Opportunity #3: Plumbing, Heating & Venting, oh my!

Of the five inside corners in the kitchen (ceiling), only one is where all the action is happening. Before we tore down the dropped ceiling, we had stuck our heads up through a hole on the opposite side of the room.  We knew there was a problem back in this corner -- there was glistening and blackness and shine reflecting back the flashlight beam, while everywhere else just looked like dust and dried, peeling, paint. The image I had formed was of a black garbage bag stuffed under the floorboards of the room upstairs (full? empty?couldn't tell, but there seemed to be a lot of garbage bag). We tore down the ceiling anyway. 

You see the corner here, in a photo I took before we removed the 2x4 joists that held up the dropped ceiling.  The green wall is the east wall (adjoining the tv/guest room, for those who know the house), which will form the long counter cooking/prep area in the final kitchen. The tan wall is north. The north wall is an outer wall, although there is a little lean-to built on to the house just here -- originally a back entrance, but long ago converted to a half-bathroom (you can see the edge of the door frame cutting into the very bottom of the photo).

Upstairs, above this corner, is a toilet (against the green wall), set a foot or so into the room from the north wall. There is also a heat register in the floor between the toilet and the north wall. The black dusty serpent is, of course, the "garbage bag" we had seen with a flashlight.  It is actually ductwork (see a sample here), supplying heat to the heat register upstairs. This is a new kind of ductwork (none of us had heard of it before seeing this and looking online). It was apparently placed there by the plumber hired to move the toilet in 2002 (during an emergency remodel of  the bathroom, after extensive damage caused by a toddler investigating the flushing capabilities of her father's shaving kit. By the way, results of investigation: full stoppage and backflow).  The other black piping you see is water outflow from the sink and shower in that room, directed to the sewer line -- a large pipe running from upstairs to cellar and out the front of the house (hidden behind some of the green wall).

Let me take a moment to explain about ceilings and floors (it is completely obvious if you know anything about houses, but I didn't, so I'll share).  There is a area of about 8" between the floor of the bathroom and the ceiling of the kitchen -- the subflooring. Things like ductwork and plumbing and electricity all run through the subflooring, hidden below your feet upstairs, and above your head downstairs.

So, the bad news here is that the current ductwork hangs well below the subflooring, into the gap formerly created between the two ceilings.  That's because the gap in the subflooring is already full -- of plumbing.

One option is to move the heating ductwork, have the register come out of the wall of the bathroom -- upstream, so to speak, of the plumbing. We'd have to go back to the more familiar tin between-joists ductwork, in the wall.  And we'd have to figure out where the branch comes off the main trunk of the furnace, to make sure that other rooms upstairs continue to get heat, too.

Another option is to tuck the current black plastic flexible ductwork into a soffit around the edge of the ceiling of the kitchen. In one sense, this is the easiest option, but it does involve building a soffit around the kitchen, which is both yet more work, and it influences the design.  The whole point of getting rid of the dropped ceiling was to raise the feeling of space in the room -- will a soffit lower it again?  Or make the room feel more narrow down below?  Hard to figure that one out without living in it.

Another challenge for this same corner is that we had been planning to install a vent from the stove (along the currently-green, east wall) straight outside.  Right through that same corner. But that can't happen straightforwardly because, again, of the plumbing. If we go with a soffit, that space is already mostly claimed by the heating duct.  And anyway, the ceiling of the lean-to bathroom extends above that height, so if the plumbing weren't there, we'd just be venting the stove smoke into the bathroom. (Oops!)
We're still working on the stove vent options.