Kitchen Part 2 - Looking Up!

So this is where we left off. The floors!

There are many renovations that go floor to tops of cabinets. We went floor to ceiling, quite literally. You see, we had the "privilege" (long, hot, hard work) of taking out an antique tin ceiling. The ceiling was originally put into a church in the 1920s. That church was renovating the space into a more usable place. Many members of the church came and helped with the demo, and we got called in to remove the tin. 

The room was HUGE (imagine the carry-in dinners!) The tins were amazing; still covered in their original white paint. I can only imagine the glory of this room when it first was completed. 

The bad part? Over the years, the church has done what they needed to do to use the space. That included putting holes in parts, installing pipes to hang from the ceiling, and putting a drop ceiling below the ceiling so that it was covered up for decades. 

There were nails every 6 inches that we had to pry out of the 4 x 8 sheets. It was hot (many of those pipes are hot water pipes, and there was no air in this part of the building.) We were on 15ft ladders, working above our heads for hours. Oh, and after taking down a whole section? We uncovered asbestos and lead. Good times. So, we had to take steps to deal with that personally and the church had to have the has-mat team in deal with it.

We came out of the room each day looking like coal miners. After prying the sheets down, all the rubble from 90 years would fall on your head, down your back, etc. We wore eye protection and masks, but it was just dirty work. 

But SOOOOOOOO worth it. 

We decided to put part of the tins up in the kitchen! All the paint had to be stripped off first. We tried everything short of sand blasting, since that would ruin the tins. Paying to have them dip stripped was not cost effective. So, hand stripping it was. These suckers have a lot of detail.

We put up strips in order to put the tins back up. Side note: notice all the patching on the walls.

At night, the lights reflect off of the tins. At first we thought they may be too dark as the original tin, and considered repainting them a shiny silver. But the fact is, we just love them as they are. 

Final step in the ceiling? We had to tape off the entire room with plastic and put on several layers of clear lacquer. Why? To keep them from rusting. We want this baby to last another 90+ years. 

Kitchen, Oh Kitchen Part 1

It took us two months to complete it, and that is with hired help!

So if you remember back two years ago, and have stuck with me that long, this was kitchen on our work day. The work day that happened before we ever owned it. 

Quaint...and honestly stinky. But then, the whole house was a bit stinky. 

We found that part of the reason was the flooring in the mudroom and kitchen. It was linoleum from 1946. No joke, we have the original receipts. In fact, the owners gave us the original receipts for the entire house when their family bought it remodeled it. 

So this is what we have been living with for a year and a half. It is perfectly functional and clean, just dated. Though honestly, taking the curtains down and the first layer of flooring up helped. But that also took us to sub floor for over a year (cold in the winter!!) that never looked clean and took hours to dry when I mopped it. Anyway, you don't really care about that. 

Our original plan was to put in stone tile. So, as we prepped for our contractor, we took off all the cabinet doors so we could paint and resurface them. 

And then, we took up a piece of the massonite sub floor. And found hardwood. 

So then all the bottom cabinets had to come out, because we decided to scrap the tile and refinish the hardwood! It took our kitchen redo timeline from 3 weeks to 5 weeks. And...it went from freezer meals that I prepped for a few weeks, to living out of a microwave. A huge shift for me. 

There were nails about every six inches holding down the massonite, so there was a lot of nail pulling and hole filling to do. Then came the sanding!

And STAINING! We stained it a red oak to match the rest of the floors in the house. 

Here is a little sneak peak of the cabinets (and countertops!!) back in.