Demo Revelations

The day started only a few hours after Dan went to sleep, finishing up emptying the kitchen. At about 7:30 a.m., the builders came to finish framing the addition. Then plumbers arrived with their 350-pound tool to clean out the flooding basement drain. Then the wrecking crew arrived and we started to learn a ton about the history of the kitchen! Here’s how it looked just before the demo with all of our paint swatches around:

Take note of where the double oven is in the far right photo (with the weird light refraction because the door is open, sorry); that will have an interesting history. What you can’t see very well here is the soffit that is over the sink (with the cutesy scalloped trim) and over the open cabinets near the hallway in the far left photo. The are more visible in this post. We HATE them passionately. We hate the soffits more than the cutesy scalloped trim, which is saying a lot. What we did not know is whether the soffits had some function that might cost us more money–ugh. I know by the lack of building permits that whatever previous owners did to improve the kitchen wasn’t documented, but we could see that much of it was jury-rigged with weird placements not according to code or visual aesthetics.

One mystery for our designers was what was behind where the double oven is (or was) now. They plan to install the refrigerator and cabinets into that wall, so if something was behind it, that could be a problem. However, if you go past where the refrigerator (violating code) is and immediately turn right, there is a closet–used by us, and at a minimum the previous owners, as a pantry–that implied that what was behind the oven was open space. We knew that the closet was original to the house. What was behind the oven is a mystery no more:

This appears to be original to the kitchen, particularly because the laundry chute door mimics the look of the milk delivery door near the back door. (Note the finished oak flooring at the bottom of the shelf unit.) The laundry chute is still open to the top in the attic staircase and down to the basement. Why someone would need a laundry chute in the kitchen, I don’t know. We would love to hear from any previous owners!

For most of the loud demo, I was in faculty meetings at the University, so Dan (who was exhausted) had to sooth the dog during his “vacation” day. When I returned at one point–the demo team showed me some new data! The current cabinets appear to have been installed in 1967. We actually do not know who those owners were because the records I found don’t include them–why, I don’t know. In any case, the pine cabinets had a stamp of March 6, 1967.

So it’s a good guess–without any documentation– that the current cabinetry was installed in 1967 or so. Notice the gap, above, between the wall and the rear of the cabinet (with the date stamp). It is about four inches. That will soon become more revelatory. Here is what 1967-era ads showed about kitchen cabinets in 1967:

Scallops fit the ads.

When the workers removed that cabinetry, we found what looks like the original wallpaper (and it coordinates well with the paint in the laundry-chute/shelves area behind the kitchen as well as with other wallpaper in the house–largely floral and folksy:

Chances are good that this wallpaper was up on the original walls for quite some time during minor renovations until 1967 because we found several of these colors–the pink and the green and the yellow–as layers of paint on the kitchen windows when we were working to restore them. My research could not find any reference to this wallpaper, which also gives a hint to its age, but we certainly do not know. We are fairly certain that the original owners, who were in their 50s when they built the house and died or left about 20 years later, likely made few improvements.

Late in the afternoon, after appliances and cabinets were gone, the crew realized that at least during the 1967ish renovation, the owners had reduced the size of the kitchen by installing a new (at the time) false wall frame that took four inches away from two walls. In addition, they installed the soffits–which we hate, I reiterate–to further close in the space, at least visually. That’s actually great news because we can rip them right out and have vertical space as well and more horizontal space–about 18 square feet. Why would anyone reduce the space in a room? I can’t imagine, nor can our contractors.

At one point, apparently early on, the floor was covered with brick-patterned linoleum. I will spare you the gross photo. But that would explain why we have unfinished wood floors in the kitchen–the only place in the house. Perhaps previous owners had thought about other flooring materials as they uprooted the linoleum instead of finishing them. We plan to make the oak flooring consistent throughout the house.

Thankfully, we close the week with an enclosed addition, a nearly gutted kitchen, a dining room full of what would normally go into the kitchen, a basement with a working drain (that is now clean thanks to Dan), a place to cook in the basement, and three exhausted beings.

Tomorrow, I’m a grading fiend as finals week begins and Dan gets some actual rest!