Some assistance.

We've been focusing a lot on the kitchen lately, but as I was reviewing all of our photos, I thought it would be nice to throw up (post, not vomit) a good before and after shot, just for kicks. These are in our posts, but in case you have trouble putting things together in your head:

View from dining room towards the kitchen, before.

Same view into kitchen, but before we ripped all of the kitchen out. Is it really an improvement? It seems so, but final judgment to be made once it's all finished.

Snow.

This has nothing to do with our house renovation (except for the fact that you get to see our bare front porch sans stumpy tree-bushes, which we cut down a couple months ago). Just wanted to post a couple photos of our house in 1.5 feet of snow, and our dog Fiver enjoying it.


Piles of snow in the front.

Fiver bounding in the snow. This doesn't adequately show that she totally sinks in the deeper parts of the snow, where she has to bounce out like a bunny.

A Room without Walls.

This is what walls can do for you:
They keep dust and dirt out of your house. They keep heat in your house. They look good (better than a chicken coop). If you have walls in you kitchen, for instance, you might feel it is appropriate to spend time there, even prepare food and eat it. Depending on how well and recently you had cleaned, you might go so far as to invite guests over.

Needless to say, removing the walls from your kitchen alters its feel.

We took down some walls in the kitchen and took off all the plaster. The plaster was in bad shape, especially where we had taken down the dropped ceiling, so we just took it all off the lath. Good opportunity to do some insulating, especially since we have a giant duct (left over from the exhaust fan) bringing cold air into the room.

Also, we took out the walls of the tiny room by the side door. We changed our minds about the layout and decided that we wanted the refrigerator there. Plus, we had done such great structural reinforcement that we knew the wall was unnecessary. It makes a HUGE difference in how open the room feels now! Check it out:

Yep, looks good. Won't you be our dinner guest?

The door to the basement is now out in the open. She's a beauty.

Note the duct above the beautifully decorated door. It now has a plastic bag over it. ALSO, that square thing in the wall to the right with the concrete circle in it? The old exhaust vent from the original stove. Pretty cool.

More With the Floor.

Lest we become to comfortable in our kitchen, we felt it would be wise to rip out the floor. Having completed the task, we recommend it highly. The kitchen is now totally uncomfortable. Additionally, we are crippled, coughing and have a 7' tall pile of kindling in our basement.

As covered in previous lectures, our flooring situation was complicated. The stratigraphy was as follows from top to bottom:

1. ca. 2006 - ceramic tile matching in date and style the surrounding kitchen which has been positively dated to the late Home Depot age.
2. ca. 2006 - Hardie Backer cementitious tile backer (contemporary with ceramic tile).
3. ca. 1970s - Cream and brown colored Linoleum in a style inspired by cigarette smoke and spilled gravy.
   
4. ca. 1940s - Linoleum of indeterminate color. It is possible that this linoleum was installed before color existed.
   
5. ca. 1920s - Thin oak flooring. This flooring was apparently installed during a period of relatively low nail prices.
   
6. 1893 - Original pine flooring. Too chopped up to save. Believe us, we tried.
   

Seen above are many of the flooring types we we encountered (we found this wonderful montage below the sink cabinet). Below, ceramic tile. Far right, original pine boards. Above right, cream and brown linoleum. Above center, early colorless linoleum tile.


Removing the tile and backer board was easy. You could say we barely broke a sweat, but Adam is always sweating.

After the removal of the tile we had thin oak flooring.

We made a beaver hut with all of the oak flooring.


Eggs anyone?

Reagan ponders the possibility of somehow sneaking out so that she won't have to deal with cleaning up the pile of spikey, nail-ridden oak pieces.

This is the original pine flooring. After we cleaned up the beaver hut. The floor boards themselves were very nice but they only covered about 80% of the kitchen floor. If you know anybody in the market for a 114 year old floor, give us a call. This opportunity won't last long.


Finally we got to the original subfloor, wide rough-sawn pine boards. These would have been a cool floor if they had been installed so they touched each other, or the walls. The barn look is very hip in kitchen design right now.

We added a plywood subfloor on top of the pine boards so the final floor will be at the right level. The canine is our dog Fiver. She is getting ready to christen the new floor by spilling her water bowl on it.

Next up...new walls.

Flooring issues.

We've been in quite a dilemma with the kitchen floor. We hate the cheap tile that's on there now. Originally, we wanted to put cork floors down, but we found out that in order to make the new floors level with the existing floors, we'd have to rip out the original pine boards that are still there, underneath the more recent layers. This idea pained Reagan, of course, and so Adam tried to figure out a way that we could save the original floors.

Option 1: Put down the cork and try to make a well-designed way to match up the two floor levels (primarily between the kitchen and the dining room). Well, this might be tricky, and chances are we'd stub our toes a lot.

Option 2: Nix the cork and just refinish the original pine floor. The problem here is that we ripped out 2 thresholds, and so these areas would have to be patched. Or, we could just put in new thresholds that were flat or something. However, we started to uncover the original floor, and it's not in great shape. There are other areas that would need patching, and there are lots and lots of nail holes from the later floor.

Lower right corner, existing tile. Lower center, the thin oak boards over the original pine, upper center. The two little squares on the left are the cork samples.

The original pine on the other side of the sink, by the door to the side deck (with lots of paw and foot prints).

Option 3: Suck it up, Reagan, and rip out the original floor and install a nice, even, new cork floor. Yeah, that's what we're going to have to do.

Forget All You Have Been Taught About Gravity.

Yes, again, it's been a while since we posted anything. But we've definitely been busy. We've been dying to start ripping out the kitchen (who wouldn't love to rip out the only functioning kitchen in their house?), but we had to do a little structural work before we could get started.

In the little nook behind the kitchen, a space underneath the main stair landing and where the side door to the outside and basement door meet, we found a small structural miracle. As we started to dismantle this space, which is to open up into the kitchen, we found that the large, heavy staircase landing was held up by 3 2x6's laid in the not strong way, which rested on some door frame molding (not the actual frame itself):

The sideways beam resting on door molding, as seen from above. Really, no joke, the stairs were held up this way for 114 years. The only possible explanation for why we can still get to the second floor is that the house is older than gravity. Occum's razor says that must be true.

Not only is this a weak system of supporting the only access we have to our upper floors, we wanted to take this door and wall out. Crap. We decided we needed to support the stairs better anyway. So, we ordered some tie rods from Simpson Strong-Ties so we could tie the joists back to a beam above them and cut them away from the door. It's hard to describe, even with photos, but we'll try:

The upper beam with Strong-Tie in place.

The threaded bar hangs down and goes through the joist, with a big washer and nut on the underside.

A view of the new system after we've dismantled the wall. You can see the three tie rods hanging down from the upper beam, going through the three 2x6's supporting the stair landing (you can see the backside of the lath and plaster wall of the stairway). You can also see some flimsy attempts at insulation to the right.

It works! The moment of truth arrived, and the stairs (and half of our house) still stand. Then, we finally took out the wall and door.

Adam dismantling the walls and doorframe.

Adam taking down the studs. (That sentence is funny if you take it out of context.)

The kitchen is now square, and it feels much more open and bright.

Now we get more light from the door's window, but the door needs some repair work, as it is now obvious that the cold easily leaks through the many cracks made when someone tried to bust the door open at some point in the past...

Next step, ripping out the kitchen walls!

We are awesome construction workers.

As we may have written before, we wanted to open up the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. We had taken down a lot of the plaster and lath about a month ago, and here is where we began the day. To date we had succeeded in adding more walls rather than taking any away. What you see in the foreground is a temporary support wall which we put up in hopes that it would save us from disaster if we should remove the wrong piece. We ran this by our structural engineer Andy, whom we had over to the house one evening after a long dinner with many drinks, and he seemed to think it was a great idea.


Before we could begin, we had to remove a little more plaster and lath.

There goes Reagan tearing things apart. She just hates all those original finishes....


We decided to install the header one half at a time to try to keep some of the structure intact until the new structure was in place. A co-worker informs me that chipping out the slot for the header, as you see here, is called "hogging". It goes without saying that if it had been called something else we might not have tried it.


Hogging complete, we are ready to put in the first half of the header.


Here is the job half done. A purist will note that we have begun to remove the temporary supports before we are completely done.


Despite everything, we and the house, survived and we can now see the TV from the kitchen.


One might wonder why we went through so much effort to get this view, but we assure you the view will improve. Stay tuned.


Adam is learning to be a very good preservationist/archaeologist. On the new header and the re-used post for the new opening he wrote "2007" so that, just in case, when future preservationists investigate our house and try to figure out its construction chronology, they'll know when this one was altered.

Drop the dropped ceiling.

We had taken the paneling off the dropped ceiling several weeks ago, and we took down the rest of it on Saturday. It was our first step towards the kitchen renovation, and it was somewhat satisfying. There were a few trick steps, such as disconnecting the electrical fixtures that were attached to the ceiling structure. Like the exhaust fan from the 40's, which had about a 1/2 inch of grease and grime all over it. Lovely.


Adam disconnects and takes down the exhaust fan. Note the greasy soot marks on the ceiling from the old stove that used to be underneath that spot. Used to, as in before the dropped ceiling went in, as in pre-1950 or so.


The exhaust fan, black and grimy, though still pretty tasty with the right wine.


We have to take the overhead light off the ceiling structure, and it's left pretty much hanging like this. We have to rotate it depending on which side of the room we want to see.


The hole above the sink - there's definitely some water damage up there, which makes sense, since the bathroom is directly above it. We're hoping that those leaky days are over (no troubles yet). Though we do sort of like the rustic look.


And more of the lovely old wallpaper is revealed. Now visible: country houses and another carriage! It's hard to describe with words the feeling of discovery we had when, having burrowed through soggy ceiling and 100 years of mouse poop, we came upon this scene of pastoral bliss.


A full-height kitchen. Adam thinks that it's changed the proportions so that the room now feels smaller, but Reagan thinks it's all going to be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, one thing that this demolition revealed is that we're going to have to take down all the plaster. We don't know about you, but we're not totally into the cracked and fallen plaster look in a finished room. It looks too, eh... Olive Garden.....

The Living Room, finally for living.

We've been a little delayed in our housework due to Adam's sister's wedding (which was totally awesome), but now we're back to work. We finally finished off the living room. Trim color, as it turns out, is very difficult to choose. We had picked a wall color, and we wanted to choose a trim color that would compliment the off-white walls and blend with the wood floors. As it turns out, we were a little off. "Sandy Brown" turned out to be more of a greenish-beige that looks orange in sunlight. It got a little better when it dried, but really it looks like a 1970's mustard color. It's great in the dark, though.

Before, with the painted walls.


After (yes, it's almost exactly the same color as an earlier trim color, as seen on the doors).


Adam worked on patching some pretty big cracks in the ceiling, and they're invisible (for now).


The finished look. We're not totally happy with it, but it's better than it was before. At least we can watch the football game on our couch, in our living room. Maybe someday when we have tons of time (or money) on our hands we'll get the trim repainted some other color than baby poop.

Moved!

After a week of 65 degree weather, our moving day, of course, had to be 104. With the help of 3 strapping young men, we got out of our apartment and into the house in no less than 5.5 hours. All 150 boxes, most of which are still on the 3rd floor and will be there for some time. But we're in! We're Dorchester all the way now. Now if we could only get our paper delivered...

Floored.

After some prodding, our Vietnamese flooring guy made good on his promise to get the floors done in 2 days. Not in our greatest or even most realistic hopes did we expect those dirty, black, gunky floors to look so good. Now that we know the potential...


After sanding



Ok, so there's stuff in the room so you can't see the pristine beauty of the floors, but you get the idea.

The finished look.