4.16.2012

Seat of the Pants Kitchen Renovation

This probably isn't the most wise way to renovate your kitchen, but last Saturday darlingest husband and I started ripping out the tile in our kitchen.  As you can see from the "before" picture, it covers most of the room -- like 5' high!  Kinda like a grungy operating room.  Oh, really not a nice description...

So, I had this plan that the tiles would come off ever so gently, and maybe we'd put up some cottage-y beadboard moulding up and it would all be a piece of cake -- like in one of those DIY shows.  Not so fast.  A few tiles came off ok, but then others came off with huge chunks of plaster -- you could still see the horse hair mixed in from 100 years ago.  And it became obvious we were taking it down to the lathe...

Window wall -- down to the lathe, baby!


We were going to try to do the renovation in stages to save $$, but we're finding out that's kind of impossible.  We thought we could wait to replace the yicky cooktop and doll-size oven, but we realized we'd have to take it out now to be able to finish the wall...

Here's a cool surprise, though...  When we took out the base cabinet we found this groovy old wallpaper (yes, I'm a sucker for old wallpaper) and a very cool chrome tile backsplash, albeit caked in old adhesive.  There's a signature from the same wallpaper guy who put the wallpaper in Griffin's room -- this one is dated 1948 -- right after the last owners bought the house.  I think it's funny I put in a backsplash just like this in my old kitchen, and I was thinking of something similar for this one.  You know I'm going to do whatever it takes to see if I can get that glue off...

Check out this very sweet wallpaper!  I love the metallic silver...

1 comment:

Postmodern Michele said...

I predict this kitchen will be the envy of the neighborhood within weeks.

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