Seeing the shape of the original kitchen (East Wall)

Without the sink, the kitchen is reduced to the most basic appliances -- stove and refrigerator, now placed where they will be in the final arrangement (although we'll be replacing the fridge with a counter-depth version).  The room feels large and echoey, and would make a good location for a movie about middle-class disenfranchisement during the Great Recession, with perhaps a drug addiction subplot.  The photo above was taken after Day 10, when HomoDommi and I exposed what remains of the original lathe and plaster.  In the following description, you'll have to ignore the 2x4s across the top of the photo -- they are left from the dropped ceiling, and since we're planning to soffit at least that wall, to hide the duct work in the corner, we've left them in place.

(Standing in front of the fridge, looking at the east wall.)

You now can get a sense of the original kitchen. The east wall was taken up with a full bank of cupboards, from north wall (the left of the photo) to abutting the frame of the door into the back room. The cabinetry was shallow by modern standards (we can tell the depth of them because the floorboards change) - about 18" rather than 24". There are stripes of bare plaster, showing that the original cabinets (and shelves inside them) were built with the house, and painting done once they were in place. The base cabinets were 35" tall; then open wall (presumably counter space) for about 15"; above that, upper cabinets all the way to the 108" (9 foot, 2.7 meter) ceiling. Topping it all: crown molding.

On the other side of the doorway -- the southeast corner of the room (between the two doors that I talked about in one of yesterday's entries) -- there is open wall (no cabinetry). Sensible, because it was only a 1x1(ish) foot of floor space.  But this bit of open wall had a chair rail at 52" and the tall (9") baseboard that we have in other parts of the house. A fun touch is that the plaster of the exposed wall was scored to look like subway tile. A cheap alternative to the real thing, and -- because paint not permanent tile -- available in any color the cook would prefer.

(The scored wall in the southeast corner. At the top of the photo is the bare plaster that was behind a chair rail; below that is the scored wall. It had a slip of white plaster over it that has a smoother surface than the rest. I'm not sure what the tan stripe is -- it looks like maybe a kind of paper tape, which has long since dissolved into the wall surface. The odd-shaped patches are paint flakes.)

Originally, the room was painted in warm pale yellow (the stripe of open wall between base and upper cabinetry). The "subway tile" plaster wall was probably left a shiny white. At some point between 1915 (when the house was built) and the late 1950's (when the remodel was done), the room was painted in two shades of green. Walls above the chair rail and the ceiling were a slightly grayer-green, and the inner back walls of the cabinets (if not the cabinets themselves) in a brighter spring green. My guess, founded on badly recalled research on changing kitchen color fashions, is that the repainting happened in the late 1920s, early 1930s. That would put an update about 15 years after the house was built, which seems logical.

We also found two small scraps of new flooring, that clearly predate the 1950s remodel. The colors are badly faded, but it was some kind of linoleum with a multicolor brick pattern; the colors including beige, a close gray-green, and a gray-tan, at least.

The surprise for me has been the hint that the woodwork was dark-stained.  In most kitchens from the turn of the (20th) century, cupboards were white, regardless of the rest of the house, following a health fad at the time for cleanliness and sanitation (a health fad that hasn't really gone away, but morphed into the desire for non-absorbent "sterilizable" surfaces, like quartz, granite and stainless steel).  Some houses in the Pacific Northwest, however, did use dark-stained woodwork in the kitchen, fitting the back-to-nature look and ethos of the Craftsman style.  Given that many of the choices made by our original builder were the cheap alternative (plain windows, compared to the twin house across the street, and extensive use of cheap fir -- cheap! old-growth fir -- for flooring and woodwork), and given several odd dark drips staining the plain plaster here and there in the kitchen, I am now thinking that the moulding at least was dark-stained.  And if the moulding was dark, it's unlikely the cabinetry was white.  And the rosy fir would go very nicely with the pale yellow.  

This means that our "medium brown" Adel style cabinets from Ikea, a simple style in stained beech, may well be an inexpensive modern equivalent of the original cupboards. (Albeit, differently dimensioned.)

(Green above and beige below: the southeast corner at the moment the drywall is being pulled off - to the right. The paint disintegrated within minutes.)

Also, at some point also before the 1950s, the "tiled" wall was painted a glossy yellow-beige.  I can't find that color anywhere else in the remaining walls of the kitchen. When HomoDommi pulled the gypsum away from that wall, the two patches of paint -- green above and beige below -- were intact sheets, which collapsed under their own weight into large lead-dusty flakes within a few minutes of being exposed -- which hints that perhaps the two paint colors were the same paint. The brighter green at the back of the cabinets is still fused to the plaster and non-flaking. The beige and the green don't seem to go particularly well each other, but maybe they have faded.

(This fragment was above the sliding door.  It might kinda sorta match the yellowy beige of the "tiled" wall.  Ignore the anemic-peanut-butter beige that surrounds the floral, and is a large square rectangle above the stove -- it is one of our slap-dash touchups with leftover paint. It made an immense improvement to the room at the time.)

Another possible redecorating/remodeling timeline is that the swinging-sliding door was moved in an intermediate remodel some time before the major kitchen remodel.  Thus, that 8 foot stretch of wall (with the pocket door in it) was changed from lathe and plaster to drywall, while the 1 foot strip of wall at that corner was left untouched.  Later, the wall would be drywalled over, when the other door in the corner was covered. I suggest this because the fragment of floral wallpaper that we discovered over the sliding door would be a fair match for the beige -- and in comments when I posted about this before, it was proposed that this could be a late 30's pattern.

Additional circumstantial evidence of a major change to the south wall in - perhaps - the late 1930s, is that the original kitchen was mostly taken up with a large heating stove.  I've forgotten the details, but we figured out when we took out the chimney in 2007 that there had been a large hole in the kitchen floor, immediately in front of where the sliding door is now, through which came some large pipes -- oil for the stove, is what I recall at the moment.  I imagine that by near 1940, they were ready to switch to a more modern furnace and separate kitchen range, and at that time, they reconfigured the south wall.

I may come back to this later, after re-reading those books I had from the library a couple of years ago.