Restoring my vintage kitchen: Part 1

16 years ago

Hi all,

This board has been such an enormous help to me over the past 2 years as I've struggled with botched attempts to restore my 1929 kitchen. We are getting ready to start up work again, so I thought I'd try to post a little of our story.

We bought this house 2 years ago. I was searching for a house that still had an intact original kitchen (I'm an old house fanatic), and finally found one that was pretty much intact from top to bottom.

The kitchen is small: about 8 x 14. The space is further used up by doors on 3 walls (one wall has 2 doors on it, so is completely used up). There is no room for a refrigerator (without making footprint changes that I would never make), so our fridge is in our garage.

When we moved in, only the sink wall had been changed. A metal sink unit and dishwasher were put in. Here is a photo taken from the "2 door wall." To the right is an empty wall for the range. To the left, the door way to the breakfast room is cut off. Behind me are doors to the dining room, and the upstairs. The doorway by the dishwasher goes to steps leading to the garage.

Here is a photo of the rest of the left side of the kitchen. Doorway to breakfast room, plus shallow cabinetry along the wall. (That's TheHusband walking in the breakfast room, and realtor in the kitchen.)

And here is a closeup of the small backsplash:

The cabinet part of the plan was simple (HA!): Remove the metal unit, and have cabinets made to match the originals. And put in a fully integrated dishwasher and a farm sink. (Also refinish the douglas fir sub floors, and restore the wall mount faucet and backsplash, strip all the painted hardware, etc.)

But TheHusband doesn't like to spend money. So he flew his brother (who used to be a general contractor) out to build these units for us (paying the airfare, parts, and labor).

Things didn't go so well. I thought I was very specific about what I wanted (and provided lots of pictures to show brother-in-law). But maybe he was confused? And he definitely had his own ideas about things.

TheHusband began to demo parts of the old kitchen: