You wrote: "the ones going across the old ceiling (vs. yanking them out), " What you wrote stood my hair on end! It is very likely you can not remove the horizontal timbers without your house's structure being compromised. Those beams are most likely doing a whole lot more than just supporting the ceiling and the attic floor. They are connecting the sides of your house. Before you even think of this, please hire an architect or structural engineer to assess it. Given the age of your house (1840) and location it seems highly likely your house is a timberframe structure. Those horizontal beams are ESSENTIAL in timberframe houses! The lower ceilings in older houses are one the characteristics of the style. You can expose the beams, but not remove them. After they are exposed you could cover them, but it would be a lot of work. In buildings the age of yours they might be hand hewn, and attractive, but rough. Many people find the old timber look very appealing as they shown the hand-made nature of the structure. The other issue is that once you have a room with such a tall ceiling (going up to the roof rafters) you will kake it very hard to keep warm at "ground level" as all your heated air will go up, far above your head. Even with good roof insulation (can be done, but does present some other technical issues) keeping warm downstairs will be a challenge, unless you have something like radiant heat in the floor. When the house was built, and every bit of heat was from logs cut, hauled, split, stacked and loaded, by the occupants they knew that lower ceilings were warmer than soaring spaces. MOlly

My answer to your question depends on how other transitions between rooms are handled in your house. In modern designs, they are often left as just drywall, as in your picture. In older homes, they would be fitted out with moldings just like a door jamb would. Then when I saw the second picture, looking into your eating space from the kitchen, it appears that the hutch cabinet is extending past the opening between the rooms, extending into the dining area. If you trim the opening out with casing, it will look like you made an error in designing that hutch. It left the kitchen and extended into the next room. Rather than have that be suggested, I would leave the opening as it is, and pretend it is not there! In your first photo, since we do not see the left side of the opening, it looks just like the right side of "an archway between rooms," as you called it in the photo of the traditional kitchen in San Fransisco. I think that the wall on the right side is too wide for it to feel just like a support for a header. It does feel like a real wall and gives the impression that it is an opening between two rooms. Now that I look at it, would you consider changing the hutch cabinet so that it does end in the kitchen? I may be seeing it incorrectly with just the two pictures I have seen, but if it were my house, it would drive me nuts to see the hutch extend under the archway into the next room. JMHO and no criticism aimed at you. Here is what I did in my last house where there was an opening between the kitchen (the photo you see below, with microwave) and a former porch, where I had raised the floor on the back one-third and had made a galley-style pantry. I only had a 45" wide platform for the pantry, so I made the landing at the top of the stairs as big as possible and that extra floorspace became the standing and walking area for a small work station that was at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the kitchen. The microwave cabinet is entirely in the kitchen, though. Now click on my link below. Behind the microwave, see the counter? The right wall that is tiled with backsplash tiles and the wall behind the maple knick-knack shelf is the wall that supports the header you see behind the top of the microwave cabinet. There are two other knick-knack shelves in the kitchen, showing off my McCoy pot collection, so using another shelf as a transition between these two rooms made sense to us. We just kind of wrapped that side of the archway between the two rooms with cabinetry. You could do the same in your kitchen. Have your carpenter do some surgery on the Hutch, so that it ends just before it would go under the archway into the dining area. Then have him build a shallow (we did the microwave cab 18 inches deep) hutch facing into the dining area. It will back up to the side of the hutch in the kitchen and fill the space under the archway, extending a foot or so into the dining area, just like the hutch probably does now. It can have glass doors on the top and hold glassware, then hold dishes on the bottom, maybe desert plates or a chocolate fondue pot that you use only occasionally. You won't actually lose much kitchen storage, you can carry the cabinetry here to the top of the archway in the dining area and to the ceiling in the kitchen. It will no longer look like the hutch section is trying to make a get-away, inching towards that back door! From the one angle I see in the photo, it almost looks like the hutch could be split down the middle and the one side turned 90 degrees to accomplish what I am talking about. You can probably reuse the doors, just have the carpenter cut the cabinet and add a new back, then build a case for the section that faces the dining area. Am I the only one who is bothered by the hutch going between two rooms? Here is a link that might be useful: How we handled a change from one room to another within one kitchen

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me, the area in your photos looks more like an attic than a dining room. Whatever. One cheap way of patching damaged old-house plaster ceilings is to cover them with drywall. Old house lovers cringe when they see that done, with good reason. Usually the house deserves better. (I say "usually" because in houses old often means well built, but not always. I've run across a few old houses that were thoroughly undistinguished -- just old.) Before you tear down that drywall, you may want to contact a professional plasterer (if you can find one locally) and pay him or her look at the situation, to get an idea of what you might be in for. As for knob and tube wiring, don't automatically be afraid of it if you find it in a ceiling. If it's been properly maintained (no oversize light bulbs, not buried in insulation), it's often still reasonably safe for lighting circuits. Still it's best to replace it when you can, certainly if you have the ceiling open for other reasons. That's in part because age and air pollution have not been kind to the rubber that insulates it.

@ci_lantro, I wanted to do Glulam but the engineer spec'd Parallams for this particular stretch. @seabornman, we are seeing it pop up in eateries in our area and yes, nearly all of it is heavily glossed (too much for me). @Patricia Colwell, by "nice beam" did you mean the Doug fir center beam or the Parallam over the glass slider? We are definitely leaving Doug fir beam exposed. I wanted a totally exposed ceiling initially, but our code required the ceiling to be insulated. @joseph_corlett, I like the way you think. @Mark Bischak, a childhood friend who is an architect said just what you said! Agreed.