Music and Cats

If you open up the walls of any house, you are likely to find surprises. While we tend to think of buildings as being static, the truth is that the walls surrounding us change with the passage of time. Heat, cold, moisture, wind, animals and plants all make their marks on the materials in a building, but the most interesting changes are the work of human hands. Kitchens and bathrooms seem more subject to the whims of style and the advances of technology than the other rooms of a house, so the wall of old kitchens and bathrooms are particularly rich in artifacts left by previous inhabitants.

Paul and I spent all of last weekend - with help from Phil and Janeen - tearing out cabinets, appliances, walls and ceiling in our kitchen. As you might expect, our 98-year-old kitchen walls have many a story to tell.

The north wall faces our next-door-neighbor’s house. The original kitchen sink was under the two north-facing windows; you can see the plumbing lines to the original wall-mounted kitchen faucets coming up under the right window. In 1908, separate taps for hot and cold water were the norm; mixing faucets became common 10-15 years later. The lead drain and vent pipes run diagonally down and up, respectively. We’ll demo all the old plumbing lines before the drywall goes on.

The east wall faces our back yard. This was originally the back wall of the house; the laundry room (soon to be breakfast nook) and powder room were added on, along with the dining room, in 1942. What’s now a large opening between the kitchen and future nook was once, I’m fairly sure, the back door of the house and an adjacent window. At some point, someone enlarged the opening by cutting through the studs of the door and window framing. Don’t try this at home! Openings this wide should have beams across their tops to carry the load of whatever’s above them - in our home, a second story! Fortunately, there’s a continuous joist at the second floor, and old-growth douglas fir cut 98 year ago is much stronger than the wood we can get today. Still, we have a minor structural fix planned; it may not be needed, but it will make me feel better. Under the window (a later addition), you can see the plumbing at the second (and future) kitchen sink location. Notice that there are two sets of water supply lines; I think we’ll reuse the copper ones. We also will be replacing this window with one that matches the other two in size.

The south wall separates the kitchen from our living room. The zip-door, installed in the doorway to our living room, allows us to enter and leave the construction site without having to go outside. We’ll see how well it keeps the dust out of the rest of the house once the construction starts in earnest. To the right of the zip-door, you can see the location of the original kitchen door. Before the 1942 addition, the room that is now our living room was both living and dining room, and the original door would have entered the corner of the dining room near the living room. When I began tearing into the plaster on that section the wall, I noticed that it was slightly thicker than on the rest of the wall. Besides the fir lath, there was expanded metal lath around the old door frame, where the new plaster was tied into the old. When the door was moved to its current location, the knob-and-tube wiring that had run vertically in that part of the wall was relocated to adjacent stud bays. We’re planning to decommission as much of the knob-and-tube wiring as possible without tearing into other walls in the house.

The west wall separates the kitchen from our home’s two flights of stairs. The door on the left leads onto the first landing of the stairs up to the second floor; the door on the right (covered in plastic), the stairs to the basement. In between the two doors is the chimney for the boiler. Our house has hot-water radiators; the gas furnace vents through one flue of this chimney. We had originally planned to vent the range hood through the other flue, but that turned out to be infeasible. The change in paint color most of the way up the wall occurs where the dropped ceiling used to be. When I was designing the new kitchen, this wall, with its two doors and protruding chimney, was the biggest design problem of the project. How did I solve it? That’s another post for another day.