Kitchen Week 2, Some Discoveries

The Alexandria house was built in 1929, so whenever we go into renovation mode we discover little surprises.  There are a couple I can discuss so far. 

First, this is a shot of the corner where the stove used to be - notice that a hole was punched there when the old corner cabinet was taken out, exposing the lath where the plaster had been applied.  While I was checking this out, our contractor came around and was pointing at the wall around the window, where you could actually see a few strands of horsehair in the old plaster.  Yep, it's that old, that the plaster here was made using those natural fibers!

The next one is not really a discovery, but a reveal.  One of the changes Mary organized is to move the entry way to the kitchen from the center of the dining room wall to the left side.  Since the doorway to the sun room will be straight ahead from there, and the door to the basement stairwell is also there, we think this will improve the overall traffic flow.  This photo is of the demo and remaining framing, all of which will be changed in the coming days.

For the third one, we found that there is original oak flooring throughout the kitchen and into the basement stairway landing.  Unfortunately, it has been covered over several times with linoleum that we aren't able to remove - in the photo of the framing, above, the linoleum is the lighter material, and the adhesive for that layer is the dark cover.  In other places, the oak is visible, but the gunk won't come off. 

We were able to strip that stuff off of the landing floor, but unfortunately I don't think we can save this material.  We are going to be putting in oak again, but this section won't match.

That's it for the kitchen update this week.  Stay tuned.