Too Busy to Blog

That's it, really. I've been busy with working on the house, working on the yard, getting kids through the school year with decent grades and then into summer sports, and actually working, to blog about anything much.

Here's a quick list-format rundown of things we've been working on, house-wise:

Repainting the inside of the enclosed front porch, so it can be a functional playroom and office. The playroom half is done in blue and clouds, a lighter version of the murals in the kids' room, With a bit of functional chalkboard paint, and the office is white, with the columns (erroneously, as it turned out) sketched in dry-brush style in blueprint cyan.

Gardening - in front, in back, the side yards. I had the most spectacular poppy bed, and then we had a storm.

This photo is from last spring's first tiny starts. Nearly all have survived the intervening year and my dianthus to either side of the porch steps are now enormous, over a foot tall. I've expanded those beds as far as the corners of the porch and  added beds to either side of the steps down to the street.

It was a long winter (snow until the end of March!) and I leapt into gardening as soon as I was allowed to. I've spent days out there getting filthy and sunburnt. It's still very small beginnings, but it will become lovely over time. Also, I already have one hard green tomato. Any further gardening talk gets its own post, because I can go on and on about gardening.

Reorganizing and updating the kids' storage in their room. This was a big project and involved finding things that worked with much of what we already had, and which will transition well from little-boy to big-boy. Tougher than you'd think.

Going through boxed up outgrown toys and baby things for hand me downs to pass on. I got rid of about five boxes of stuff that way. No pictures. That was pure chaos!

Turning half of the unfinished dining room into a temporary kitchenette, with various freestanding storage things, in order to make it possible to work on the kitchen. Also, no pictures. We've already taken out six 1940's steel cabinets in the kitchen, it's a madhouse. All of those will go to the laundry room.

Preparing for the kitchen renovation has been really absorbing. Most recently, we've been getting the cabinets measured for, and ordered. We've driven all over hoping for a wonderful deal on period-appropriate tile, like we got on the bathroom, but will most likely end up using reasonably close stuff from a big box store.We already have the new sink, and the new fridge and stove, but the sink isn't installed yet, plumbing and gas needs moving about. This, also, will get its own post. There are drawings. And a bushel of photos.

Now, those old cabinets, the ones going into the laundry room? The laundry room doesn't exist yet. This has been stressful, but it's a part of the Big Plumbing Adventure that needed to wait for spring and the end of freezes to take care of. That's coming up in a couple of weeks, and will mean a few days without water.

Finally, I spent a big chunk of winter being (curably, but miserably) ill and stewing over delayed renovations by sleuthing other houses. Thanks to an online house-aficionado acquaintance, I managed to locate another Sherman/Sheridan. Sadly, it's probably been torn down, as it was a tax default sale. That, too, is another story for another day.

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.

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.

Return of the Kitchen Plans

Part of gearing up for a return to work on the house is updating plans, and updating cost lists. One thing that hasn't changed is that we intend to use Ikea kitchen cabinets as our budget solution for making our kitchen more usable. We are going with white Adel cabinet fronts because they look the most like what used to be here (we found the remains of a door in the basement), and using hoosier-style pulls instead of knobs and handles because, as big a room as it is, it is still a tight space.

I wish the Ikea planner gave a little more control over the walls, and I don't really understand why the stove hood won't fit in with the short open shelves (there will be a vent hood there of some kind, but we may have to fabricate it ourselves), but I'm happy with the general look. 

I love the light in the room, and I never, ever wanted to cut those long windows in half, as I would certainly have to do if I let the cabinets and counters cut across them. I also want, but don't have room for, a permanent kitchen island or kitchen table in the middle of the room. Given these two factors, I decided to use kitchen carts  as combined movable workspaces and additional storage for things like mixing bowls, the wok, baskets of folded kitchen towels, art materials for the kids, all kinds of things we won't need to hide.

The sink is getting put back where it used to be, under the short wide window where the stove sits now, looking lonely. Where it is now, it has the water lines running through an unheated, uninsulated space under what was originally a porch that got enclosed some time in the late 1920's, and expanded into sometime in the 1940's. That space is a perfect spot for a table and a couple of benches for eating, doing homework or making messy crafts.

This is what it looks like now, with a round table, all the counter and most of the storage on one side, the sink crammed up against the back door, and the stove hanging out in the middle of one wall. So much wasted space, not a great working layout, and a bunch of great 1940's steel cabinets that will become my laundry room cabinets when we do the kitchen reno.

Here is the plan view, showing how much better the new layout (which is likely not too different from the original layout) will use the same space.

The fridge/storage/pantry wall, with some workspace (I foresee the microwave and telephone taking up residence here). Those tall cabinets are the pantry and cleaning closet, the high cabinets will be more pantry. Yes, I have already purchased my stepstool.

The old Ikea planner version of the kitchen redesign, with the medium brown wood finish Adel fronts and gray counters. Between my research showing that white was popular, locating the white cabinet door in the cellar, and realizing that a long narrow room like this never benefits from loads of dark wood, we elected to go with the white. However, as you can see, the basic plan remains the same.

And an overview of the kitchen from the new planner, with the white Adel fronts, more open shelving (we like putting coffee cups, spice and dishes on display) and better-fitting carts. I expect my entire basement will be filled with boxes in short order, though the renovation isn't going to happen until spring. 

Oh, I forgot to mention the best part: the cost for all the cabinets, counters, sink and furnishings is under 5 grand. Yay Ikea!

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.

Scroogey.

We are within days of move in -the moving van comes on Wednesday-, and my heart goes pitty-pat, but not in anticipation.

It's stress. And possibly fear.

Read my wailing lament:
We have a huge pile -or two- of salvaged lumber that has to go to the basement, another pile of demoed plaster the size of a live bear, an accumulation of trash on the back porch that I have no clue what to do with (we have no trash service at this time, or trashcans, for that matter), and 3 rooms that MUST be painted prior to move-in (bath, master bedroom and kitchen). I'm sure there's more, but my brain is being kind and refusing to allow me to recall it.

On the positive side, where I'm focusing my energy to stay sane, we have all but completed the bath - it just needs paint, installing the glass shelves (6) and remounting of the light fixture and shower rod, and we're ready to go. The master bedroom is really almost done, we're stripping the last of the wallpaper today, and we discovered a Cool Original Detail under the last stretch of paper at the top of the room - a stenciled frieze of wreaths. The dining room ceiling is closed, if not pretty, and most of the wiring is really done. I got the kitchen cleaned up last night, in prep for painting and move-in.

The hardest thing, right now, is not doing the things that can wait right now - the frieze paper in the dining room, the desk in my son's room, the window-seats, the kitchen faucet. The only optional thing I did was spend a whopping 20 bucks on some cheap xmas stuff and we put a tiny, pathetic tree up. It's only 3 feet tall and looks overpowered by one string of lights and 18 ornaments.

I so desperately want to build those window seats. And do all the other things we must wait on. There is simply too much else to do.

So, we are only taking off Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and maybe not even Christmas Eve.

Lockset Archaeology, plus more working lights!

We spent yesterday continuing with the electrical work and moving original parts of the house around. Now, thanks to our Wonderful Freinds, we have a hallway light fixture, and my son's room has light, and things are really moving along that way. So well, in fact, that we need to buy some more wire :)

However, Chris and I did stuff not related to electrical work. We went looking for various bits of hardware that had been relocated over the years and tried to put it back. This kind of thing is one of my favorite rehab activities - I get to play archaeologist.

I was started on that path because our original (now interior, as our porch was enclosed 10 years ago) front door had had its lockset and attendant hardware removed and replaced with a modern Kwikset lockset (YUCK! I despise shiny yellow goldtone) sometime in the last 30-odd years. There have not been any keys for that lockset for nearly 15 years (according to the PO), so we were going to have to remove it, no matter what, and replace it with something that our 3-year-old can't use to permanently exclude us from the house.

I thought of something odd I had seen on the (now interior - also has a now-enclosed porch) back door, involving a knob/key plate that didn't look like it was set right. It looked too large, and the interior one, while smaller, was still larger than the rest of the interior plates. This matched up nicely with the scars on the front door, as did the edge face of the lockset, once we removed the Icky Kwicky lockset and knobs. I delightedly disinstalled the relocated mortise lockset and brought it into the living room, where Chris was working on the door.

Chris observed that the latch was going the wrong way, and said that this must not be the right set. I pointed out that somebody had clearly disassembled the lockbox and removed the deadbolt (I'm guessing about the time the key disappeared) and the button stops (privacy knob-locks). It looks very similar to this repro mortise lockset, but is made of iron with steel working parts. Chris then unscrewed the two screws, pulled out the latch and flipped it over, and put it all back together. After all that, it worked fine and tapped into its original hole perfectly. We still have to strip off the eighty-one billion layers of old paint from the plates, and then refinish them and the knobs, but it already looks a million times better.

Yes, our internal kitchen/back door is now without knobs, but I know where its originals went (and plan to harvest them and replace them), and the latch hadn't lined up with the (wrong) strikeplate for decades anyway. It had locked with first a twist bolt (since painted into oblivion) and then a small surface bolt for ages and ages.

I have ambitous plans for relocating various doors throughout the house so they are more useful (such as the all-glass basement entry and its lovely old wood-framed screen door, the current interior kitchen rear door, and the old kitchen/hall door). There are two non-original, but clearly older, doors that are going to go away to more appropriate homes once the doorway shuffling is complete.

There's also some strangely located edge molding that was stuck into the cellar stair doorway in addition to the stop molding. For no good reason. That will also be removed, stripped and reused in one of the several places such molding was yanked out. But it can wait. Next winter, maybe...

As for future plans, anyone have shellacking or varnishing tips for me? I'll need to coat the cleaned door/window hardware to make it match any non-painted stuff that still exists in the house, as all the hardware was in place when the wood was finished, with shellac. And our windows in the dining room bay need to be refinished, as there's old water damage from before the storm windows went on.

Why is it, that as soon as a task gets struck from the list, two more spring up to take its place?