Progress we've made and stuff we've found!
Where to begin...We've been busy busy busy.
Let's start with the Kitchen...
Here's the kitchen before:
With Dogbutt!
And here is the kitchen after:
With under cabinet lighting, "cuisine cart" (the black thing, which is actually quite nice. Purchased at Fred Meyer's. That place is cool) and toaster oven shelf built and installed by Tina!
Me, standing in the kitchen.
Oh yeah, and Dogbutt!
(I can't wait until I see people pulling this page up after doing a websearch for dogbutt. HA!)
Lit by under-counter lights alone, this almost looks like a modern kitchen!
Tina did a bang-up job on the shelf. My wiring job underneath is a little less good. It's only temporary!
That kitchen took a lot more time than we expected, but we actually have a kitchen we can stand to be in now.
We busted our asses freeing up the two windows above the kitchen sink. Like nearly all windows in the house, they were painted and nailed shut. The PO also stuffed cotton in any cracks or nooks around the window and painted over that.
Since we got the windows open but did not have screens to fit them, we had to improvise.
I'm sure my neighbor appreciates our white trashiness. (After what they did to their poor house, they have no right to criticize ANYTHING we could possibly do. More on that another time.)
Of all the stuff the PO left, I think I like this little thing the best. And the picture is pretty neat too! I take full responsibility.
One of the first thing we did when we actually took posession of the house was changed the locks.
I installed an electronic keypad lock on the french doors that go out to the side porch. It is incredibly convenient to be able to open the doors without fiddling around with keys!
It's not exactly period, but it can't be seen from the front of the house and the cool and convenient factor wins out over historical accuracy.
Ever since we bought the house, Tina and I have debated things like "Why the hell is that electrical outlet on the ceiling/floor/medicine cabinet?!" and "What's under that panelling?" and "under the carpet: Wood or nothing?"
We have an electrical outlet in the middle of the living room floor.
We thought that this would be the perfect place to get a peak under the carpet, in the hunt for real wood flooring.
We took a box cutter and opened up the carpeting autopsy-style.
Being the classy folks we are, repairs were done with duct tape.
When we looked beneath the carpeting, all we could really see was carpet padding, followed by this weird egg-crate rubbery crap, followed by linoleum and beneath the linoleum was particle board.
At this point Tina was convinced that the floors had all been ripped up.
Because all the rest of the work in the house was done on the cheap or on the lazy, I assumed that they didn't rip up the floors, but simply covered them. Tina thought I was just being optimistic for no reason.
Finally I was able to talk her into really exploring it a bit more.
We started in the corner of the office, right by the French doors.
With much wincing and nervousness, we took prybars to that damn particle board.
Underneath we found what may be flooring, or may be subflooring. The only thing that we were sure of was that it was wood and that it had been painted.
Subfloor or floor? You make the call!
Whatever it is, it's sure ugly!
A little sanding later, we realized two things... 1) We probably should have worn masks before sanding since we have no idea how old the paint was. and 2) We have some gorgeous flooring beneath all that crap! One of our neighbors said it is fir, but I don't think so. It looks like pine to me, but I'm no expert.
And another shot:
Finding wood flooring under all that crap is like finding sunken treasure. SOOOOO HAPPY.
Speaking of finds... Tina and I got up in the attic and found a shoe! I don't know who it belonged to, but they had good taste.
Inside the shoe you can still see the maker's mark:
I'm pretty sure this was made by the Hamilton Brown Show Co. I'm not positive, because it's tough to make out. But that company was huge at the time, so I think it's them.
Along with the shoe we found an empty box of earplugs! (eardrums?)
They were apparently made in 1923.
We're not sure why they were in the attic above the kitchen.
Look deep into my eyes... You are getting very very sleepy... You will come help us to restore the house... When you awake, you will not remember anything that happened here...
Tina spent painstaking hours unearthing the original sidewalk that ran along the side of the house. It was half covered with dirt and grass and such. It's in pretty bad shape, but we're going to research and see if there's a way to preserve it. It's pretty neat looking concrete. It was so bad that when she hosed it off it took some of the rocks and mortar along with it. Our lovely neighbor suggested to her that she was wasting her time digging it up, since it was put there sometime in the late 1800s. Ugh.
HEY YOU KIDS!!! GET OFF MY SIDEWALK!
posted by Unknown @ Tuesday, June 20, 2006
