Kitchen - Thrill Of The Dig

For whatever reason, I love to look at a room of a "fixer-upper" and determine the challenges, and how to solve them.  Even more, I love the "dig", taking a room a part, piece by piece, like it is a puzzle, enjoying the unexpected discoveries along the way, and getting it down to a clean slate.

This is the picture of the kitchen before I started tearing it apart. Lovely, isn't it?  In it's day, it certainly was, but it probably has not been updated in 40-50 years, and obviously I can't do carpet in a kitchen.

One of the first things I did was take the ceiling fan down (of course), and because I could not figure out how to get it down in once piece, this was an added feature in one of our bonfires.  I then took up part of the carpet (which was glued to subfloor for added exercise) and pulled out the refrigerator (guessing it is from the 1960s at the latest).  This, of course, was after I took off the door, because I could not get it to budge, at first, and thought I could actually take it apart.

I then took the cabinet apart that surrounded the refrigerator.  I was hoping to keep it all as one piece, as I'm using all of the kitchen cabinets in my garage (waste nothing...).  No such luck, it as nailed too many times to the wall.  So I took it apart board by board, removed the nails, and yes, you'll see an episode down the road of the cabinet put back together and used in my garage.

When I removed the cabinet, I discovered some very cool vintage wallpaper.  At some point, I lost count, but I believe I unlayered eight different kinds of wallpaper.

Here you go with some wallpaper samples, and you'll also note that I discovered tile under the paneling also.  Underneath the tile/wallpaper and throughout the house (walls and ceiling), this 1921 structure also has tongue & groove wood. Nothing wrong with that, except noticing so far that the exterior walls do not have insulation.  Nice...

Another "adopted brother"/lifelong friend came by and we filled his trailer with items to take to Gary's Metals.  Afterall, I had a refrigerator with no door that didn't work anyway, had to get a new hot water heater, so I had that old one, and then there was this stove...

I guess I could have made slightly more with this stove if I put it on Craigslist, but really, it was very old, missing knobs, and with my schedule, I didn't have time to mess with meeting whoever may or may not want to buy it. So we loaded it on the trailer, along with the metal vent, to take to the scrap yard.

And while I wasn't quick enough to get the photo of my refrigerator flying through the air, I did capture the stove in a bit of a crunch.

So appliances are gone, took up more of the carpet, then time to tackle the rest of the cabinets and the ceiling.  This time, thanks to my brother for the large set of cabinets, I was able to keep the cabinets intact.  They are now all in the garage waiting to be placed - at some point.

You can see now that the wall is quite lovely with the wood on it (joking). I decided to take down one of the walls, put in a half wall that opens up into the living room. Stay tuned for that phone, my parents built the half-wall. 

I'm also opening up the ceiling. Actually, the ceiling had to change, so I took the tiles down and I needed some way to get to the attic to take out the chimney, so I just took down all of the wood. This is when I was convinced that I needed an "exposed" ceiling.

A carpenter starts this week on the ceiling project.  It will remain open and vaulted, but it will be insulated properly, and new wood and fake beams will give it the same look that I want.  Sure has given me a lot of bon fire wood. :) And did I mention there was a dead mouse behind the refrigerator that had been dead for a very, very, very long time. Nice. Stay tuned for more updates.