Weekend Updates

We tidied up a bit, and the old cabinetry that was being stored in the kitchen nook is now staged in the dining room. 

We've scheduled a pick-up from Restore for Wednesday. They'll take all of the old cabinets, and the dishwasher, stove and refrigerator. 

We did make another discovery over the weekend - the kitchen doesn't have the original wide plank pine flooring. This is perhaps because the ell of the house was built at a later date, or possibly because the planks were removed at some point due to fire (which was quite common), or some other reason. 

An architect neighbor of ours thought that this north kitchen wall, which is adjacent to the dining room, once held the cooking hearth. There is some evidence of this in the roofline, and in a few mismatched floor boards in the dining room on the other side of the wall. 

However,  the reason I took this photo is to share our most recent mock-up of one corner of the kitchen layout.  We've often used mock-ups as a means to make final decisions for items that can't be easily undone and always find them so helpful.

We've decided to keep the sink and the range in the same place as they were previously. The refrigerator will most likely also remain in the same place. You can see masking tape to the right of the refrigerator that shows where the kitchen counter will/may come to. 

The other option was to put the refrigerator in the corner against the west wall, but having the refrigerator line up across the room from the range and hood feels like it will provide more balance.

In the end, we also removed the pantry on the north wall. We decided to do this to open up the room more upon entry from the dining room, and it's removal also facilitates flooring options. Now that we know that the old wide plank floorboards are not there, we are discussing the potential to put down new Eastern white pine planks from a local sawmill, which replicates the original floors in the main house. 

Upstairs, we did find the original wide plank pine floors underneath the vinyl. We are speaking with our floor refinisher about replacing a couple of more damaged boards (casualties of plumbing retrofits) so that we can refinish the bathroom floors to match the rest of the house. 

The loo had to be removed before the old vinyl floors were taken up. 

As did the sink. Both of these items will also be donated to Restore.  

Still not absolutely sure what we'll do in here between bath, shower and toilet. It's hard to focus on one particular project when there are several other projects going on at the same time. So we are moving forward with the certain goals - get floors refinished, and walls patched and finished.  Hopefully by then the other details will follow. 

This is the length of the space in the bath/shower nook. The wall will most likely come out but a plumber has to assist Mike as there is some peculiar plumbing involved. 

This second measurement is the maximum width that the sink can be. 

The reason I have photographs of these measurements (which I took with my Canon Rebel) is because we didn't have pen and paper to write on. That's how high-tech we are. ; ) 

Hopefully, my next post will be about our doors! They've been away for over two weeks - more details to come.