The Mushroom Factor

What better way to work off the over-indulgences of Thanksgiving dinner than to knock down walls the very next day. And so our kitchen project officially begins!

Over the years, we’ve removed plaster and lathing in exterior walls throughout the house in order to add insulation. The job doesn’t get any cleaner with experience, we simply become smarter in dealing with it. Here in the kitchen we laid a tarp to protect the floor and catch debris. As it filled, we dragged it out the door and onto a pickup truck.

Debris gets heavy! Plaster is a type of cement so it gets VERY heavy! We had to unload the tarp often.

Need a kitchen sink? It’s a Kohler.

Lovely, yes?

Hidden Secrets
In 20 years of remodeling, we’ve found apricot brandy bottles and a few old magazines. Other than that, there haven’t been significant treasures.

But remodeling exposes secrets of other kinds; some pleasant surprises, others scary near-misses. As we removed plaster from around the chimney, we were pleased to see it’s Watertown Brick, a locally made cream-colored brick.

Somewhat frightening though, were the charred bricks and burnt lathing around the cookstove’s pipe opening into the chimney. The lining between the pipe and chimney had rusted, leaving a poor fit that allowed sparks to get into the wall.

Wow, God keeps a watchful eye!

Levels and Slopes
We suspect the sunporch at one time was an open, exterior porch. The floor level is lower than the rest of the house, with a slight pitch. The ceiling is also lower and pitched about 2″ within nine feet. Knocking out the ceiling revealed an angled rafter built to provide the pitch.

When it comes to slopes elsewhere, we’re pretty lucky. Our house was built well. Not only is it structurally sound, it’s also accurate. Overall, we don’t have the crooked walls, poorly-angled corners or other issues that often come with old houses

We suspect the sunporch at one time was an open, exterior porch. The floor level is lower than the rest of the house, with a slight pitch.

The ceiling is also lower and pitched about 2″ within nine feet. Knocking out the ceiling revealed an angled rafter built to provide the pitch.

When it comes to slopes elsewhere, we’re pretty lucky. Our house was built well. Not only is it structurally sound, it’s also accurate. Overall, we don’t have the crooked walls, poorly-angled corners or other issues that often come with old houses.

Like every other room in our 1917 American Foursquare, the kitchen is…well…square. Yes, there are four walls, but how much space these four walls provide is quite questionable. In this one room alone, there are five doors and two windows!

The Pantry
For the most part, we use the pantry as our cooking and storage area. It has counterspace and cupboards, but it’s crowded! For a two-chef family, as we often are, it’s even more crowded!

The Kitchen
While the pantry isn’t conducive to the gathering of family and friends, the kitchen certainly is. Long before we lived here, it was used as the main room of the house. The elderly couple before us kept a daybed, table and TV in the kitchen.

Next to the sink is the doorway to the pantry. And yes, that’s a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink! When we bought the house 20 years ago, I said that was going to be one of the first things to go. Somewhere along the way, something happened.

The cookstove is original to the kitchen. It’s a Monarch Malleable woodburning stove, from Beaver Dam, WI. It creates such a warm, cozy ambiance. No, I don’t regularly use it for cooking – I have enough trouble using a conventional stove! But we’ve baked in it once a while for novelty’s sake.

Oh…And that’s Clyde, our renovation mascot!

The art on the wall is a print by American folk artist Doris Lee. We like to think her kitchen scene shares many similarities with ours. And the table? My father-in-law made it for us the year my husband and I turned 30. Like, um, last year? Not.

So, there you have it…this was our kitchen for the first twenty years we’ve lived here. So many memories and happy times! And now the time has come for a few new walls—new walls with new tales to tell. May they be as good as the old!

January 7, 2010: This post was imported from a previously created-now defunct blog. I know, I know. I’m a bit scattered.