Kitchen Nightmares

Sorry it's been so long folks!  Had an unfortunate event with cameras and had to recover pictures (since I learned y'all really like the pics more than my writing. Very sad.) Time to catch up, in an episode I'll call... 

This is the Kitchen el, off the back of the house.  They say this was originally a "summer kitchen," which would have been a separate structure from the main house where the "women folk" would cook and clean in the summer months.  Since cooking was done in an open fireplace, cooking in the main house in the summer months would have been brutally hot.  Apparently it was ok to relegate the women in neck-to-toe garments and bonnets to the summer kitchen to slave over the flames.   There was a fireplace on the back gable end and the chimney used to come through the roof to the left of the window.  The window was not original.

If the kitchen was a separate structure at one point, it's not clear how it was separate from the main house...it would have been very close...within feet, which doesn't seem likely.  In any case, it seems clear that the kitchen wing - whether a separate structure or an addition - was built later than the main house.  It still uses timber frame construction methods such as hand-hewn timbers and mortise and tenon joints, but the timbers are a smaller dimension, and the pegged joints a bit different. 


View into kitchen from side Dutch Door



Fireplace at the gable end

Think of the delicious, homey meals that came out of this kitchen..once from the ancient hearth, and more recently from this modern electric double wall oven replete with modern features like an interior light and analog clock!



Hey Mom, what's for dinner?!?



We popped up the ceiling boards and saved them.  Conceptually they cover the same footprint as the floor, so maybe we'll re-use them as the floor boards in the new kitchen.  The collar tie cross beams are beautiful old timbers.  But, they stood at about six and a half feet off the floor.  Even with the ceiling boards out, the height still made it feel a little claustrophobic...or, along with all the odors in the kitchen, like a chicken coop.  So, we popped out the wooden pegs holding them in place and set them aside for now.  When the kitchen is re-framed, we will re-install them on the top of the side wall top plates, which will gain us another foot of headroom, but still leverage these timbers for structural support.  I was torn whether to take them out and move the timbers higher, or possibly drop the floor 8" to gain more headroom.  Although the mortise and tenon joints between the top of the wall studs and the collar ties were generally still in place, over half of the studs had been cut off to accommodate newer windows and the door, and for repair reasons.  So, there wasn't much to save, and there would have been a lot more repair work given the condition of the exterior walls.  The roof rafters are basically small tree trunks about 4" in diameter.  The horizontal furring strips were added when the latest cedar roof was installed, which was probably 25-30 years ago.

These two pictures show the view looking back into the great room, and then beyond the great room to the front foyer and front door.  In the top picture on the far left you can see a door which led to a steep primitive staircase that went up to the attic above the kitchen.  We really liked the quaintness of that staircase and wanted to keep it, but it would have been a staircase to no-where and cut into the floor space.  We did, of course, save the stairs in-tact and all the cupboard doors and trim.  I hope to re-use the doors and trim somewhere in the kitchen, and if possible use the stairs in the library, even if for decoration.

We will widen this doorway leading to the great room to about five feet, so the whole space will feel more connected and cohesive, and the rooms will flow better.  The kitchen is about 16"x16", which is a decent size, but not super huge for gathering...and our families do a lot of kitchen gathering.  By opening up the door and joining the kitchen to the family/dining room, I think the whole back of the house will basically be a gathering space, which should be awesome.

And what would an old kitchen, that was last updated in the early 1900's, be without a bottle opener....no expense was spared to outfit this place with the sleekest modern kitchen marvels.  You can barely make it out, but the words "bottle opener" are stamped on the top of the fixture.  Think of it: this was such an innovation at one time that they actually had to to label it with a descriptive tag.  Actually, I bet most of my nieces and nephews would need the written cue to figure out what this is.  (And, is it me, or does it look like this dang thing is laughing at me...what does he know?)