The Kitchen - after

Let's start with the kitchen since that is where I will be today. There was tremendous water damage in the kitchen from leaky pipes under the sink. The floors were rotten and the floor joists were rotten. So we pulled up the floor, being careful to save as many boards as possible. We wouldn't have enough old flooring to use it all over the house, so we decided to go with new pine flooring in the kitchen and save the kitchen's old wood to use in the dog trot. Once we could walk without falling through the floor and the house was rejoisted and leveled, we got to make a few fun decisions like cabinets, appliance size, and whether to try to get the paint off the walls or paint over it. The kitchen and the bathroom were the only rooms that had ever been painted. Obviously, we decided to paint the kitchen.

We had the cabinets custom made at the house. I wanted them to seem as if they had been there as long as the house and I wanted them to fit our not so square house. We decided on banded pine flooring (which was my mother's design) for the solid cabinet doors and hardware cloth for the upper doors and the pie safe. The pie safe was original, though the doors were gone. For the cabinet tops we went with Formica everywhere except right next to the stove. There we used tile so I could move things off the heat without damaging anything. We went with this arrangement because I wanted a practical kitchen. I didn't want to spend any time worrying about whether I was going to ruin a counter top. Julia Child also recommended a Formica and tile combo.

After having lived in the kitchen two years, there are a few things that I would have done differently. I would have moved the island back toward the refrigerator to give us more walking room around the table. I would have made the harvest table a little smaller. I would have added a ceiling fan to this room somewhere. And I would have thought long and hard about the lighting. I don't have enough light over the stove and I don't like the counter lights. With tall wooden ceilings darkened by years of wood stove use, light seems to disappear just when you need it.

Mostly, I still love what we did with the kitchen - practical farm, with touches of modernism.

Our house - before

Some of you have been curious about my house, so I thought I would do a before and after series. The house is a little over a hundred and had been rented for about 30 years, maybe more, before we got our hands on it. During this time not much maintenance was done. At some point a longer term renter tacked up some Sheetrock and Formica to the the walls and lowered the ceiling in the same mish-mash manner in hopes of slowing the flow of the winter winds.

The first picture is not a true before picture because the disgusting mildewy cabinets have been ripped out and the dropped ceiling removed, but the patch worked walls and rotten floor give you the feel for the place.

Which leads me to a short detour. Mr. W and I were planning on building a new house on this same property. We went so far as have the site prepared, but each day we went to the top of the hill we passed this old house. Each day one or the other would say, "I wonder what it looks like inside?" or "I wonder how bad it is?" or "Wouldn't that house be interesting?" Renters were still living there so we couldn't just barge in.

One day, the roof of the house started leaking and the renters were referred to us as being the new owners. Mr. W raced over in an attempt get a look at the house to make a good impression as a landlord. He went in and then did everything in his power to get out as fast as he could. The conditions were that bad, yet there was still the feeling of something special. We gave the tenants notice because we didn't think the house was habitable and they left leaving their dog, a nasty couch, and mounds of stinky clothes.

Once we got all that trash out, we started tearing out the dropped ceilings and mismatched drywall. We found the bead board and heart pine siding, the dog trot, the fireplaces, and the curved heat trap in the hallway and never looked back. We abandoned our plan of building and threw ourselves into another rehab project, our third since we moved to Mississippi. Our goal was to keep as much of the original as possible while updating wiring, plumbing, and insulation and making sure you couldn't fall through the floor. Of course we needed to modernize some things, like the kitchen and bathroom. We also needed to get rid of the sky blue, silver, pink, lavender, and black door facings and replace all the doors that had been kicked-in (which was all of them). If we couldn't refurbish the original, we tried to keep the spirit of the old.

As an added bonus, since this had originally been my Great Grandparents home, we had stories from my father, his sisters, and a great aunt to help us rekindle the spirit of the house. We felt good about the work ahead of us. And we had a lot of work ahead of us. We had no idea of the structural problems( a little termite damage, though they don't really like heart pine). We had no idea we would have to find a salvage house to match the bead board. We had no idea we would have to have wood milled to match the pine siding on the exterior. We had no idea that we would have to remove every piece of wood so we could insulate properly.

We had no idea!