When we decided that 905 E. Pembroke would become our home, we knew that the kitchen was kind of small, but that it had BIG potential. We loved using the 7 x 5 pantry that was lined with shelves on both sides, complete with its own window. Yet we somehow new the space could be used more efficiently. We also detested that the mud room was a poor renovation of what used to be a back porch on the house, but we loved that the laundry had it's own space.
After we tore the flat roof off of what was to become our future bedroom and put a new pitch roof on August, 5th, 2007, the weekend before we moved in, John was feeling ambitious.
That fall he ripped all the paneling down in the main kitchen area and discovered flaking lead paint, an old chimney covered in plaster, and a transom that had been covered up by the paneling and all of its hideousness. We also made the doorway bigger (6ft) and put up a 12 foot header after sawing our house in two (the beams in our house are balloon framed, meaning the same stud goes from the crawl space to the attic) because the wall between the kitchen and dining was load bearing. In fact it was holding up a good portion of the 2nd story.
This is how it stayed for nearly a year. Not for lack of working, but because he went back to the bedroom for some demolition...
Secretly I think he just feels manly destroying things... jk!
Those of you all who know me know I LOVE to cook and have people over for dinner, so this has been hard. The next project after the bedroom was supposed to be the kitchen....
and we did do some of the kitchen in the fall of 08... i.e. we knocked out the walls between the laundry room, pantry and kitchen. We (and by we, I mean John) knocked out the kitchen ceiling making it 13 feet instead of 8. After Christmas, in Jan 09 we put in a sliding glass door with the help of my dad's Christmas gift to us. Then the kitchen stopped.
The kitchen plumbing and the bathroom plumbing were tied together, and therefore the upstairs bathroom needed to be re-plumbed and re-done before the kitchen plumbing could be done.
So John completed the upstairs bathroom in the summer of 09.
In the fall of 09 John returned to the kitchen to put the ceiling up before our Christmas party and the winter set in (remember: We have had NO walls in our kitchen since the fall of 07) but I thought it would at least help keep SOME of the heat in to have insulation and sheet rock up... this meant John had to redo the electrical and get the lighting plan from me. Then we realized that in order to lay the sheet rock flush against the ceiling beams john had to extend each of the beams to be even, and he had to replace more newly discovered, but old, termite damage.
Then it came to pass that families were going to move in with us (YEAH!), so we needed both bathrooms to be fully functioning.
Hence construction stopped on the kitchen once again, with the promise that once the bathroom was done the kitchen would be completed.
YES!!! Our downstairs bathroom is NOW complete....
This means that John is moving on to the kitchen right? RIGHT? no such thing....
He will be spending the next few weeks mudding Mary Dawn and Adam's future bedroom, tearing out the hallway ceiling upstairs (because it looks like it might fall on someone at any second), and putting in attic stairs. THEN he will move to the kitchen.
Lord willing.... for the last time. Stay tuned....
No comments:
Post a Comment