Floorplan comparison

Here is another bit of comparison, for those who might want it. This is the floorplan of the house as we are guessing it was originally built, based on what we have found during renovations, compared to the floorplan from the catalog.
Differences:

• The tiny foyer was left out. Not uncommon.
• The closet's doors were reversed whenit was built, either error or by request of the original owners, and its intervening wall was also omitted (we removed the closet wall into the large bedroom to make space for modern bedroom furniture, so it's gone now).
• The location of the back door is guessed,  that wall was turned into a cutout into an extension onto a porch addition sometime between 1921 and 1950.
• The dining room windows are assumed based on the catalog plan, also, because there was a poorly tacked on bay added in the 20s, at which time the entire dining room wall was removed. The bay was centered on the original window configuration, and is therefore not centered on the dining room itself. The plan's locations for these windows made the strange offset finally make some kind of sense!
• The kitchen door was set in the hallway, rather than in the dining room, probably to accommodate an existing coal cook stove (left hand side orientation of the stack, probably, and perhaps a right hand side access for the ash or coal? Wish I knew!).
• I have not yet taken down a later corner cabinet where the pantry window was supposed to be, to see if there is a repair to the plaster there. On the exterior, this area is partially covered by the added on bay, so no evidence shows there.

Another change made after building was an opening into the dining room from the front bedroom/study. I omitted it because I found evidence that it was altered later. We have filled it in and plan to add a built in buffet in that space.
Next update will show the current configuration of the house, contrasted with the plan. That's all for tonight.

A Little Comparison, a Few Conclusions.

So, today I got out and took a photo of the house from nearly the same angle as the catalog photo. Not quite, but close enough to do an overlay. I need to scoot over about three feet and take another picture, but that has to wait for the camera to recharge. As it was I ended up using the webcam on my tablet and guessing the angle, because I got out there, set myself up to shoot based on the catalog image on the tablet and had a dead camera. Got to love modern technology, huh?

The front bedroom window and front corner line up. The replacement front steps line up with the originals. The roof line might line up if I can somehow get more on a level field with the house. Maybe by standing on a chair on the raised sidewalk across the sunken street. The lack of dormers is glaring, and I know those were there, you can see their ghosts inside the attic. The chimney doesn't line up, but that may be due to the error in aligning the photo just right. The modern siding on the now-enclosed front porch thankfully wasn't continued around the whole house, but the eave overhang was inexplicably closed in with ugly flat ventilation soffit and I fear that the lovely shaped rafter ends were likely trimmed or removed to fit under it. At least the rest of them were not covered up.

It has really underlined how much has happened to the house in its 100 years. I am both happy about this and sad, but not surprised.
I have the front porch interior half painted (the kids' half, of course) and I discovered something that is significant and not unexpected. I knew the sheathing of the columns had to have been either mangled or stripped away in order to put up the siding and interior paneling. I found the ghosts of the columns etched into the old exterior front wall, at both ends. The angle of the column sides and shape of the capitals match those in the catalog picture. This will give me something to work from when we restore the porch. While we want to keep it enclosed, it will be changed to a more sensitive style of enclosure, with the columns replaced, exposing or replacing the curved beams, removing the awful siding and soffit panels, reshingling the porch wall up to the rail and putting in more period appropriate steps, windows and front door. It is an ambitious plan. It is one of the last things on our list.
One more thing - the floor plan in the catalog shows the dining room windows are not centered on the dining room wall. The addition, put on in the 20's (and done by an awful contractor I would love to have some harsh words with), is also not aligned to the center of the dining room. It is off by almost, but not quite, a foot. The discrepancy in one explains the otherwise random discrepancy in the other. It looks as if they laid the foundation for the bay addition, aligned to center on the pair of windows, then tore out the wall, and discovered that it was out of line with the room.

Kitchen in progress, Part 1

So, we decided to change our plans. No Ikea kitchen for us. No prefab cabinets at all. We are going totally custom, and doing it ourselves. ALL of it. Cabinets, sink, 20's style banquette, and built ins.

Not exactly this, anymore.

Why? Well, frankly, Ikea is too far away to realistically be able to get spare parts, 6000 dollars is a lot to spend for not-quite-fitting cabinets, and ... a good friend of mine got defrauded by a cashier at the Atlanta GA Ikea, with a very poor response from Ikea loss prevention (I would not shop at that one for a while, folks. Go elsewhere). Thus, between the distance to the nearest Ikea and the bad taste that their treatment of my friend left in our mouths, we elected to take our business elsewhere.

Perhaps a bit more like this, instead.

The plan:
The layout will be very similar to the posted plan examples. Sink and dishwasher (yes, I have decided I want one) under the short wide window in the middle of the kitchen, double door fridge next to a pull out broom closet, cabinets up to the ceiling, banquette where the big 1940s/1950s double sink cabinet is now, stove on the wall with the chimney, racks/rolling worktops in front of the long windows. Lots of integrated stuff, a pull out trash bin, a fold-out ironing board set into the door of the broom closet, probably an appliance garage too. I'll be using furniture grade plywood for the cabinets and hardwood for the doors.

Tools:
Level, table saw (borrowed), finish nailer, drill, sander, router and table, and whatever else we already have or need to get or borrow.

A little of this one, too.

References:

• Easy-to-build kitchen cabinets for the remodeled farmhouse, free facsimile ebook
• Shelves, Cabinets and Bookcases
• Shop Drawings for Craftsman Interiors
• Hoosier Kitchen Plan Book 1920

The cabinets will be white, probably with chrome hardware. The appliances will be modern, but white. The floor will be white with black accents.  Backsplashes will be tiled, white with black and little bits of red. 

We are seriously considering doing a custom cast concrete sink and drainboard, and possibly cast-in-place concrete countertops. The other option being tile, as I love to lay tile on counters. Not so much on floors, but I am already committed to tiling the floor.

The walls will be white beadboard wainscot from lintel height to baseboard where they are visible, and bright red above (possibly there will be a frieze stencil design, but not too keen on that in a kitchen environment). The ceiling will be papered over the drop ceiling tiles with a tin-tile pattern relief paper, and that will be painted white.

There are no good pictures of my kitchen, it's a series of unfortunate shortcuts and concessions all piled on each other, ruining the original flow and wasting all the space. 

All of that is eventual. The current status is vinyl sticky tile, steel cabinets that don't fit the space (and which will become my laundry room cabinets after the reno), and not enough of them, the old sink cabinet that is over an unheated extension and is also falling apart despite heroic attempts to save it, and the new stove and fridge. The fridge is currently sitting where the stove will go, and isn't hooked to the water because that's not going to be over there. We'll run the line when we run the new supply and drainage lines for the relocated sink. Which would be the week after we get the pros to run the gas line back to where it used to be and close off the current stove line safely.

It only looks this good good because I faked up some subway tile with stone-pattern sticky tile. I had to. I hated it. See that curtain around the sink cabinet? It's hiding the doors and drawers that fell off. The banquette will go here, soon.

We have the fridge, so we can design, plan and fit the fridge wall cabinets around it now. I plan to build the frames and install them on their bases, and build and hang the wall cabinet frames. Doors can follow after the rest of major work gets done - I've removed doors as a cosmetic choice in when I was a renter, reinstalling on move out, so it won't bug me. A bonus to this is that we can take our time to hash out pulls and knobs. I don't want anything that might catch on my clothes or anything since it's a narrow space, Mr. Vintage House wants knobs and protruding handles. We have months to argue before this becomes an issue.

After that, the stove wall cabinets get built and installed, the stove gets moved, and we start on relocating the sink. After the sink is done, we will build the banquette under the corner windows and have someplace to eat besides the living room.

Progress, why does it feel like sliding backwards?

I got it!

The foldaway built-in ironing board cabinet, that is. The door is there, the cabinet itself is in great shape, with all moving parts intact. It's very petite, so it will work perfectly in its intended use as an in-door mounting on a pull-out pantry cabinet.

It has the sleeveboard, and the pop-up support and the covers are still on both boards, so patterning new ones will be a breeze. It has never been painted, so no stripping needed!
Edited to add this image from a 1920s catalog for Ideal Furnishings, what looks to be exactly the model I found.

The folks I bought it from are moving, which why they are selling off their salvage. It is a pity, because they are awesome people.

Blue Greasepencil

Remember the post about the greasepencil mark? Well, we reorganized our salvage lumber, and about eight of the studs (out of one 12' wall!) say "SP1" in black and blue greasepencil. There are also some carpenter's notation (lengths, probably for custom adjustments on site) on one or two pieces, in graphite.

Greasepencil is one of the identifying marks for kit homes.

Wish me luck!

Why? Because I might have a line on a foldaway ironing board cabinet, salvaged, in what looks like decent shape. If I can get it, I will mount it as the front of a pull-out broom closet unit. in my redone kitchen.

Cross your fingers for me!

I have never been so glad to be wrong.

What was I wrong about? Well, folks, remember this post? I thought the house wasn't a good match to the Aladdin Sherman from the 1912 catalog because of the measurements I had of the exterior.

Those measurements are based on the exterior measurements of the modern remuddled enclosed porch, over the vinyl siding. The vinyl siding adds about 6" to the width on each side, because it is simply laid over the original porch structure, including the rail. That structure isn't calculated into the footprint of the plans.

If you go by room dimensions, the house is IDENTICAL, except for the tiny foyer and pantry walls having been omitted. Well, and the closet dividing wall was also left out, and the closet doors were built in reverse of the original plan, the kitchen door was moved into the hall, and the pantry window was left out since there is no pantry wall. There are double doors into the den from the living room, plus that open arch into the dining room from the den that may or may not have been original, and which we temporarily filled in, so the room could be usable as a bedroom.

I am sure the house is a Sherman, now.

I just wish the scan was clearer.

Research: A possible match

Well, it looks like my odd little house has even stumped Rose Thornton. That's hard - she knows a lot about kit homes! Her best guess is that she thinks it might - maybe- be a Gordon Van Tine. I have asked her to ask Dale Wolicki if he recognizes that floorplan in his collection, as there are currently no pre-1920 GVT catalogs online.

However, that made me go looking again, in hopes that I might find something useful. And - I might just have done so!

Thanks to the Clarke Historical Library's online archive of Aladdin documents I may have found a possible match. In the 1912 annual catalog, there is a little house called the Sherman. It isn't in the 1910 catalog and there is no 1911 catalog in the archive.

Its footprint is off, it's a little narrower, (ETA: I had the dimensions wrong!) exactly correct, 26x48, and the room dimensions are a little off (another ETA) practically identical except that they are given as divisions of the plan, not wall-to-wall measurements (plus there is a pantry where my house has none), but this is the absolute closest house plan I have yet found. I wish the scan was clearer, I've tried to refine it a bit for my example, but it wasn't very good.

Here she is in the 1913 annual, with two plan options. Neither is as good a match to my little oddball as the 1912 plan (or to the exterior illustration! look at the windows). The only real difference between this one and the next year's example is that there are people in the image, and the scan is clearer.

By 1915, it's clear that no more changes are being made to this design, or even the catalog page, except perhaps for typesetting. The 1914 and 1915 layouts are almost identical. And, in the 1916 catalog, I think I may have hit upon an answer as to why the Sheridan looks so very very much like my little mystery kit home. In 1916, the Sherman's name is changed to the Sheridan, one plan gets updated, and the exterior image finally gets a full update to match the changed plans. 

Look how the unaltered windows (the dining room and kitchen windows have significant alterations in my home) line up with the plan! At this point, while I am very optimistic that this house may, in fact, be a customized 1912 Sherman, because of the differences shown in the overlay image above, it is still equally possible that the 1912 Sherman is a copy of a similar house from a competitor's 1911 or 12 catalog. And, of course, if it is an Aladdin ... why is it all Sears on the inside? What this has given me is a concrete time range for the design of the house. I always had a feeling it was early teens, and now I am certain of it. It makes the search more focused and I am very, very happy about that.

Research: What the House is Not

I've been saying recently that I have pored over - without any success - numerous online and print resources, without being terribly specific. I really ought to share where and what I have looked through. I've mostly focused on the best (most local) companies, since my town is on two north/south rail lines and Chicago and Cairo were likely sources. Another clue about this being cut at an IL mill is that the house is mostly, if not all, cut from cypress. However, while makes the house nearly bulletproof and resistant to water damage, that fact doesn't narrow the options any, since local lumber mills in IL cut lots of cypress lumber both for local and regional use. Sears even advertised cypress as a high-quality budget option for floors and millwork (cheaper than oak or birch, but not by much).

Features that make my house easy to identify:

1. Odd footprint size -apparently 28x48 overall is a weird footprint for the period.
2. One floor (fairly rare in a house of this size among all the various plans).
3. The arrangement of the bedrooms and closet between.
4. The bath positioned at the center rear of the house.
5. The kitchen is not square.
6. Front has two living room windows, the door, and the den/parlor window.
7. That crazy angle between the living and dining rooms (this may have been a custom feature, though it was still fashionable in the 1900's and early teens).

Superficial features:

1. Porch design, tucked under the hipped roof (could easily be customized).
2. Hipped dormer attic vent (now missing).
3. No living room or parlor fireplace (house was heated with stoves originally).
4. Lap siding, millwork and interior hardware are all Sears (and original, there is no sign whatsoever of the interior hardware ever being changed).

So, here you go, a quick illustrated guide to what this house is not.

From the Winterthur Archive (these examples are created from their archive scans):

Chicago House Wrecking Company 1913 house plans book.

The best candidate is the 119A - It looks good, from the outside, except this house is wider and has a different roofline, footprint (31x38) and similar, but still off, layout.

Montgomery Ward Book of Homes, 1916 (date taken from wallpaper book ad at end of catalog).

It isn't a 156, because the footprint (32x39) is wrong, and the plan is also far off. The only real similarities are the outer appearance and bath/kitchen positions. She looks a lot like my house, though!

Plan Book of Harris Homes 1915

The closest I could find is this one, the L-1001. It's not really even close, footprint is off, appearance is wrong, all details are wrong.

A later undated edition (all houses are "N-" designs) has no likely examples beyond the N-1001, which is almost identical to the above excerpt. Another I would assume comes between the two has houses designated "M-" and is equally unhelpful. Nearly all Harris Plan Book houses have a side-located bath in the one-story models.

Aladdin Homes "Built in a day" catalog No 29, 1917

It's not a Sunshine, though it is very close in some significant details, like the kitchen/bath/back bedroom arrangement (this is a very Aladdin style layout, actually), and the chimney stack position. Footprint is close but wrong, roofline is wrong. The Boulevard is just as close, but too small, as is the Stanhope.

Oh, now we get to the Sheridan, which really, really looks like the old girl. I mean, look. Just look at her.

They could be twins. But all the other details are off. Plus that pesky all-Sears interior.

Then there is the Cadillac, which really looks like a similar plan, and is even 28 feet wide. But the room sizes are all wrong. All of them. It so close to right but it's not.

This concludes the selections from the Winterthur Museum Library (courtesy of archive.org).

There are no Sears Home Catalogs or Gordon Van Tine Ready-Cut catalogs earlier than about 1920 on the Internet Archive. I have compared the 1920s GVT 548 with my house and while there is a superficial resemblance, they are far from the same house, the 548 is too narrow and has the wrong plan. Likewise for the 1920s 533.

I also have several Aladdin and Sears catalog reprints, plus The Houses That Sears Built and Houses By Mail and have voraciously read everything Sears and kit home related I can find online, and I can tell you that I have not yet found a precisely similar house. I am at a loss and I would be deeply grateful to anyone who might be able to point me to one.

Research: A resource for kitchen restoration

The Kitchen Plan Book, 1920 Published by Hoosier Manufacturing (the cabinet people!) is available at the Internet Archive's online texts archive. It is a free download, or you can read it online. It's the collected best submissions from a kitchen design contest, and shows a fantastic variety of kitchens from classic mid-late 1910s bare-bones rooms with wood stoves to ultra-modern, deluxe, fitted kitchens that would not look out of place in a modern home.

Here are a few excerpts:

This one is for a small kitchen not unlike ours. I want built in everything, like this little kitchen has.

I especially love this one, though it's for a much more architecturally interesting house, with an octagonal kitchen. It looks like something you might find in a new house with a modern fitted kitchen.

Advice, if you want to download it: remove the extra periods from the filename, or your pdf reader will tell you it's a corrupted file.

If you want to get a hard copy of an earlier one, American Bungelow has their reprint of the 1917 edition of the Kitchen Plan Book (all different designs from this one, different year's contest) on sale, half price.

Emerging from hiatus, and a request

UPDATE: Dimensions were wrong, and a typo led me on a wild goose chase. Please read the posts tagged "aladdin sherman".

It's been 4 years of near-total inactivity here, but there wasn't much to report. We've been on hiatus, my husband has been deployed a few times, and we are finally getting to get back to work on the old girl.

I've spent the intervening time researching things and making plans, and I have figured out a number of things about this house. Not one of those things, and none of my extensive research, has given me anything like an answer as to which architect or kit company she came from. Not a bit, despite having practically had a love affair with the online texts section of the Internet Archive, and spending way too much time with Google Books. So, in the spirit of warming up a cold project and slowly getting it into gear, I am going to ask you for some help. Here's my question for you:

Does anyone out there recognize this floorplan? I have yet to find a house with a 28 x 48 26 x 48 footprint with a 28x40 26 x 40 cellar/foundation. I made a few rough scale drawings of what the house looked like before three different additions were tacked (or frankensteined, in the case of the dining room bay) on, and before the porch was closed in and roofers removed the vent gable. I think I ought to have drawn the steps wider, but I have no idea what the original steps might have looked like.

Here's the only photo I have been able to find prior to the changes to the porch:

What we do know:

• The county tax assessor has a single sheet of manila with a tiny photo stapled to it, which I have been told dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The build date on the house, according to this document, is 1925. However, as records are incomplete, I have been told that could simply be a sale date, or the date the property record was recorded in the county office. Nobody knows.
• The younger daughter (Edith Heppe) of the family that built it visited the late former owner of the home about 15 years ago, and a statement about the house was written down from her childhood memories. We have this statement and I have transcribed it here. 
• Mrs. Heppe remembered it was built by her father, and her parents moved to Centralia in 1921, so it had to have been built before that time. 
• It's got Sears hardware throughout, and all the original millwork is directly out of the Sears millwork catalog. 
• It originally looked rather like an Aladdin, if you go by that little black and white photo. But it does not match any recognizable Aladdin plan, or even a footprint of any similar style of home, that I have yet found. Also, the interior millwork and hardware and NOT Aladdin.
• I've found a similar footprint in Wards and Chicago House Wrecking company catalogs, but nothing like this plan or style in combination with the footprint.
• It's got an odd arrangement of den/living room/dining room that is indicative of an earlier house, so really, the latest I would put it at is 1914.

In other news, I finally know what to do with the back bedroom. More on that, and the kitchen remodel, later.

Hibernation

I have noticed our renovation activity hibernating, for lack of a better word, during deep winter. We've got kids in the house, stuff going on (besides an unfinished dining room), it's "seal your house like a ziploc" weather and that means no painting, no powertools, no sanding.

It's frustrating. The most we have been able to do is decrapulate the living areas of the house, and I'm going nuts. Well, okay, I did put up drapes and make a lampshade, but that's girly stuff and I need to wield power tools, sand something, or whip out the paint.

Imagine my relief that we had some false spring today. I crawled out of my cave, scratched my back on a tree, and got to work on the sun porch (the office-to-be). I got to use a Very Small Power Tool - Dremel tools make a satisfying motor-noise, even if it is in the soprano section of the power tool choir. I've now altered all the fake mullions on the modern Andersen casements to look at least sort-of Arts & Crafts. They are now divided into four small square "panes" over one big "pane," and I cannot express how much better it already looks from the road.

I also removed the last two interior storm windows (put up before the porch was enclosed), so we can use the windows to move air through the house from the sunporch. I feel vindicated.

Back to the cave.

Books!

Ah, a box of research materials arrived today. The other should arrive tomorrow. So far, no love, but I'm sure I'll be popular with the local historical societies if I share these.

I'm going to go roll in my books now. Detailed reviews once I've pawed them all - I'll let you know what they tell me about this place.

What a difference a latch makes!

We posted a couple weeks ago about ordering a new latch for FX's room, so we didn't need to use bungee cords to keep his door closed anymore. We received it Tuesday and installed it Wednesday. What was the delay? Since I didn't post about this before - we had our Very First Houseguests (waves to C and C all the way in California) and have spent the last couple of days recovering- I'm posting now. Please forgive me, dust covered and paint spotted readers.

A little bit of related news before getting to the mechanical focus of the day: We also ordered a can of Craftsman Furniture Polish and a roll of low-friction tape. The furniture polish is nice, but most of our wood is so very far past only needing polish that it's not a cure-all. We really need to suck it up and refinish our furniture. Works great on the moldings, though. The low-friction tape, however, has made our old and battered bombe front chest of drawers work like a dream, which it never did before. Getting clothes in the morning was like an episode of Ultimate Fighting Championships, and now it's not.

I also made some drapes for the living room, and made a kid-kitchen in our corner cabinet, but the batteries in the camera are dead, so that's another day's news.

Now to the main event:

The latch works great. It makes FX's door actually function as a door should. It even came with all the hardware we might need, though we didn't need anything except the latch and the screws (we also got 2 spare strikeplates and their screws). That said, there are few caveats for anyone else looking to replace a 1910's latch-only assembly. They are:

1. It's a little bit smaller. Lengthwise. Just enough (perhaps a sixteenth of an inch?) to make the spindle not line up with its original hole.
   
2. This causes power tools to come out during an install. When one has to enlarge a hole to allow the spindle to move (we could get it through, once the faceplates were off the door, but it didn't move), it's time for Mr. drill.
   
3. This also causes the faceplates to need moving over, so they line up with the new hole. Another job for Mr. Drill.
   

All in all, the job took about 3x as long, but that's maybe half an hour, considering that a direct parts swap would have taken 10 minutes. I should not neglect to mention that I put the latch in backwards after I'd gotten everything set, and had to pull the knob, the spindle, and the latch and put it all back the right way. And, really, I was prepared for potential difficulties, since repro parts rarely fit exactly like the originals. But, oh, that would have been nice...

The end of the story is that our 4 year old now has a door that works, for his birthday. That would be the other reason for a delay in reporting - we threw a birthday party for him. At Pizza Hut. No, the dining room really isn't ready for six four year olds to be throwing cake in it. It may never be, even if we do eventually get it painted.

Locks and shades

Today I did something we've put off for months, with no good reason. I removed this from my son's bedroom door: It looks fine, I suppose, but there's another facet to the problem. The latch itself is snapped off, even though the rest of the mechanism is fine:

Our three-almost-four-year old has been living in this room now for a month, without a door that closes properly. Ihat's fabulous if one only worries about escaping during a fire, but horrible if you want to be able to hear your toddler escaping during his nap. We've been making do with a bungee-cord hooked from his doorknob to the moulding, but it's both ugly and not great for the woodwork, not to mention not being ideal, safety-wise.

Today I took a step towards not jerry-rigging it, and ordered the replacement latch from Vandyke's that we had picked out ... Last August. It's ideal - same dimensions, comes with replacement strikeplates in case the original we have doesn't work with it, and it's relatively cheap.

For the curious, the works of the latch looks like this:

I may have mentioned that we had bought a replacement lightkit for our living room ceiling fan, and found that you can't get the kind of light we want (a single shade uplight)to work on the ceiling fan we have. I also do not wish to spend $150+ for a fan at this time to get what we want. The lights on the fan have been driving us nuts, however, as they are downlights just about perfectly angled to be regarded as interrogation lights AND the "shades" are actually clear glass, unfrosted, convex-petaled tulip shapes that function more as lenses to concentrate the light than as any sort of diffusion device. We have to live with this thing, but we can't stand it. In short, "ow."

Yesterday, I got tired of "badly designed light fixture"-induced migraines, and decided to do something about it. We went from this:
to this:


I built it out of card, armature wire, copper tooling foil (bought for another project and then not used - if I do this again I'll use copper flashing as it's WAY more cost effective), glue (duh), aluminum foil (to line the reflector panels with), and a scrap of the indigo-dyed organdy that I'm making my sheer curtain panels from. Soooooo much better. It's like breathing fresh air after being in a stuffy room, or putting on sunglasses in the middle of a scorching Texas summer day. I plan to reinforce it with square wood dowels in a week or so (I have them, but they are still at my mother's house), since it's bowing a bit from the pressure of being mounted, but overall, I'm very pleased.

If you'd like to make a shade yourself, I highly recommend this book. This wasn't the first shade I've made (I have made several Japanese style wood-and-ricepaper shades and a few cloth ones), but it was my first copper-and-card one. The book made a great reference for shaping, though it's not a design from the book, there are several similar projects.

Castles in the Sky

Or, "Cabinets in the Kitchen." It makes no difference, because one is as real as the other, unfortunately.

However, dreaming can be fun, so I downloaded the Ikea kitchen design software and went on with my imagined redesign of the kitchen. I'd been playing with various configurations for some time in my other 3 remodeling software packages, but this really works well 9this year - last year's crashed on me too much to bother with). We're considering Ikea as a source for reasonably priced cabinetry that we can install ourselves, so this gave me a nice idea about how much it might be to get the whole mess from them (under 7 grand, including fripperies like a stove and a dining area, and not including shipping). There's the added fuzzy of following a kind of tradition - the house and everything in it having originally been ordered from catalogs - even if this is just a pipe dream.

First, here is a rough approximation of what we've got now, Ikea-style:


I'm guessing, from the five or so cabinet doors we found cobbled into a shelf in the cellar, that there was a basic kitchen built-in on the side where the counter is now, possibly also an icebox. The corner cabinet I roughed in in this is a homemade affair, cobbled together (fairly well, actually) form odds and ends of plank and tongue-and-groove boards, and goes from floor to ceiling. I like the midcentury steel cabinets, but they don't go with the house, and we need more storage and more counterspace.

Problems with the kitchen as it stands:

• As you can see, there's LOTS of wasted space.
  
• The current sink location is both counterintuitive and just plain bad - the supply and waste pipes go through an unheated space under the original back porch).
  
• There's kind of a work triangle, but not really.
  
• If we want a vent hood, we will have to cut through the outer wall of the house if the stove stays where it is. Not good.
  
• There's no eating in the kitchen without traffic bumping into the hapless person next to the door.

So I have a few things in mind to change, and some things to restore. I started out with a bare room and the knowledge that the original location of the kitchen sink was where the range is now, the stove had been in the inset where our dinette is now, and went from there. I got this:


Wow. I went with one of the more traditional "modern" cabinet fronts, "Ädel," on "Medium Brown," as it seemed more like what was once here. I put the range in the original location of the cookstove, I moved the refrigerator over and put tall cabinets between it and the partial wall for expanded storage (including a broom/cleaning storage closet, which we do not now have), put cabinets on the stove wall, filling the awkward inset with useful things, and relocated the sink to the original sink location, under the short window.

In order to avoid removing or obscuring original features (the long windows, which let so much wonderful light into the kitchen), I elected to put kitchen carts or some other portable storage/workspace solution on either side of the sink. And the dining area? Where the existing sink is, so nobody gets elbowed or bumped during breakfast. The sink I picked is one of two that I really love in the Ikea catalog, the one that looks like a vintage farm sink.

It's so much more usable that I just want to buy it NOWNOWNOW. Of course, this is not possible, and will entail a great deal more than seven thousand dollars, such as living without a kitchen for a couple of weeks while we move plumbing around and install everything. Never mind the money.

Writer's Block, or Living in the Project

NOTHING says "house restoration" like patched plaster walls, an extension cord, and a bale of toilet paper. Except possibly the direct view to the bathroom from the front door, and a nifty sepia effect courtesy my camera.

So, here I am, camera in hand, readied to relate the news of living in the house for a whopping 2 weeks, and I find that my grasp of words has failed me.

Utterly.

I find myself thinking "Kitchen ... NO! Bathroom ... wait. Bedroom. Plaster? Yardwork? Snow?" This is followed by a dull moaning sound as my brain's gears fail. Madly, I continue to hunt for things to write about, grasping at "Scrubbing floors, perhaps? Or the kitchen drains? Oooo! How about the cellar?"

I'm not short of things to write about. I'm spoiled for choice. My brain is whirling like a magpie in a sequin factory. Too much to do, too much to tell, not enough focus.

Therefore, with this decision (or lack thereof), I give you some photographs. And some captions. That's all I can muster right now.


Bath, before and after. See if you can guess which is which! My best clue for you is that there's no Homart plastic tiles in the restored bathroom. Or pink. I'm not a pink person.


Here's the Original Medicine Cabinet, the one I bragged about finding so long ago, in her almost completed state (note the smears of wood filler). All installed, but not really finished yet. I'm putting off the rest of the paintjob until I get time to pull and strip (or replace with chrome copies) the hardware. The existing stuff is brass and would look ... odd, with the rest of the bath hardware being chrome.


Look, that's food in the kitchen, and not tools! Okay, some of those are tools, but mostly it's actual kitchen stuff. We can cook in here now, as of about a week ago. The first week, though, it was pretty grim, and we didn't get the tools packed of to the cellar until we were nearly starving for a lack of cooking space.

And, as promised, an image of (part of) the Giant Bed. It really does barely fit in the expanded master bedroom. This was the best picture I could get, as it's what was framed in the door. That's the baby napping on the bed, he gets his crib tomorrow. It's huge.

I will close with an image of the no-longer-hellish dining room ceiling, with the pretty, new, unfinished, "beam" for all to see. The real beam is actually much further up in the wall, and the posts against the walls are as cosmetic as the cladding over where the beam ought to be cosmetically (structurally, it's fine where it is). Don't look at the piles of boxes, please. Just pretend they aren't there.

That's what we do.

Connected

We're online now, but the camera, being Mom's, didn't come with us, so pictures of the house have to wait until we get one of our own.

Still so much to do, but at least now it's home.

We're IN!

Moved today - All basic necessities are in the house, and no luxuries.

That means we're without cable or internet access, so expect few or no updates for the next week or two, and then lots of them.

See you next year!

It's always something

Oh, yes, before I forget, Happy Christmas.


We got the bedroom painted last night - well, sort of. We went into this week with the attitude that we'd get the house ready enough to "not get paint on the furniture or plaster dust in the food," as I said elsewhere. The bedroom is painted on all the walls that would be impossible or highly inconvenient to paint with the Great Bed* in the room. That leaves out the end of teh room where we still need to buy another can of spackle to level out the difference between the old closet, the patch where the ex-wall was and the bedroom walls. It's a nice soft, restful cloud grey, and I felt calmer just being in there while we painted it, or that could have been the fumes.

The ceiling isn't painted, but that's not just because of the strip of unfinished patching (though the rest of the ceiling is solid now, after we patched 1908039794856289 nail holes from the removal of the pasteboard tiles). It's also because, if we cannot get it satisfactorily smooth (which is unlikely just now), we're going to paper it with a grey and white marble-pattern paper and just go with it. I know, I know - people who paper ceilings to cover problems are evil. I should know. But it'll be a lot easier to paper than paint the ceiling after the big bed's in there - it makes fabulous scaffolding. And we have to live there, too. So that's my defense.

Here's the Cool Original Detail, before painting over:

It was a simple frieze of wreaths with ribbons, stencilled on the original thin layer of ocher yellow paint (probably milk paint), in green and russet. It was about 14 inches high.

Detail shot:

It's pretty, and it was a real pity to paint it over. At least we were able to document it.

Handy Tip For the Day:
Bicycle handgrips, applied to the non-business end of a paint roller pole really help with control when using it at full length. And you can't drop them paint roller downward when you're up on a ladder...

And now, to this week's installment of "I Thought We Bought That!" : We went to put the outlet plates on in the kitchen and discovered that we had somehow bought three times as many double outlet plates as we needed, and only one box of single plates. Which are all gone, having been installed elsewhere in the house, I guess.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I bought the outlet plates, and I distinctly recall buying the right number of everything. Well, back to the home store we go. Next week. Or sometime. We've got bigger fish to fry right now.

But our bathroom looks beautiful! Of course, I didn't take any pictures of that...