Swinging a Hammer Into the New Year

 Transitioning a second story kitchen into a bedroom is harder than you might imagine. Here's a shot of the cabinets mostly demolished. The uppers have already been moved to the garage to make storage space (imagine the white area on the wall as the "backsplash"). In this picture you can see a number of potentially deadly DIY projects:

The rest of the demo work reveals missing baseboard and miserable water  damage to the flooring.

W. M. Rutter- apparently a now defunct WV lumber  company.
Difficult to obtain 1 1/2 x 5/16 red oak strip flooring.

My pathetic first attempts at soldering copper pipes in the wall between the room and a closet. You can see that the first try didn't work (water sprayed on  lathe).  On a second try, I forgot to empty the active water line down to the valve in the basement and nearly lost an eye when steam in the pipe built up and shot off the end cap like a bullet!

Plaster patching finished (I was forced to cap the waste water line and leave it protruding slightly from the wall). It connects to an air vent directly on the other side of this wall in the corner of the closet. Since we didn't want to remove the whole thing, which would have also involved roof work, we settled for a small oddity. It will likely be behind a bed or some other piece of furniture anyway!

You can see the electrical outlet now moved to the baseboard just to the right of the ladder.

Well, it's still a work in progress. I was able to reuse baseboard from the kitchen in this room, except for one stretch. I also found trim work I had saved to match the existing wood around the closet door. I would not have been able to match it otherwise, short of custom millwork (hah!). What remains? SERIOUS flooring work (2 inch x 5/16 straight edge is on order- I will have to rip each piece), then refinishing the entire floor and lots of painting. Stay tuned!

Demolition Update: Before and Now...and after?

Demolition Day got us off to a great start with the remodeling of our 1912 Arts and Crafts house in York, PA. But so much has happened since then!

The kitchen walls have gone from yellow faux-brick wall board, to the mounting lathe beneath it, to bare plaster.

We've pealed back the walls around the back stairs in preparation for their removal and expansion of our kitchen.

 (These are the basement stairs, in their place will

be the fridge, stove, and countertop.)

The dining room closet is ready to be converted to the new basement stairs.

 (We're hoping to recycle the wood flooring we

carefully pulled up in the closet by using it to repair

flooring in a second floor bedroom!)

And most recently, and perhaps most exciting: the kitchen floor has gone from three layers of linoleum (one for every three decades I suppose) to bare wood. Thank to Jon Allen for his assistance in getting the floors to this point!

(While we sanded a lot of lines, stains, and old adhesive off the floors,

another mystery line appeared. It appears to be some sort of cut made when

installing previous flooring but even more interestingly, it seems to have dyed the

wood around it!)

We can't wait for the final product. Then we'll have true before and after photos!