So, along with fun discoveries of wallpaper we found a few other surprises.
I found this looking for more pictures, this was part of the wallpaper finds, this was behind the cute teapot style paper. So cute!
Part of our discovery that the ceilings had been dropped came with a mighty big surprise.
The mudroom, the room that is immediately left after you enter the house from the side door, also our laundry room, which then merges with the actual kitchen. The mudroom's ceiling was not as fast or easy to pull down as the kitchen. Right above it is the remodeled handicap assessable bathroom, the largest bathroom in the house. When who ever remodeled it, they thought it was just fine to shove all the debris from it under the floor, on top of the ceiling for the mudroom.
Just some of what fell out of the ceiling as we ripped it down. I will forever love the memory of Rick and I teetering on our ladders, crow bars in tow, when suddenly I hear a huge crack and whoosh. The whole room instantly became a murky grey, I couldn't even see my hand in front of me. I stood on my ladder yelling, "HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Rick are you okay?!" "Yeah, are you?" "Yeah! That was nuts!" By now the dust began to settle and Rick and I were able to see each other, maybe eight feet away from each other on our ladders. It was hard to tell each others reactions because we were geared up and prepared for the worst. Rick had explained he managed to get a full sheet of dry wall to come off at one time, so about 24 square feet of junk came crashing down at once. "I think we need to take a break outside" Rick said, I couldn't have agreed more, or laugh in disbelief more.
Luckily we were prepared. We had peeked into the ceiling before we pulled it down. "It's totally full of shit!" I remember Rick shouting to me with his head stuck in the two foot gap. He popped his head out with a copper pipe and part of a tile in his hand. We knew we were going to be rained on by broken tiles. Silly as we look wearing our motorcycle helmets in the house, it was a good thing we did.
Of all that fell out of the ceiling, I collected some of the things I found interesting.
I didn't find Henry up there, I'm sure he would have had a blast exploring up there before we pulled it down. There's a few more wall paper samples too.
I had mentioned earlier we discovered the missing servant staircase. They had removed it and turned the top two stairs into a closet upstairs. Once the ceiling was gone we found ourselves in the closet!
Evil Kneivle Helga, checking out how far she can explore.
You can also see towards the top right, the old bell used to call the servants. We had also found a little button in the floor of the dinning room, where the head of the table sat, where they could tap it with their foot to call help into the room. What a hard life. ha.
Another neat discovery was finding this little nook.
This nook has not only left Suzy curious, but us and some neighbors as well. It's a little tall to be a seat. It certainly isn't an icebox. This room was used for when you came inside off of the carriage. The floors are oak, so more than just the help would use this room. I'm rather certain that sadly someone may have really gutted this room. I bet there were nice built in cabinets/ pantry across from this spot. This, like the servant staircase, has gone through many different stages of what we want to do with it. It will be covered up with cabinets, but hopefully if we have the time, I want to strip the paint off the windows and replace the board that acts like a counter to match the rest of the oak in the house and make our own secret nook there.
Eventually the whole kitchen was gutted. At this point, you don't get to just slap up dry wall and start building a kitchen. Remodeling a kitchen especially a really old house kitchen requires tons of work that no one will ever see, perfectly, strategically hidden behind the walls. We had one of four, maybe five, now that I think about it, circuit/fuse boxes in the kitchen. We moved that a whopping ten feet down into the basement were the other boxes are. Again, not as easy as it sounds. We had to remove 100's of feet of wires and pipes. Years of out of date, unused, used, exposed, ready to start a fire wires, old gas pipes, pipes for radiators, plus an outrageous amount of strange configurations of pipes put in more recently to add more bathrooms on the second floor. Also, while we had everything open, we updated as many wires and pipes as we could that ran through the walls to different rooms.
This is what the mudroom looks like right now. Well we pulled up the HVAC tubes again to get some heat upstairs. This is another task we have to deal with. We need to update, and redirect and conceal the feeder tubes for the second floor HVAC. They go right up the middle of the master bathroom. This has bit a bit of a nightmare planning how to redirect them.
Mudroom as of lately. You can see the side back door we use. Now that I look at this, I realized Rick and I had made plans to open up the door/wall more. Ah, just another thing to add to the to-do list.
We also gutted the side hallway. This is our side door we use most it's next to the driveway. Here was the first place we discovered the ceilings had been lowered. Gutting the wall also gave us full access to the library's pocket door hardware, giving us a chance to tune it up before it's hidden away for another hundred years.
I'm pretty sure Rick's ipad has more pictures of the kitchen while we lived in it over the year, and all the different times we rearranged our card tables and other makeshift tables. For now, this is the best picture I have of what we came to accept as our kitchen for months. Rick worked at the electric and plumbing, I had spent more time outside working in the yard than inside the house, and then we couldn't move any further because the next step was the expensive step that we needed to save up a big chunk of money for. Plus, everything in the household came to a screeching holt for a little while when I suddenly got a job, that threw me into working 50-70 hour work weeks.
Lookin' real stoked. Ha!
Here are a few pictures I took about a month ago. I decided to quit worrying about showing the world the mess we live in. We're not perfect people, I doubt we will ever have an always amazing sparkling perfect clean house. Hell, it takes days to dust the entire place. So, sorry for the mess, we did the best we could as our entire first floor has been turned upside down and wildly shaken like a squeaky toy meeting it's final squeaks in the jaws of Cosmo.
Looking East, towards the doorway into the dinning room.
Looking West. Basement door to the left, mudroom to the left, back kitchen door.
Looking southwest. Turning into the mudroom, which you saw above.
oh, we also had to replace some support beams that had been hacked into and were beginning to sag. No one cared about the next person to own this house. We're doing our best not to continue that habit.
So now, I leave you with only a hint of the next step of our kitchen.
When Rick and Allie go to Ikea....
Check back soon!
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