The Kitchen, Part One

The holidays took a heck of a lot more time than I thought it would, back tracking me on writing a blog. Sorry! I'm planning to write a bunch of shorter blogs about the happenings in the kitchen. If I did just one, you'd be reading for days! Ha! So here we go!

It all started when this died, one year ago, today.

Then I fell in love with this....

The big range. 

Oh, and Cosmo 2.0, I think by now he had started to melt my heart. 

So, we were rocking a little bit of a torn up, but totally functional kitchen.

I miss that tall faucet so much.

Then, we didn't need these any more, and thank God, they were not that great.

Check, out those blonde cabinets! The kitchen was built to to serve the 12-25 disabled folks that lived here. The city didn't care if it matched the rest of the house, they needed cheap and functional. Puke. Puke. Puke. But, a year later, I miss those ugly things.

We posted the double oven on craigslist and a few days later, the entire kitchen was gone. A church came and paid up $500 and took the double ovens and all of the cabinets and counter tops, even the sink. 

So, this was our kitchen suddenly.

We had already begun ripping out the many layers of flooring, now that the cabinets were gone it make it easy to pull the rest up. That board in front of the range, that's totally preventing anyone from falling into a pretty decent sized hole. Luckily we had another tiny kitchen up on the third floor so Rick managed to drag the sink and cabinets down. This made me feel better since at this point we only had on bath tub/shower and I didn't want to do the dishes in it. And I couldn't justify eating off paper and plastic for however long (I was thinking maybe three months) until we had a kitchen again. You can see to the upper right we started exploring what all the walls had to tell about the past of this kitchen. 

The wall we started to knock out divided the kitchen, we called it the kitchen nook room. It once held a servant staircase that we took a long time deciding if we should rebuild it. The staircase shared the room with what would have been a butler's pantry as it was adjacent to the dinning room, and a nearly hidden door in the entry way to hurry out the answer the door for guest.

Hell with the wall and the kitchen nook and staircase. Sometimes bringing things back to original isn't worth it. But adding another 100-square feet to the kitchen, in a house built in a time that all kitchens were tiny, hell yeah.

  

So long kitchen nook! 

Near the time of expanding the kitchen we had also discovered a bonus of 2 feet more of ceilings! 10 Foot ceilings! Holy moly, what a total change it made to the entire room, once the ceilings were back to normal.

At this time we were able to took into the kitchen nook ceiling from here. That is when we learned more about how the room at actually been set up! 

With the walls coming down, we found some really beauiful wall paper. We figure the first major remodel of the house was in the 1930's/1940's then ~1973, then again early 90's. A few other smaller remodel projects happened through out the house at different times too. The kitchen could tell a story as we peeled it apart. Each time change happened they just covered up the old, or updated right next to the old. We had layers of floors, layers of walls, and you can see each new generation of electrical wires lined up side by side.

 This one above was found in the butler's pantry. We are 98% certain that it is original to the house. With out a doubt this was the most beautiful I had found through out the house. It was paper and ink. Nothing too fancy like silk, but nice enough incase the guests saw into the room as butler's went in and out of the dinning room.

But then there was this one. This one just makes my old fashion heart explode. There were apples,  plates, and clocks. Under this was another close in style of wall paper, but a bit older, that depicted more farm life, like a little person in a big hat turning the ground for turnips.

We also found  A LOT of wall paper like this. This is also a nice date marker for when they had lowered the ceilings. You can probably see it in some of the picture. 

So, this is starting to get long. So for now you wait! I have nothing else better to do right now, well, i have about a million trillion things I should be doing right now, but I rather do this. So, I'll set up an auto post for Part- Two to be posted tomorrow morning. 

SO CHECK BACK! This time I'm 100% for real, there will be another blog tomorrow!