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?