Oh my, I forgot to update. We bought it in March and are having a great time redoing it! I tried to start stripping the stairs, but it was horrible, so I'm painting the risers white and the treads a very dark black/brown. We did carpet the living room, which had very ugly carpet in it, most of the floors we are removing carpet, though, because there are nice floors, that someone painted...ugh. We have hired someone to lift the porch up, pour footings, and replace the parts that are damaged and showing rot. Otherwise, no major issues. Pretty solid, crazy 12" thick brick walls, even the interior walls, most of them.

This topic stressed me out a bit since we are the middle of work opening our kitchen to the dining room in our 1906 house. I'm already worried about whether everything will turn out ok. We thought a lot about this, though, so I'll weigh in. I apologize for the length - brevity may be the soul of wit, but it apparently is not my strong suit. We moved to our current 1906 Arts & Crafts house from a Victorian farmhouse which had the kitchen isolated from the dining room and living room, separated by a bathroom. We found it hard when we had people over since they were either crammed in the kitchen without enough room to participate in the cooking or they were way at the other end of the house. We saw that we had a pattern of having people over in the summer when we could congregate outside by the grill, but not much in the winter. We have a very close community of friends and we enjoy sharing meals in a very casual, family sort of way with kids playing, adults talking and cooking. We also found the dining room more difficult to use for everyday meals. Additionally, it was not possible to carry on conversations when in the two spaces or moving between them for setting, clearing etc. I enjoy cooking, but also like interacting rather than being isolated. When we decided to move we were looking to resolve this split and have a more connected common space. We saw many houses (and almost bought one) with family room additions connected to the kitchen which left unused living and dining rooms. These rooms had become merely somewhere to walk through, heat and cool. Some had little or no furniture in the abandoned formal rooms. We realized that we did not really need this redundant space. There is an excellent book by Sarah Susanka (Taunton Press), The Not So Big House. It talks quite eloquently about using space in an efficient manner. I personally like having one place to eat all meals. I like eating at the dining room table for just the reasons mentioned in posts above - slowing down, sitting on a chair instead of stools, in a space designed for eating, around a table (preferably round) which facilitates a relaxed, shared experience. The truth is that since we do not have servants, we often need to go back and forth between the spaces. Houses at the turn of the last century were often built to fit a more formal way of living which placed servants (even modest homes) or the women of the house out of the way while the hosts entertained in formal rooms. They were also built prior to the use of refrigerators. When we moved into this new-to-us 1906 house it had a (tiny) butler's pantry for staging serving, while the refrigerator was crammed into the food pantry in such a way that required near-contortionist moves to get a carton of milk. The only storage was open to mice or around the corner in the butler's pantry cabinet. Counter space was limited to the two drainboards of the 1950's metal sink. This was not the room of efficient post-work cooking and cleaning, much less any pleasant shared time. One of us would quite frequently get trapped in the pantry by another trying to get something. The rest of the first floor of our beloved home showed signs of the revolutionary changes that were happening in houses at the time, shifting from formal double parlors to more flowing open rooms with wide framed openings between them. I am in Oak Park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright, though our home was part of a far more modest working class development. It is stunning to see the differences among the different houses being built during the first part of the century. As central heating and radiators allowed rooms to open up, a social shift away from formality and toward more relaxed, real connection was also under way. Now that the social and technological changes that have transpired over the last century have ushered in a time of shared cooking, I welcome kitchens and floorplans that facilitate that. There are other times in history and other cultures today in which the communal kitchen holds a significant place in a community. Our new kitchen provides inward facing space where people can prep around an island. In our open floor plan I envision friends and family cooking and talking together, either within the de-cramped kitchen or between it and the dining room next to it. We are also concerned about creating something that respects the house's history, fits in with the architecture and creates a sense of two spaces with different but related activities. The disfunctional pantries were ommitted in favor of refrigeration and dish storage near the new dishwasher (uses less water than hand washing). We removed the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and are replacing a portion of it with shallow (12 inch)cabinets that create a partial division and open to both sides. There will be a 6 foot visual opening on top,stepping in to a 3 foot walking space at the bottom in a sort of key hole shape. As much as we love the big pocket door in the large opening between the dining room and the foyer, I doubt that we will use it. I just can't see part of our family sitting in the living room smoking cigars while another part of the family or servants quietly set the table out of sight. It has been a delicate dance trying to mesh the eras. We are having a duplicate of the missing original built-in hutch along one side of the dining room built, but it will have some wood doors in place of the original glass to house some less aesthetic items that have no other storage on the first floor since the one closet was turned into a WC in the 50's. We got a picture of the original at an open house across the street and noticed gloves and scarves displayed where china and silver of another time once shone. Life is not static and it seems to me that a key component to navigating the ever-shifting impermanence is to be flexible. I cross my fingers hoping that my ideas about homes and people actually work out in this re-working of our lovely old house. I do not disagree with any of the prior posts, I just wanted to add some thoughts.

We've always said it's never too late to post to a DAT, and I'm testing that theory. I've been working on this one since May. The house is another Oakland hills home, but definitely a nicer one than the one I previously posted. This one is on the uphill side of the road and so has an exterior elevation worth looking at. Here is a shot of the living area with the dining room in the background. The kitchen is through the door at the back of the dining room. The living room is all neutrals, but the kitchen walls are green and the bedrooms were all painted shades of blue, green and aqua. Here's the kitchen and the room past the peninsula: It looked to me as if the homeowner spruced up the kitchen for sale by painting the cabinets white and putting in new black counters. But the black and white seem too stark to me compared to the rest of the house, and with the large west-facing window, the kitchen gets a LOT of light, and it just makes the black and white more stark. Now, if I really bought this house, I would probably live with the kitchen indefinitely. This design is more about what I thought the homeowners should have done if they were staying, and I riffed off their design choices elsewhere in the house. I wanted the kitchen to be a bit softer, and transitional between the neutrals of the public spaces and the water colors of the rest of the house. The cabs read a bit pinker than I wanted; I was going for a creamy neutral. I took out the uppers on the outside wall and the suspended cabinets over the peninsula. I left the layout the same otherwise, including the cooktop on the peninsula, however questionable that may be, although if it is feasible (couldn't tell) I would look to moving it to the interior wall. The adjacent space beyond the peninsula looks like it was intended as a breakfast nook but with the dining room and peninsula seating already, more space for eating seemed like overkill. Since the deck is off that room, it seemed like it would be nice to have a space that worked for indoor/outdoor entertaining. So I turned it into living space. What I wanted to do, but didn't have enough energy to do a board for, would be to do a wet bar at the far end of the room, behind where the white loveseat is. The room also has what looked to me like mirrored closet doors, which I replaced with something I liked better. So below I did board for the window wall, a view of the peninsula, and the living area facing the interior wall. Kraftmaid cabinets, maple in canvas Counter: Silestone Unsui Kohler Iron/Tones sink in Palermo blue Heath tile robins egg blue Kohler Purist faucet Maytag dishwasher Paint Benjamin Moore Acadia Green White oak wood floors woodfloorsonline.com Wolf gas cooktop Rangecraft Landau range hood angelo:HOME Ennis Shoreline 3 piece sofa collection (Overstock.com), only used 2 pieces C.R. Laine Pendleton chair in Kyoto Wasabi Abaca ottoman (Overstock.com) (this is just like the one in the existing LR, although I didn't do that consciously) Target Andres seagrass barstools (I picked these before the ottoman and now I think it's too much seagrass, but I didn't have the energy to look for replacements) Closet door pic from door.clutchot.com Both paintings are from 1stdibs.com, Energy, and The Rose and the Nightingale.

cs929, (AMS hope I'm not taking too much space with my posts! color discussion can lead me to that), the color is actually was mixed for some unknown to me designer for her clients in Malibu or something. Our cabinetmaker prepared 4 samples for us-any colors I wanted-I chose Elephant's Breath, Revere Pewter, all the warm grays I could think of. They all looked just great when they were laying gorizontally on some surface. The moment I turned them vertically-as they'd be installed vertically, right?-they all became too cold. They became grays. And I wanted color verging on taupe, very warm color. So the cabinermaker, seeing as I desperately look at them and finding them all wrong, told me he has some other grayish samples in his store. (He holds on to every sample in his shop, in case clients want to touch up/repaint same color) I found what, another ten doors? I asked permission to take them all home to look at them more. Permission was granted. I spent ten days dragging doors around and looking at them in different lights..)) My MIL who lived at the time with us looked at me like I'm a madwoman. Anyway. Only one color worked, out of all shebang. Only one was what I envisioned. And it didn't have a name since it was custom. So I called it after myself. It's varnish of course, lacquer-they have different formulas from paint, I mean they're made differently. We color matched it in regular paint store because I loved it so much, and it's become the color of our master bedroom as well. And there it somehow gets to be warmer, more brownish. I bet because of the different light. It's more moody too because not varnish anymore..it's more matte and deep plainly because of the different nature of material it's applied to. Many months after that I ordered a mirror painted in Kingsport Gray by Benjamin Moore(paint on papier mache applied to metal). And I thought to myself: hmm..that's pretty damn close..))