Kitchen Update -- Return to Green, and a New Take on Illumination

Ted and I went to Kansas City the day after Christmas, and brought his sister Betsy back to Chicago with us in time for New Year's Eve. It was a fun few weeks of visiting back and forth with friends and family, but now that the last of the hot buttered rum has been consumed and the Christmas decorations halfway packed up, it's time to get back to our home renovation projects.

So the last few days were spent working primarily on the kitchen and entryway, with triumphs great and small. Ted focused on the electrical, working to rewire the kitchen and find out just where the heck each circuit runs--the conduit never seems to go where we think it should, and it's a matter of opening up sockets, switches, and boxes to physically wiggle wires and trace where they go.

In the process, he removed what has been, for us, a true eyesore. The ugly white kitchen fan:

Our kitchen is fairly small, and the fan--even though it's a light color--just dominated the room. We love ceiling fans, but in this case it just wasn't working in the space. We cheerfully disassembled it, packed it up, and set it on the porch where it awaits my next trip to Goodwill. In its place is a light we picked up from Schoolhouse Electric, which makes period lighting. It's the one new light fixture we've purchased for The Box House; the others to date have all been antiques that Ted rewired. Definitely visit the vendor site; Schoolhouse has an excellent gallery where you can peruse the light fixtures in various settings. The one we selected has a gorgeous custard shade with black trim:

(I wish the light fixture budget was bigger, because I would also like to pick up a set of deco-looking bathroom sconces from Schoolhouse. Sigh. Maybe some day.)

As for myself, I continued to plug away at stripping the wood trim around the doors in the kitchen. When last we left it, it looked something like this, the wallpaper having just been taken down:

Note how the horizontal boards are painted white. Boring and so wrong! I used the heat gun on them, and because the first coat was shellac, it melted quickly and the white paint just slid off. For the wood without paint, I used a pull scraper and lightly scraped off the bubbling finish.

This photo shows the horizontal boards uncovered. Even without sanding them, I'm already thrilled with the contrast. It really makes the room come alive.

 
This is a closeup of the (mostly) sanded wood of the vertical trim around the door, and the horizontal board, which hasn't been sanded yet--you can still see traces of shellac.

I know y'all are tired of looking at my sanded wood, but I'm not, so here's another pic:

For her part, Mom began to chip off the gawd-awful brown tile that runs behind the sink and stove. Underneath the tile, we found evidence that the horizontal wood boards once ran all the way around the room. A previous owner took them out on this wall to install the icky tile.

 
Eventually, we're planning on painting this room with a pale green venetian plaster. It was Mom's idea, who just felt that the room should be light green. This color green, to be exact:

And what do you know? Upon removing the tile and a bit of the mortar, we found trace evidence that the original color of the kitchen was green:

Okay, it's not the same shade of green, but it's light green just the same. How cool is that?

All in all, it's been a satisfying few days' worth of work.

Why I Am Stripping Wallpaper on Christmas

You know how it goes. You begin stripping the paint off the bathroom door trim, and because it's only right, you strip the trim on both sides of the door at the same time. And as long as you're stripping the wood on the entryway side of the bathroom door, you decide to strip the trim on all six doors off the entryway at once.

And one of those doors leads into the kitchen. And the trim of this door is attached, at the corner of the room, to another door off the kitchen (this one opening to one of the bedrooms); so it gets stripped, too.

 Kitchen corner with entryway door at left, 

bedroom door at right.

So, as long as you're stripping the wood trim on that bedroom door, you might as well strip the wood trim on all the doors remaining on that stretch of wall—an ironing board closet, a pantry, and the back door.

And because each of these doors is surrounded by wallpaper, you decide to pull just enough of the wallpaper away from the edges of each to strip the wood.

But really, because it looks stupid partially torn and you've always hated the wallpaper anyway, you decide to push that part of your renovation project forward, and pull off all the fifty-year-old wallpaper the last owner put up.*

(Of course, you find it ever so slightly annoying to pull off a layer of wallpaper only to discover that there is another layer of the very same paper underneath. WTF?)

So this is how, fueled with too much ambition and hot buttered rum from an old family recipe, you end up stripping wallpaper on Christmas Eve.

But it definitely looks better than it did, and the rest of the wood stripping should be a piece o' cake.

The same corner of the kitchen where the entryway door 

and the bedroom door meet, sans wallpaper.

* In our case, because I am too cheap to rent a steamer and hesitant to use toxic wallpaper strippers, I just scored the paper with a PaperTiger, soaked paper towels in a mixture of equal parts hot water and white vinegar, laid out the sheets of paper towel on the wall, left them there for ten minutes or so, and then peeled the paper off. This worked well because the underlying paint is a semi-gloss.)

Icebox Access Panel from the Enclosed Porch

Because Karen Ann was curious about our iceboxes, here are the pics. The panels are at the backside of the iceboxes, which are built into the walls in the pantry on each floor, adjacent to the back porches.


Back in the 20s/30s when people had ice delivered every few days the iceman would just open the back panel, put in the ice and leave, all without disturbing the family.

My great-grandmother had one in her kitchen but the iceman needed to come into the house for the deliveries.

Our iceboxes themselves are in great condition with the exception of the panels being painted shut years ago, a sad battleship grey. They look like several layers of paint from over the years. Future project, when we get as far as working on the porches, will be to strip the backside of the iceboxes and open these panels again. Not that we expect ice delivery anymore but it would be a neat authentic touch. Our icebox is now being used for additional storage space in the pantry. Good place for wine. :)


Box Mom

Painted Cabinets and Dining Room Murals

And now for a little house porn...

I love visiting Bob and Rachel, my future in-laws (although they're saying yeah, right, when are you guys really getting married?) The kitchen / dining room / living room area of their house is absolutely fabulous. When you walk in the front door, the first thing you'll see is the red living room:

I do love a bold, red room! It's one of the things I miss from our condo; my office was just this shade of red. And the white shutters here really make it pop. The fireplace is painted. Yeah, I couldn't believe it was a faux texture when I first saw it. I love, love it.

Just off the living room is the dining room. Although there is a smaller table in the kitchen, this is the one we gather around in the morning to read the newspaper and drink our coffee. The mural, I believe, was done by a friend of theirs. Isn't it gorgeous? I wish I had the talent for this, but the artistic gene in our family skipped me altogether. I wonder if we could hire a student artist from Northwestern University to do something like this at The Box House?

But oh, silly me! What I really wanted to show you all was the kitchen--but I neglected to take full-room pictures of it! You'll have to settle for these close ups.

Not long ago, I mentioned wanting to paint the old wooden cabinets at my mom's other house. This was my inspiration:
Aren't they incredible? Although our enclosed porch at The Box House is now gray and yellow, it is nowhere near as sunny and cheerful as this room. And I think Rachel's pottery collection is what really ties it all together. (I think if you click on the images you'll be able to see some of the textured faux finishes on the walls as well.)

This was our first visit to K.C. since moving into our own new home. So we found ourselves studying the bones and construction and finishing techniques in ways we haven't before. In fact, Ted says he felt like he got busted with house porn in hand, because he was all alone in the basement studying their ceiling joists when Rachel came downstairs!

We live and breathe home improvement projects these days; I don't think it's possible to just go to anyone else's house anymore without studying the construction itself.

Electrical Hazards, Courtesy of Uncle Jimmy

Part of getting ready for the tenants' arrival was cleaning the kitchen top to bottom. Sounds simple enough. Aside from the ironing board repair, we didn't anticipate having to do much else. So Ted moved out the stove and refrigerator to get at years of accumulated dust behind each one, and found one hell of an "Uncle Jimmy" setup.

A while back we started calling any dubious home repair, amateur fix-it, remuddling job, or downright dangerous setup an "Uncle Jimmy." It goes back to our home-search days, when our agent would say things like "Ugh, it looks like they got someone's Uncle Jimmy to fix that" instead of hiring a professional. So, basically, anything shoddily done is an "Uncle Jimmy."

I was fiddling with the blog when Ted came to find me. This "Uncle Jimmy" needed a second witness. I arrived with camera in hand.

The refrigerator was plugged into an adapter, which in turn was plugged into a 99-cent power cord:

This cheesy white power cord, along with the cord for the microwave, was plugged into a beat-up, cracked, badly damaged (and very, very cheap) black power strip:

The power strip was plugged into another cheap power cord:

This snaked behind a counter and behind the stove to join this mess:

At first, I couldn't entirely make out what was going on here; the entire thing was coated in thick, greasy dust. It's amazing there was never a fire. Clearing off some of the dust revealed that each half of the outlet had one of those 3-in-1 adapters, setting it up to hold six appliances/extension cords (even though the refrigerator/microwave extension was the only thing plugged in on one side).

Ted cleaned up the whole mess; unfortunately, I didn't get an "after" picture before moving the appliances back. He moved the microwave to the other side of the kitchen, where it is now plugged directly into its own outlet. The refrigerator is plugged into a cord that is rated for heavy use, and that goes directly into the outlet. The other half of the outlet powers the stove. Uncle Jimmy would be awed.

I know The Box House is an old house with only a few outlets in the kitchen at present, but sheesh. What were they thinking? We'll be installing some GFCI outlets in both kitchens--and more outlets period--sometime in the future.

Here's some additional info from the U.S. Products Safety Commission:

Limit Extension Cords To Reduce Risk Of Fire

WASHINGTON--If you use a lot of extension cords in your home or apartment, government safety experts say doing away with as many cords as possible can improve the safety of your home.

Noting that May is National Electrical Safety Month, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said homeowners can use fewer extension cords by taking the simple step of relocating floor lamps, clocks, radios, television sets and other electrical products closer to wall receptacles.

According to CPSC estimates, there are some 4,600 residential home fires each year associated with extension cords; these fires kill 70 persons and injure some 230 others annually. Apart from fires, another 2,200 shock-related injuries happen with extension cords every year.

CPSC offered the following safety hints for using extension cords:

• Don't use an extension cords unless absolutely necessary. If you do, it must be marked #16 or some lower AWG number (the lower the number, the larger the wire and the more current the cord can safely carry). Also, the cord should bear the certification label of an independent testing laboratory. Do not use #18 extension cords which were previously used for floor lamps and other low-wattage electrical products.
• Always use 3-wire extension cords for appliances with 3-prong plugs. Never remove the third prong which is a safety feature designed to reduce chances of shock or electrocution.
• When disconnecting cords from outlets, always pull on the plug rather than the cord itself. Discard any old, cracked, worn or damaged extension cords.
• Don't overload cords by plugging in appliances that draw more watts than the rating of the cord. You can check this easily by examining the cord to see what its wattage rating is. Use heavy-duty cords for high wattage appliances. Use extension cords labeled for outdoor use when powering tools and garden products outside the home. Also, it is good practice to plug into an outlet protected by a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI). The device shuts down power in milliseconds if the consumer is exposed to an electrocution or electrical burn hazard.
• Don't run cords under carpets or rugs since they prevent heat from being released by the cord.

A free brochure on safe use of extension cords is available from CPSC by sending a postcard to Cords, Washington, D.C. 20207.

Bungalow Door — A Dumpster Diving Adventure

On the way back from a late-night run to 7-11 for our Big Ass Diet Cokes, we decided to come back via the alleyways. It was garbage night in the 'hood, and we were wondering if we'd find anything interesting now that it's spring and everyone is working on their houses. The night yielded a few choice finds: a set of funky old rocks glasses and this great, solid-wood swinging kitchen door that came from a bungalow. Now, we already found the two kitchen doors that were original to The Box House, so we don't really need this one, but there was no way we could leave a perfectly decent door to be tossed out with the trash.

It does need some work; one side is painted white and on the top, at the part where it attaches to the top of the door frame, there is a bit of wood loss that can probably be filled in with epoxy. But still, they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I was too paranoid to take the Cokes home first and come back, lest someone snatch it from under my nose, and I didn't want to leave the Cokes behind with the rest of the garbage. Who knows what could happen to them in the five minutes they were out of my sight. So we carried the door under one arm and balanced our drinks in the other hand. What an odd sight!

I have to laugh--after weeks of trying to find new homes for all the junk left by the previous owners, here we are bringing more salvage home!

Basement Discoveries, The Good and The Bad

We celebrated our one-month anniversary at The Box House this week with a fun activity we like to call Garbage Night. Each week, we bring up another load of left-behind junk from the basement and try to figure out what to do with it. Here's the garage, a.k.a. The Staging Area:

Most of what's there is junk, pure and simple. We'll recycle the cardboard boxes, and our friend Andy is coming by sometime to get the old radiator cover. And those two wooden chairs, which I thought I'd eventually rehome, I've decided to keep instead. They are solid oak and if I refinish them and put on new seats, they'd be cute little chairs for...somewhere in the house. But the rest of the stuff? I don't know. The old wooden Krakus ham crates are a little too far gone for me to want to save, and nobody came a'running when I offered them for free. I won't feel too guilty chucking them, because at least wood is biodegradable. But there's lots of other crappy furniture and fixtures that we don't want and apparently no one else does, either. So that all gets shoved to a corner for one giant Salvation Army pickup sometime this summer.

I know I've complained about it before, but it is very frustrating to have to find time to deal with this when all I want to do is start working on the house. I'd rather spend time assessing the overall structure and creating a priority list of projects than deal with this stuff.

Still, there have been a few pleasant surprises in the basement, such as fragments of one of the original stained glass windows. I think most of, if not all of it, is there. We're not exactly sure where this would have been originally. It matches the piano windows in the first floor unit, but does not fit any of the dimensions of the current windows. My best guess is that it might have been for the stairwell window, falling halfway between the first and second floor. In any case, I want to try to find a stained glass art class to either restore this to hang in a window, or create a light box for somewhere in the interior.

One of two piano windows in the first floor living room.

Here's a not-so-pleasant discovery. We took down the grotty ceiling tiles in the storeroom under the front stairs and found evidence of past termite damage. The mud tunnels are what they travel through; if you brush them away, you can see there is damage to the wood. We had found some damaged boards in the dining room, which were already replaced, and recently found one in the stairwell landing--just on the other side of these boards in the photo--that is also damaged. (The part about this that irritates me is the sanding guys must have spotted that one, too, and chose to stain it anyway rather than tell us it was partly hollow at one end.) The mud tunnels are random, and only extend for a couple of feet. It does not look like anything current is going on and we haven't found any insects anywhere in the basement, except for the occasional spider. Still, I'll need to research this more. Unless they came in with the wood, which is quite likely, they somehow managed to get into the house before. I don't want that happening again.

Here's a great discovery--the original kitchen doors for the units upstairs. They are swinging doors that must have been removed when the kitchen was tiled. We'll be reinstalling these when we do the kitchen remodels, whenever that will be. (Boy, I need a haircut. Um. And maybe some makeup.)

A bad discovery. The brick underneath the windows along the north wall had a lot of efflorescence. The P.O.'s had painted the walls, and the efflorescence was pushing against the paint, making it easy to flake off in this section. Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of mortar loss, too. One of our top projects for the summer is to determine how to stop moisture from building in this wall, which receives little sun, as it is in between houses. Our inspector suggested regrading, which we'll have to discuss with the neighbors, probably.

All in all, it's been a mixed bag of discoveries the last week or so. But I think we're nearing the end (ha!) of the pile of stuff we have yet to remove from the basement.

Water, Water, Everywhere

We knew last month when we were able to clamber up on the garage roof during a break in the weather that we had a problem with the gutter. It is so packed with old leaf debris that it's like solid, frozen mud. Well, this weekend the temperatures reached the low forties for a day, and things began to melt. And refreeze. And continue to melt.

The gutter is shot. Nothing is actually flowing to the downspout because it is completely clogged; it also has several holes along its length. Water is backing into the wood ceiling beams, soaking the back wall, and flowing in through the doors and windows. When it freezes, it's expanding and crumbling the brick and mortar. Salvaging our 82-year-old garage has shot to the top of our to-do list. Once the weather warms enough to work on it, that is.

Fragments of brick and mortar on a wet floor.

Water coming in around the door. The doors are a lost cause, and we knew from the start they would be replaced.

Water cascading down the wall and in the window. Again, we knew we were going to replace these windows eventually.

So. Mom's vote is to hire a gutter guy to do the work. Ted and I are advocating we do it ourselves. I found instructions online calling the project "challenging" but still doable for the do-it-yourselfer, which we are due to a lack of deep pockets. It's a straight gutter, sloping down to a downspout. No fancy turns. We should be able to do it, right? I did a quick check online and Classic Gutters was selling vintage-looking gutters at $3.00/foot for aluminum. That seems reasonable, doesn't it? Considering when the downspout fell off our condo over the winter, the quotes for that were coming in at $800 or so, including labor. I'll have to do some more investigating.

In the meantime, we're not even using the garage for our cars because it is still full of the basement load of junk left behind by the Previous Owners.

The gutter problem is not the only water issue we had this weekend, either. I neglected to tighten everything up after bleeding some air out of the radiator, and Ted walked into the bedroom to find a pool of water had collected on the newly finished floors. I haven't taught him yet to document all mishaps so we can ha! ha! all laugh at how silly Joanne is when I post them on the blog later. So no photos.

But I did catch this image of Ted, when Mom found that the kitchen sink was leaking. The PO solution was to wrap a rag around the base (nowhere near the leak, by the way, just where the water was collecting). It's leaking down from the actual faucet, but since we'll eventually remodel the kitchen, none of us could get all that worked up about it.

So. Welcome home to us. And how was your weekend?

Pantry Project

A quick, feel-good project that Mom has decided to tackle first is pulling up the old contact paper and recovering the shelves in her pantry. Each unit of the Box House has a rather large pantry, which compensates for the rather smallish kitchen. There is a ton of storage space in each. Just looking at all that space makes me want to try my hand at canning and preserving summer fruits and vegetables!

The glue on the old paper is so dry it just took a putty knife to loosen an edge before peeling it all off. All she'll have to do is wipe the boards down and recover them with fresh paper.

I'm not sure what I'll do in my unit yet; I thought about peeling off the paper, stripping the paint, and leaving them as bare wood. Both our inspector and buyer's agent laughed at that idea, saying that new wood is cheaper to buy than the opportunity cost of going through all that effort. They're probably right, and Ted agrees. (He checked out wood prices at Home Depot today--our fifth trip there in the last week or so.) But I have a weird nostalgic streak, and like the idea of stacking my cans of food on the same shelves the original lady of the house would have used (if they are indeed original!)

In the vertical photo you can just catch a glimpse of the built-in ice box behind my mom. Yes, a real ice box! We were very excited to see these when we first looked at the Box House. My parents had one when I was growing up, and I would store all my crayons and art supplies in it. (Later, when it was temporarily stored in the garage, I accidentally tapped it with my car a couple of weeks after I received my driver's license. I have never been able to live down the fact that it fell over and more or less shattered. I swear I was just inching my way in.) At present, both ice boxes contain more junk to sort through--although I was grateful to find a large stash of light bulbs in the downstairs one. We've had two bulbs burn out since we've been here.

As these ice boxes are built directly into the wall, the back side opens onto the porch, and the ice man would deliver the ice without ever having to come into the house. The porch is now enclosed, and the boxes seem to be pretty well preserved. The backsides are coated in paint, but it looks like I'll be able to strip them and get them to open up again. I'm not sure what we'll use them for, but am open to suggestions.