great-grandfather Norman.
I think I still need more stuff on the walls, but it comes slowly. Almost everything is a hand-me-down, mostly from my grandmother.
Now the dining room wall is returned to its original location, and that puts the whole room back in proportion. That makes me so happy.
Both sets of French doors have been stripped of their paint (one set still hanging on the wall they moved, was a dingy white, the other set found in the basement, had been painted half mint green, half liliac), and re-hung.
Now, two small radiators, evenly spaced, make for a much better look. Plus the large one used to be partly in the window bump-out, and I was just never comfortable with that. The floor does slope down there.

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House Tour: Dining Room Before

Christine

The Dining Room, as it looked in September 2003…

Really, no too bad. Bland wall color. Really poor treatment of that beautiful bank of windows. The glass shelves across the windows were really special, too. These people really had a thing for wall mounted shelves. They were all over the place. The plate rail around the top wasn’t bad, but it had to be removed when we moved the wall, and we discovered that it was definitely not original, and was very cheaply made. Also the chair rail was added at a later date.
It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with this room. The proportions were wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In the picture below, to the left of the French doors, you’ll notice a strange lumpy line running down the wall, right above the radiator. It is hard to tell from these pictures, but that is the edge of the bump out. You see, sometime in the past, probably in the 1950s or 60s, someone enclosed the back porch to make a bedroom. And they moved the dining room wall to make the bedroom slightly larger. Once I figured out what threw this room off, I knew it would bug me until I would be able to move it back to its original location. I just didn’t know it would be so soon…
Note the fabulous press-board entertainment unit the previous owners left for me, mostly because they couldn’t fit it on their moving van.

There are two radiators in this room. They should be about the same size, and they flank the window bump out. As some point, probably when they moved the wall, someone swapped the second small radiator from the dining room and put it in the living room. They took one that was almost twice as big and made it the second one in the dining room. I can only assume this was done to provide extra heat to this tiny, make-shift bedroom. Even now, it is cold back there, and before we rearranged walls there was no heat source in that space, which is also over an un-insulated part of the basement. Burr.

The doorway to the kitchen was also no longer in its original location. It should have been about 32″ wide with a swinging door. The door is still here, and it is in beautiful condition. I was very lucky. Many of the original doors were still tucked here and there around the house. Also, don’t you just love the 60s-70s “chandelier”? Brass AND wood.
Although I like the plate rail, we never put it back up after we moved the wall. We would have had to replicate the brackets (which I have hung on to), and by the time we were even at the stage to even think about it, almost all of the shelf board had been re-purposed.

For such a simple room, it really looks different today.