Monday, June 18, 2012

House renovation: Part One

We'll start with the heart of the home: the kitchen.

Here are some more photos of the "before":

Move-in day uncovered several problems that we were not aware of beforehand (the house was PACKED with stuff, it was impossible to see much of the walls and floors before the previous owners moved out).
Like rotten flooring
Falling wallpaper


Old stove pipe holes in the walls


And leaks just about everywhere possible for there to be a leak!

We ripped out the rotten spot in the floor, and ended up replacing a large section of subflooring, several beams under the house, and the joists in the adjoining wall.






Another project was getting rid of the wallpaper. Unfortunately, when we tried to peel it off, it started pulling out chunks of the plaster behind it. Since we had neither time nor money to replaster the entire kitchen, we patched the bad spots and covered the wall paper seams with spackle and painted over it! This project also involved patching the old stove pipe hole.







What a difference a coat of paint makes!



Of course, we also fixed all the leaks, sanded and varnished the window frames, redid some wiring, added some outlets, and moved the stove a little closer to the counter tops (adding plumbing for gas while we were at it!).

Finishing details included a new faucet (the old one broke completely and I had to haul water from the bathroom for a few weeks!), new hardware on the cabinets, some cup rails, and a pot rack over the stove to hold the microwave, and we have a brand new kitchen ( /schoolroom/sewing room/home office)!


extra storage space!


sewing "corner"


schoolroom

We found these old glass medicine bottles buried in the yard as we started tilling the garden I love them on my window sill.

Our little cabinet mount CD player gets lots of use - Steve and the kids jamming out to classic rock while making pancakes on Saturday mornings, preschool songs after lunch, and a little Chopin in the evenings after dinner...

And that's the kitchen.  Tomorrow we'll look at my favorite room!

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