Restoring Irving Gill's "Williams House"

A 1940s Wedgewood plus photo albums

We just hooked up a super, original condition 1945-8ish Wedgewood stove, complete with griddle. The fire power on the cook top is pretty impressive. The griddle could be hotter, but it works pretty well. We are still acclimating ourselves to the oven's personality, so I will reserve judgment there. 

Generally speaking, I'm pretty tickled with it. It helps that it is beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, I have added some photo albums to the blog: house features, homesteading, Hilltop skies, and the forest around us. Take a look -- just click on the thumbnails at right.

Kitchen remodel layout

We have been planning a kitchen remodel for about nine  months. We hope that the remodel will be sometime in the spring of 2006, but the key to that date seems to be the key with all of these projects – time and money. It is a shoestring budget with a lot of do-it-yourself (DIY) projects as we describe in our kitchen remodel timeline. I thought I’d review some of the plans for the layout here.

Woe is me. Cabinet stripping

We continue to strip this kitchen-cabinet-to-be that may not be original to this house but has been here a long, long time.  It is solid maple and must weigh in excess of 500 pounds.  It has four colors of paint, with at least six coats altogether.  Two of those coats are my mom’s from the early 1980s who never considered stripping it.  She didn’t think it could get moved out of the room and even once claimed that she thought it was built in the room.  (It is pretty massive at 7 feet high.)

Kitchen Cabinet: interesting lineage?

When my parents moved here in 1982 a cabinet was left by the previous owners.  We assumed that it was in the house when they purchased it as well.  It is seven feet tall, five feet wide and very heavy.  We have speculated about whether it is original to the house and survived the unfortunate people in which the house’s fixtures and furnishings were a community free-for-all.  The cabinet is certainly heavy enough that it may not have been attractive for the taking.  It is also located in the room that had probably been used as the kitchen cold room, so it is possible it just sat there all these years.

Haunted by kitchen plans

I mentioned in a previous post that our original house design included a kitchen layout.  As we move forward to renovating the kitchen, I find myself haunted by these plans.  We will be doing a kitchen remodel sometime in the spring of 2006 and already had the floor plan design and most of the materials selected before we received these plans.  Generally, we plan to use existing cabinetry for one wall of cabinets, build a new run of base cabinets on our north wall, and build an island using a baker’s table as a model but sizing it up a bit.  A few key items stand in the way of restoring the kitchen to the original plans:

1908 kitchen island – way ahead of its time

We received the original architectural plans for the house late last week and discovered that the floor plans call for an island in the kitchen.  And to think we have spent months in our kitchen remodel trying to include an island in our kitchen and make it look period. 

The “island” in our plan includes the kitchen sink centered in the 17x17 foot kitchen.  The sink is a wide single bowl sink (much like we have planned for our remodel) with drain boards mounted on cabinetry on either side of the sink.  The plans even include cabinet details.

To the north of the island was to be a base cabinet (the details also included) under a six-foot expanse of windows.  The east wall called for a range hood in the south-east corner vented through the wall and into the fireplace flue in the great room.  Next to the range calls for a set of base and wall cabinets.  The west wall which is now open, calls for a base and wall cabinet.  The south wall is empty.  The wall cabinets in the plan were to be suspended from the ceiling with chains.  Gill also designed plate racks/shelves mounted to the walls with chain.

In Bungalow Kitchens Jane Powell says “Island cabinets as we know them today were extremely rare, though many kitchens had worktables of one sort or another.”

Do you know of any other early kitchen islands?  Any with sinks?

In Bungalow Kitchens Jane Powell says “Island cabinets as we know them today were extremely rare, though many kitchens had worktables of one sort or another.”

Do you know of any other early kitchen islands?  Any with sinks?

Hot Shower

It's over 100 degrees here so a hot shower shouldn't matter that much, but what a difference it can make after a hot, nasty day.

We no longer have a water heater in our kitchen.  Dwayne and his son Casey installed a new water heater just outside of the kitchen between the porch steps and the side of the house.  It will be fairly well protected under the eaves, inside its hut, and wearing a number of blankets.

I took a great picture of Dwayne and Casey today, but he asked that I not post it until we have one that represents what he looks like most of the time.  None of us looked like ourselves today in this heat, even those of us who avoided crawling under the house and installing appliances.

This new heater should make a big difference in our utility bills.  It is propane which is cheaper to run here and is more efficient than the 14 year old it replaced.

Kitchen Remodel

July 11, 2005

Our kitchen remodel is moving forward.  We developed a detailed work timeline today after a great deal of discussion of the various tasks (many of which are do-it-yourself).  We will be gutting the kitchen, including removing the old linoleum.  The entire project from gut to reinstallation will take just over four weeks.  We are not entirely sure when Day 1 is yet – there is a possibility it will be this fall, depending on the availability of relevant parties, cash flow, and the need for some structural work (and thus related cash flow).  But the timeline looks something like this:

Sound of silence or "Goodbye Commercial Refrigerator"

June 26, 2005

When I went off to Santa Clara University back in the late 1980s, I adjusted quickly to the city noise.  I lived in a dorm near a major airport, train station, and three large freeways.  On my first visit back home to California Hot Springs, the silence was so “loud” that I had a difficult time sleeping.  That first night home a cricket’s chirp seemed deafening.

It has been a long time since you could hear that cricket’s chirp in this kitchen. 

I’m not as young as I used to be

June 25, 2005

The plan for today was to unload the truck and fill it up for a dump run before returning it to Bakersfield this evening.  We’re beat. 

This morning Sander and I unloaded the settee, dryer, wheelbarrow, and a filing cabinet from the moving truck.  We left the refrigerator, freezer, and stove in the truck protected, and filled the rest of the truck for our dump run.  We had accumulated rubble since late March for this dump run – old pipes from our woodstoves, treasures from the clearing out of the workshop, remains of the old burn barrel.  It took well over an hour to load the truck and at least a half hour to unload it at the dump.  I need to get in better shape if I am going to be doing this kind of work.