The Mushroom Factor

Fan of Prairie School architecture? Planning to visit the Purcell-Cutts House and other architectural gems in Minneapolis, MN? Yes or no, you’ve got to check out “Unified Vision: The Architecture and Design of the Prairie School.”

Published by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, this web site showcases the work of architects Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie. It also features the Institutes’ collection of Prairie School furniture and home décor.

If you’re planning to tour the Purcell-Cutts House—a classic example of Prairie Style and designed by William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie in 1913—this web site is great preparatory research. The site’s linear tour offers 360 degree views of each room, together with detailed commentaries. The photos are stunning.

The site also takes you on a personal “walking tour” of notable Prairie School buildings in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Complete with audio narration and printable tour guides, it’s the next best thing to actually walking through the city streets (and considerably warmer at this time of year!)

Check it out—it’s a cool site!

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It’s winter here in Wisconsin—and a good, old fashioned winter at that. We’re getting record snowfalls, below zero temps and an occasional rain shower. Put this together with a poorly ventilated attic and you’ve got the inevitable ice dam. 

Can something so beautiful cause so much damage? Well, apparently so.

The University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension describes an ice dam as “a mass of ice forming at the bottom edge of a sloped roof. The ice results primarily from heat escaping to the attic from the house, causing a warm attic.”

With all the snow we’ve been getting, it’s accumulating heavily on our roofs. If this roof is warm, the snow melts, runs off the roof and into the eaves where it then refreezes. The real problem occurs when water backs up under the shingles and works its way into the house.

And so, here in Wisconsin, where we haven’t had to deal with this in years (global warming, don’tcha know), we’re working off the brats and beer by raking snow off our roofs.

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Our current project—one we’ve been working on for over a year—is the renovation our kitchen. In truth, this has little to do with renovation and everything to do with creation.

Our house is 90-years-old and in the course of those ninety years the kitchen was never updated. Yes, it was a very quaint kitchen. But let’s be real, a sink hanging on the wall with no surrounding cupboards—no cupboards anywhere—is not conducive to today’s style of living.

So, as you can imagine, a lot of planning, research and discussion (emphasis on the cuss) has gone into this project. But hey, it’s been fun!

THE BEST ADVICE IS WHAT WE’VE FOUND ONLINE
We’re not kitchen designers. And, judging by the number of times we’ve redone the same soffit, we certainly can’t profess to be designers either. But we’re also on a budget and paying for such expertise didn’t make the cut.

Instead, we turned to the Internet and found more knowledge than we ever imagined possible. Here are a few of my bookmarked links:

gardenweb.com
The Internet’s Garden & Home Community

I’m addicted to the forums on this site. They easily are the nurturing source in the development of our kitchen. The well-organized topics range from kitchens, to appliances, to lighting, to bathrooms to home finance. There’s a lot of conversation and participants, for the most part, are homeowners rather than industry professionals. They readily pass along ideas, recommendations and photos.

Anyone know who sells a good quality stainless steel sink?

Ask such a question on one of the forums and you’re sure to get lots of good answers. Many members recommended Galaxy Tool Supply in Chicago, IL, and sure enough, we found a 16-gauge double sink at a very good price. And, yes, I’m ditching the old cast iron baby. Need an old sink?

hgtv.com
Start at Home

If you love bold interaction and the latest Internet technology, check this out. I could spend hours and hours digging through this site. It has phenomenal imagery and its long list of video clips features interesting tidbits from industry professionals.

The How-To/Online Tools pages are fun and you can design your own room in 3-D. The one drawback, these pages only work with Windows Internet Explorer. What about us Mac people?

behr.com
Explore Color

As a graphic designer, I’m supposed to know all about color. Somehow, though, color on the wall seems so much different than it does on paper! In addition to rebuilding the same soffit several times, I’ve also repainted its walls in no less than three varying shades of green.

We’re not stuck to using one particular brand of paint, but the color site I like best is that of Behr’s Explore Color. It’s user friendly and coordinates your chosen color as a main or accent color.

You can also preview your chosen color on their sample photos or your own. Pretty cool. I really should have tried this before I painted my kitchen!

Next time…

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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.

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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!

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