Our New Old House

Finally! Some photos of our kitchen looking closer than ever to being done! At least it looks clean and usable now.

Ok time for before and after!

Woo hoo!  I have my kitchen back!  We still have plans to add cabinets over the stove and fridge,  refinish and paint the existing cabinets, and actually paint the walls something other than white, but we’re getting closer!

[tags]cabinets, paint, plaster, future plans, kitchen, ceiling, light fixtures, flooring, dishwasher, drywall, refrigerator, photos[/tags]

Hello fans and followers of Our New Old House! It’s time for another quick update to bring you up to speed on what we’ve been working on the past couple months. Today’s post is about the kitchen. Lots to talk about there so I’ll split it into two posts. (Ok, I confess. I haven’t taken a final picture of our kitchen now that it’s finished, so I’ll have to post that another time. That’ll be part 2. Phew! I feel better having told you that.)

When I last blogged, the kitchen had a brand spankin’ new floor and we were trying frantically to get all the wallpaper scraped and the ceiling finished. The paint colors in the kitchen were… delightful.

When we scraped the wall over one of the counters, we found this weird black stuff underneath that wasn’t on any of the other walls we scraped. Not even under the counter where we put the dishwasher in, which was right below that countertop. Anybody know what this stuff is/was?

The funny thing about it was that when we painted it with primer, it bled through and came out just as messy and weird.

But we forged ahead and painted over everything with tons of primer.

(Seen enough of the back of Brandon’s head yet?)

After my friend Laura did an awesome job scraping this wall we found the outline of the original kitchen sink and the outline of some wood trim like is in the bathroom. Maybe you can’t really see it here, but use your imagination. Anyway, the shape of the outline matches the shape of the kitchen that’s now in the basement. We think that sink was originally in the kitchen and got moved downstairs to be a dump sink. I LOVE having a sink in the basement so I’m grateful.

Let’s see… what else did I do?  Oh!  I put joint compound on the drywall on the ceiling.  There was a tricky spot over the stove and fridge where the drywall was about 2 inches too short.  I had Brandon cut me some 1-inch wide strips to fit in there and I glued them to the furring strips before putting mesh and joint compound over them.  They came out pretty good!

The gap:

The drywall strips glued in place:

Joint compound going on over the mesh:

Almost done painting:

Check back for part 2 when I’ll have some finished pictures for you!

[tags]ceiling, plaster, paint, drywall, photos, cabinets, kitchen[/tags]

We had central air installed at the end of last month and a couple weeks ago we had a duct run up to the attic so we can use that room comfortably year round. 

Now I need to look into options for improving the insulation of the attic.

[tags]attic, ceiling, insulation, air conditioning, photos[/tags]

The ceiling… duh!

Brandon and my sister’s boyfriend, Ryan, put up drywall in the kitchen last week. Here they are working very hard on one corner. (Truth is, I only took photos of them while they were working on that one spot.)

Beautiful!!! Now I just have to mud it and we’ll be ready for molding and paint!

[tags]drywall, kitchen, ceiling, photos[/tags]

Will the wonders of my kitchen ever cease?  Maybe.  I worry I’ll start to miss the disgusting walls and the gag-me-with-a-spoon froo froo trim.    And then I start pulling it down and the act of destruction solidifies my rage over the tragedy that is the decorating job done to this poor old classic house.  Case in point:

Behold! My kitchen. It sucks. But not for much longer. Here you see the stupid trim (as I’ve taken to calling it these days) on the left and the area where I pulled the stupid trim down on the right.

Some fascinating wallpaper choices. Just fascinating.

Is that strange golden grainy stuff on the wood sap that has oozed out of the wood?

Anyway, trim is coming down and a new drywall ceiling will be going up very soon.

[tags]wallpaper, photos, kitchen, ceiling[/tags]