Kitchen: What I like best

Looking north (towards bathroom and neighbor's house),
before framing had been installed on the window and door.
I didn't take any photos of the floor direct, but you get the warm effect here.

I walked into the kitchen on Sunday afternoon (two weekends ago) to discover HD spreadeagled on the  floor, just lying there.  I gave him a skeptical eye, but he said, "Come and try it!  It feels great!  This is so comfortable." (He had been installing baseboard -- requiring stretching out on the floor to get the right angle on the woodwork.)  I joined him and experienced the surprising cushiness of our new cork floor.

What I like best about the kitchen is perhaps this cork floor. Cork is a new old-fashioned fad, which, because it is eco-friendly (I believe the cork is harvested from trees without killing them, so it is a renewable resource that encourages rain forest growth -- or something like that) is tremendously popular in the Portland housing market.  (Marmoleum, equally eco-friendly requiring less maintenance, would have been more popular, but we couldn't decide on a color -- and it seemed too stark and bright for what we had in mind for the kitchen anyway.)

To save having to level out (or remove) the existing fir subflooring, we bought a floating floor -- that is, planks of cork on a light frame, which snap together to form a seamless whole. (You can see how they fit together here, in the photo right above the word "linoleum".) We bought the floor in 2007, during the first, aborted, attempt to renovate the kitchen, because it was on sale.  We bought the Ikea cabinetry almost three full years later, and they are almost exactly the same color.  (Which is good, but we didn't realize they were the same until we brought home a sample cupboard door.)  The cork is warm, and springy, and pleasant to walk on.  It will be great for Cordon Bleu dinners, when the cook is standing in the kitchen for hours on end.

Looking northwest, towards the basement stairs and the foyer on the left.
The new door to the basement, installed. The fridge is now
where the ladder is in this photo, taken in June.

Then again, perhaps the thing I really like the most about the kitchen is a totally cool phenomenon, entirely fortuitous. It needs a bit of explaining.

The stainless steel refrigerator is positioned, offset by three feet, across from the door to the basement.  On the landing, partway down the basement stairs, in line with the basement door, is another door, which opens onto the side yard and the flower garden outside. Both doors have windows in the top panel (they are north-facing, at the 45th parallel, so it is dark in the winter, and we wanted every particle of light we could get).  (I wrote about the new basement door here.)

Looking southwest, from the bathroom doorway. The fridge, now. 

We discovered when I was washing dishes in the new sink, and HD was doing some work in the side yard, that when the outside door is open fully, and the basement door is partially open, the prism bevel around the window in the  basement door forms a camera obscura, directing the image of the outside onto the surface of the fridge door.

See the green picket fence and the petunias?

Now do you see them?

This is not a simple reflection: the garden is at least 6 feet below the "garden" in the image, not to mention being offset horizontally from the fridge as well.  And, the basement door has to be ajar -- not fully open, nor fully closed -- in order for the image to appear.

Standing about three feet in front of the outside door, looking
across into the kitchen "hallway".  Notice the edge of the fridge on
the left. The camera is about 6 feet above "petunia" level here.
By the way, straight ahead is two fabulous Ikea 88" pullout pantries.

This phenomena will only get noticed in the summer, when the outer door is open, but its ephemerality makes it even more fun.  And how fitting for the house of an artist!

Note about the fridge, for those who want to know: It is simply the Ikea standard two-door stainless steel fridge with ice and water in the door.  Which means, it's a Whirlpool. I should say, it's the Ikea standard in the USA.

Drumroll: The Kitchen, then and now

From the front hall, back in 2008.

From the front hall, August 2010.

Standing in the doorway (from the front hall) 2007.

The back of the sink-window. HD made this wall this month. In our plans,
it was just a blank space, the back of 2x4s and drywall and plumbing.
Standing in the doorway (from the front hall) 2010.

And again, at night.  

The view towards the north wall, 2007.

North wall now -- the camera is shifted here.
I apologize for the inexact positioning.

The view towards the dining room, 2007
(before we took the chimney out).

And today. Well, earlier this month. It's already
better -- HD had finished framing the door before
we left (I forgot to take a photo).
Yes, that's Boy-Child, getting tall.
Note the tin ceiling.

What is now the sink wall, (looking west) in 2008.

The sink wall now.

There's more - details and fun stuff. Check back tomorrow.

Drumroll: The Kitchen, as it was in June.

Sample Ikea instructions and bits, laying on the stacked pile of walls and floor of a cabinet, before assembly.  Note the smile on the little man's face in the instructions, while he assembles the cabinet on a carpet. I wanted to stab the little smiling man with a Philips screwdriver after only a couple of hours of cursing assembly.

I have been ignoring the clamor to post photos and updates on the Kitchen, and I do apologize.  It's been so busy in my day-to-day life, and so much happened to it right after I left Portland, that it has presented as a combination overwhelming task to describe on evenings when I can barely function anyway due to the unfamiliar pressures of the ordinary workday.

First, a reminder of where we were when I left for the midwest -- which is that we had just finished applying, compressing and sealing the American Clay on 98% of the walls and ceiling.  The last weekend I was there, The Texan and I assembled the Ikea cabinets, attaching A to B and then clamping C for about 60% of the 250 boxes of things in the living room (the other 40% was drawer fronts and drawers and cabinet doors and hinges for doors).  I will show a photo of that, just for perspective, even though it's so distant in the past now that I might almost volunteer to assemble another Ikea cabinet again.

The Texan hard at work on one of the more difficult cabinets.

I didn't think to take a photo of the kitchen full of all the empty, topless (because the top is the countertop, of course) cabinets, stacked two high, away from the walls so the contractors could work there.  Here is the only after-photo I took, with Tasha as Vanna White.

Check in after another 24 hours -- tomorrow night, I plan to skip the in-between steps (I don't have many photos of them anyway) and show you the (almost) finished product.

Step 4: Sealant

The fourth, and last step (which is completed in two coats, actually) is a sealant over the clay.  This is recommended for rooms with high humidity or if you want a slight sheen to the wall.

Applying the sealant means mixing a 1:1 ratio of what appears to be a liquidy school glue and water, and spraying it on the wall with a houseplant mister, in overlapping circles.  Let it absorb for a few minutes, then blot any drips with a sponge.

Let it all dry for a couple hours, and then repeat, and then let cure for 72 hours before working on the wall again.

We finished the second coat early on Friday, so the walls could cure over the weekend.

Step 3: To impress, you must compress!

(Same corner as last night. Different tools. Different muscles.)

The instructions are headed with the title ("To impress, you must compress!" I think it would be more memorable if it were, "To make an impression, you must use compression!" But they didn't ask me).  Step 3, after letting the second coat of clay dry, is to lightly press the wall, using a very well-squeezed sponge, in overlapping circles.  More good upper body workout here.  The Texan and I recited, "Wax On. Wax Off" as we worked.  Tonight's step only took an hour though, and that felt like a great reprieve after about 53 woman-hours of work in the last 7 days (counting priming, too).

We think we did it right.  I can't figure out how rubbing an almost dry sponge against a wall will "harden and compact the clay" as the instructions claim -- but we did notice there was a slight sparkle in the clay as we finished. A sparkle that is visible in our demo swatch, but hasn't been in the pistachio goop we've slammed on the walls.

One more step tomorrow.

American Clay Coat 2 - Who needs a Gym?

Last night -- well, Monday night for The Texan, and yesterday afternoon into night for me (and her for her second evening) -- we applied the second coat of plaster.  You can see the slightly pained look in my eyes -- although I didn't feel pain at that moment, which was about 9:45 p.m.  This morning, however, my right hand in particular is swollen, cramped up from the hours and hours of holding the trowel and dragging.

But it's up, and no more troweling! Yay!

Plaster thick, Some will stick

(Not even half done, but isn't it pretty? The white spaces will be left as is -- they're behind cabinets, so we didn't plaster those spaces.)

This weekend we put American Clay on the walls. Thirty-four "woman"-hours of work, not counting the primer, which we finished Friday night.  That's the first coat done -- only three more steps to go.

It is actually not hard to do, and (if you have good tunes to listen to, or in my case, podcasts from The Popcorn Dialogues, Kermode and Mayo movie reviews, and WNYC's RadioLab) not all that tedious.  The plaster is forgiving of mistakes, and the look is intended to be organic.

Mixing it took an hour and a half, alone. You start by pouring half a 50 pound bag of flour-like plaster into a couple gallons of water. Separately, you mix the color -- a one-pound bag of colored powder -- into water, and then pour that into the clay.  Then you work another 25 pounds of plaster dust into the mix, using a drill with a mixing head on it, slowly so as not to create lumps, until it "forms the consistency of pudding". I know how to mix a wedding cake now -- as long as it's pistachio.

Then, slap the pudding-goop on the wall and spread it around.  As I said, it was tedious more than difficult, and simply took forever.  We had to change our plans on the fly as to what is to be plastered -- we had intended the ceiling of the long entrance way to be clay as well, but there simply wasn't enough (and the stuff is expensive enough that we didn't want to buy a third bag, to use about an eighth of it for that one space.

That was the first coat.  The second coat is more of the same, except we hope that this time we'll be more experienced (i.e., faster).  Third coat is actually just a damp sponge and pressing, which we really really hope is faster -- just a matter of climbing up and down the ladders. And lastly, the sealant -- sprayed on lightly with a mister bottle, and left to cure for three days.  We are hoping to have the contractors back in a week from today to start installing the cabinetry, so we have to get the walls completely done by Friday night.  It will be a busy week.

Contractors - Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma'am!

To heck with having an exploded kitchen -- we've hired contractors to mostly finish the work.  By "we" I mean The Texan, who did the legwork. I just showed them around for bids, and then have been letting them into the house for work.

The last straw was the day after HomoDommi returned home from his latest visit, when we all realized that -- due to school functions, having to move houses (their rental expired), and summer school (not to mention recovery from the sheer exhaustion after the last working visit) -- he would not be able to get back to Portland for any reason until late June at the earliest. And then he would only be able to stay a few days, and would have children with him. We at Cattus Dommus Prime would love to see the children, but their presence would not be conducive to dawn-to-dusk work on the house. We couldn't stand the thought of 6 weeks of no-progress, followed by a mere couple of half days' work, followed by more long weeks of stalemate.

So contractors it is.  The Texan chose someone who bills himself as an "All Around HandyMan", which allows us much flexibility -- and it's already proved useful.  I'll call him "Marvellus" -- a rotund man with shiny white hair who reminds me of a generic character actor from a screwball comedy -- and his sidekick, "Gricolus" -- a wiry, pepper-bearded short man who moves quickly and constantly, who, if anything, reminds me of the generic town-drunk sidekick in a singing western (without any hint of the drunk part). (Click here for more fun with Roman names.)  Gricolus's high-school-aged son "Tertus" is working too. A summer job that comes with long-term career experience.

HomoDommi does good work -- our new Handymen have not done anything better than he could have.  They are faster though (and there are three of them, two of which have a combined 75 years of experience), and not worse. They've worked four partial days so far, and in that time have sheetrocked (and double-mudded) the remainder of the room and ceiling, and built a broom closet.  They fixed a bunch of mistakes in the mudding of the walls that I did, too. The space feels more solid now, less echoey, although it's still wide open.

The next step is up to us. We are priming the sheetrock -- putting plain old drywall primer behind all the cabinets, and special "toothed" primer everywhere else, even the ceiling. By "toothed", I mean, environmentally green gluish-paint-substance-with-tons-of-sand-in-it.  

This coming weekend, we will plaster all these toothed surfaces with American Clay, a textured plaster that gives a hand-crafted, earthy feel to the walls.  By "we", I mean, me, and The Texan.  The How-to DVD that comes with the bag assures us it is easy to apply, while recommending we hire professionals.  The Texan and HomoDommi have used it before (on the downstairs bathroom, for anyone who's been to the house) -- and assure me it is nowhere near as straightforward as implied.  They both seem to think the kitchen will be easier, however, because, "the bathroom -- that was two of us, in a small space, in 85 degree summer heat!"  

I look at the sheer volume of wall space we will be covering (about three times the size of the bathroom, and much of that is ceiling) and the forecast for this weekend (sun at last, with a steamy 83 high for both days), and I wonder about those professionals. Time to recharge my keen sense of humor, I see.

Kitchen Ceiling

This is a dull little post, to communicate the current state of the kitchen from Portland to Boise (and, I suppose, anywhere in the world this blog is being read).

Another thing happened today

The appliances, and the remaining parts of the cabinetry order (some pieces were back-ordered) arrived today.  They took away the old refrigerator, but we still have a gain of two large boxes (a huge, to-be-built-in microwave and a new range).  This is the current state of the living room. The coolers we'll empty into the new fridge when it has cooled (it says 24 hours, we plan on 6). Most of the rest of the stuff stays, however.

Committed.

Two weekends ago, when I was in Boise with the children and the other adults were here in Portland, FemmeDommi and The Texan went to Ikea and actually bought the cabinetry.  It was delivered the next day. There had been much angst about whether to rent a truck and pick up, or whether to pay for delivery, until it was delivered: 235 boxes and bags of items (we will do the assembly), weighing over 800 pounds.  We have organized and stacked and even assembled a couple of cabinets to see how it will go (eh. could be better, could be worse).  But until the room infrastructure is finished, the contents of the new kitchen are being held in the living room, alongside the contents of our temporary kitchen. (The new appliances will be delivered the day after tomorrow.)

Historical Walkthrough of the Kitchen Layout

I don't know if any of you will be interested (okay, I suspect Peaceable will be, but I wonder about the rest of you), but I've reconstructed what I believe to be the historical layouts of the kitchen.  I am actually not at home today (through a time-warp, I wrote this yesterday) but rather in southern Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Uncle, Aunt and The Texan.  So I'll keep this brief. (All the illustrations can be clicked on to make big enough that you should be able to read the  lettering.)

Here's my reconstruction of the original kitchen.  We aren't sure about the door to the foyer (shown on the left) and the top of the basement stairs. The entrance to the main part of the room between the corner of the range and the corner of the stairs would have been fairly narrow (I've probably under-drawn the size of the range here). And, there was an entrance to the back of the house through what is now the bathroom, so was there a need for two entries within 4 feet of each other?  However, the stair landing is significantly below the level of the floor, so there isn't much space for another basement entrance.  And, the paint markings left on the original lathe and plaster along that wall (opposite the stairwell) shows that there were originally cabinets as shown here.

The foyer closet (the large gray area encircled by stairs) was we believe added later -- possibly originally there were two doors in the foyer, one directly to the basement stairs, which would have wrapped around a central post. Or perhaps there was no door at all (just wall) from the front of the house to the kitchen, but that would be unusual compared to other blueprints of period houses that I've seen. (We do know that something weird has been done in the foyer, but we haven't figured out what. The whole room, walls and ceiling, was sheetrocked at some point, erasing all evidence of the original layout.)

The colors, from what we can tell, were dark stained fir cabinets, powder yellow and green walls. The backs of the cabinets (and the fronts?) were painted light green. The floor was one of the linoleums that we've found, possibly the green, gray and yellow brick-like pattern.

I've written earlier  that in the 1930s (I estimate) the huge range and boiler were removed and a "new" range and oven installed.  Then, the major remodel in the 1950s.

The ceiling was, of course, dropped, and all the upper cabinets were inset into soffits.  The basement stair wall was lengthened (or added) entirely -- it's not a load-bearing wall -- and a raised peninsula jutted out into the middle of the room like a thick arm around the new range. Over this, hanging from the newly dropped ceiling was a bank of cabinets, providing a narrow passthrough behind the stove. (Was there a bar, with stools, there? It would have been narrow.)  The door to the back room on the east wall was removed, the swinging door on the south wall pushed away from the corner and turned into a pocket door, allowing for a little nook with a table in it. Looking at the layout now, after months of pondering and destruction and rebuilding, I have greater respect for the planners and builders of that 1950s kitchen than I did at the start.  All of the cabinetry was well-constructed; the design allowed for a "work triangle" that was neat and tidy.

This was, however, a kitchen for Mom (and only Mom) to work in. Kids, I suppose, could sit at the table and do homework, supervised by Mom.  The hanging cabinets psychologically closed the room up; there is no room for two cooks, no room for now basic dishwasher or a microwave. To keep enough floor space, the counters are all shallower than standard nowadays -- only 18" deep on one side, 21" deep on the other -- so there is little room for standing mixers, coffee pots or toasters that clutter modern kitchens. (And the upper cabinets were hung only 15" over the base, and many appliances, such as coffee pots, wouldn't fit.)  The built-in cupboards on the south wall were 16" deep, fixed shelves over four huge drawers.  The shelves were so deep you could never find anything behind the first row, but not tall enough to used mini-shelves; the drawers, when full, were so heavy you couldn't open them.

The walls -- I've forgotten what HomoDommi told me, but I think everything was painted white when they moved in. The cabinetry was a golden pine, and the floor was a speckled gray and black linoleum with a line of red fronting all the cabinets.  I'll bet it looked sharp when it was brand new (it didn't 50 years later).

Here's what we're doing.  We've opened the kitchen space psychologically quite a bit, while narrowing the "hallway"space. New kitchen designs have dropped the concept of the "work triangle" and taken up the idea of "preparation spaces". Thus, we have a cooking space around the stove, a cleaning space around the sink, and a food prep space at the island and down in the south east corner of the room.  I'd guess fifteen cooks will be able to work in here at once (not really, but it's not limited to one).

We've returned the ceiling to its original height, but partly to mask structural repairs and partly because the ceiling is very high, we've installed shallow soffits over all the cabinets.  We've greatly increased the amount of counter space; added a dishwasher next to the sink (by shifting the sink over to the longer basement wall). Admittedly, the fridge is right at the furthest point it could be and still be in the kitchen, but that is not necessarily a bad thing for the way today's houses flow (all the books recommend having the fridge on the edge of the work space, so that "kids can get a drink without having to fully enter the cooking area").  Just to the right of the refrigerator is the space that was open chimney hole. To be honest, we're still working on how that space is to be used, but what we want is a small countertop for a landing spot for food from the fridge (with room for a stool beneath) and book shelves above.

It looks like we have drastically reduced the storage space of the room but the pantry will be an Ikea pullout -- providing us with 10 drawers, 2 feet long by 15 inches deep, so that we actually have as many linear feet of food storage room, and all but the top shelf is more accessible than the old way.

The colors. We chose a medium warm (almost orange) brown for the cabinetry; virtually the identical color cork floor (even though chosen two years before). All the vertical surfaces that are not cabinets (the walls around the window and doors, the soffits) will be an artisanal-looking "natural" plaster (American Clay) in a mid-level green. The countertops will be a speckled white granite, which is all the rage, and the appliances are all stainless steel (also, all the rage). The ceiling will be a pattern of tin tiles. Lighting is a combination of three hanging lamps centered down the middle of the room, a lamp over the sink, and undercabinet lighting.  Keep your fingers crossed that it all works.

Doors (another form of absence of holes)

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we changed the dimensions of the exterior window, and adding a cosmetic window over the sink.  We've also worked on doors.

We removed the door to the basement -- oh, I can't remember how long since.  It is probably original to the house and doubtless coated with lead paint, and currently lies on its side in the garage. We always had to leave it open to grant the cats access to the litter boxes in the basement, and after we removed the hanging peninsula from the kitchen (I may write about that someday soon), the door half-blocked the entrance "arch" to the semi-desconstructed 1950s kitchen.  (HomoDommi refused to install a catflap, and now that I've seen old virgin-growth doors with pet doors inexpertly applied to them, I completely agree with his decision.) Also, removing it allowed quite a bit of light into the kitchen, the same light that now comes in through the little window over the sink.

We still have cats, but future owners may not. And frankly, the open doorway at the top of the stairs allowed for heat to sink down and litter box smells to rise up. A drafty exterior door, sits on a landing halfway down to the basement, allowing in light, but also chill breezes. So, HomoDommi and I resolutely searched the many used architectural warehouses until we found a suitable door. (Hence, the opportunity to see the sad fate of old doors -- some with plastic pet doors destroying the bottom third, some painted and cracked, and even a few from neighborhoods which had come down in the world, fine-grained old oak, now with 7 locks bored through them, reinforced with steel, and clearly opened that final time by a police battering ram leading a narcotics team.)

We chose a five panel door (so it matches the door to the bathroom), with a window on the top, for light to shine through. It had been thickly painted, many coats, but you can estimate the quality of the original door by looking at the detail work on the panes -- we chose one with a raised inner panel and curved molding in the panes, indicating that someone originally thought this door was worth artisanal touches.    At some point, the door had been kicked in, and the toe panel was a collection of giant splinters, but all the parts were there, so we thought we could glue it all back together.

(In the basement, ready to be stripped. HomoDommi did all the stripping using a gentle, non-toxic product that works just as well as the more aggressive ones, but slower. By the way, the toe panel glued together as good as new. Stronger than new, in fact.)

(Here is a close-up showing the grade of wood under all that paint, the detail work on the panes, and the hardware all cleaned up.  In this shot, we'd done two rounds of polyurethane -- we did five coats in the end, including the oval under the hardware, too.)

In a shocking before and after comparison, here are photos from almost the same position, taken in February and last week. On the "after", The Texan is painting the sill from white to a neutral warm brown.  I forgot to mention that we also had to build the wall out about 8 inches (behind the door) to accommodate the new cabinetry.

Eager to show some progress, we have already hung the finished door. Maybe not the best idea, to place a large glass window in the narrow hallway through which we'll be carrying about 20 heavy cabinets and appliances, but we'll live with the risk.

The other door we have worked with is the entrance to the dining room.  In 1915, this was a swing door, positioned about a foot from the corner of the room. In the 1950's (or earlier), it was moved three feet further out (to allow for a little table in the kitchen) and converted to a pocket door. We hadn't intended to mess with this corner at all, but when we removed the sheetrock from that wall, this is what we discovered:

That is, although the photo doesn't show it well: the header over the pocket door has sagged hugely in the middle in the 50+ years since installation. Again, this is a load-bearing wall, and some not-future-thinking contractor in the past chose a 2x6 with a huge knot in the exact middle (visible on the left of the photo) to guard the upper stories against gravity.  The knot has split down the middle. (This header is actually two 2x6s, but even the one behind has sagged, although less than the knotty one.) 

We really aren't sure that the header needs to be fixed -- maybe it has sagged as much as it ever will, and the house is as settled as it can get.  But it worried us, so HomoDommi suggested a way to shore it up: deepen the four-foot long wall by one more 2-inch beam, "yammered" (as he says) into the header and supported itself by more studs.  In essence, move the pocket door one 2x4 width in front of itself.  We can mask the new depth of the short wall, because on the other side of the door we have the new laundry chute, which now simply won't stick out as far from its surroundings.

As long as we were at it, The Texan and I convinced a reluctant HomoDommi to buy a new pocket door frame. Our door falls off its tracks one use out of two, unless you are very careful. 

"But it's easy to get back on the tracks," HomoDommi pointed out.

"But why should you have to?" we replied.  Technology has improved since our doorway was built --more wheels, more guards to prevent the door from swinging, smoother gliding. You can buy pre-assembled frames at the local Build-More Stores for under $60.

(Before. Note also the guard over the hole-that-will-become-the-laundry-chute on the right.)

(During. Things didn't align -- nothing at all in this whole project has aligned -- and "we" -- that is, HomoDommi -- had to plane 1/8" off all the studs above the old header to allow the new header room. The Texan is vacuuming up the sawdust and shards as he does the scary work. I don't like planers -- too loud and too sharp.)

(After. See the new ladder-frame on the left of the door -- the door itself slides oh-so-smoothly between them.  The lighter wood is all new framing, deepening the wall and supporting it. On the right is the shiny new laundry chute with flooring filling the hole in front of it.)

This unplanned corner of kitchen remodel took a little more than two days of full-time labor, not including the hours spent staring at it and trying to decide what could be done and whether it should be done. By the way, despite the assurances of easy installation on the box of the pocket-door frame, the instructions -- two sets of them -- were worse than useless, badly written, with diagrams labelled by part-number, not function,  and contradicting each other. And, as has become de rigueur for this project, we had to take apart the frame, cut it to size and put it back together again to fit our old, pre-standardization, house.

Floors and the absence of holes

It has been two weeks since I last posted. Sorry.  We have been feeling the honest exhaustion of 8 or more hours of daily physical labor, collapsing into our beds at night, to wake up merely to start at it again. At some point, all this honesty built into wordless hostility on my part, filled with impotent sighs -- which I decided to spare you. But HomoDommi flew home to his family yesterday; I spent the day in a mostly comatose, if upright, state, and today I am feeling merely normally overwhelmed and tired.

The problem with not blogging near-daily about the project is that it is hard to remember what we've accomplished. We are still (sigh) working on the infrastructure of the room. Two days were spent installing a new, stronger, beam to replace the one that shored up the interrupted load-bearing joist, more accurately than we had before (a month and time away showed how we had misaligned our original fix).   So, the incompetence of that plumber 10 years ago cost us over a month in building time, and a deep loss of morale, which we appear only now to be climbing out of.

Speaking of climbing out of holes, several days were spent fixing holes in floors. The most satisfying was replacing the register in floor of the bathroom, above the kitchen. (HomoDommi did all that.)

In the kitchen, two holey spots were reasonably small -- where plumbing used to snake up from the cellar to the old sink position, and another corner mysteriously simply absent of subflooring. Fixing the kitchen floor holes is like filling in a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle: first 2x4s are hammered in between joists in the basement ceiling to combat gravity, and then you find scrap wood to match the 13/16ths inch rough subflooring boards, and lastly top it off with remnants of 100-year old tongue-and-groove floorboards from an antiques and restoration store. (Matching not for looks, but for depth. Modern floorboards are a shade thicker, leading to unevenness.  All these spots will be obscured by cabinetry or covered with floating cork floor in any case.)

(Not much to look at, but it was very satisfying to finish this space. It is level and strong.)

The largest hole was the 3 year old gap left by the chimney removal, a space filled with electrical wires and plumbing, right next to a doorway, so we've had to step around it all this time.  Even now, with the floor in, I still walk around the area. HomoDommi secured 90% of this floor-fill, which has to be strong enough to hold, on one corner, the edge of our refrigerator, and I did the top layer.

At the wall at the back of this former-hole, you'll see an expanse of shiny metal. That is perhaps our most impressive construction, a laundry chute.  It runs from the back of a closet on the top floor down to the basement. If we have any energy left later, we will add a little door to it in the kitchen, for dishcloths.  The last floor hole to be filled was at the top of the chute, in the closet floor upstairs.

There is now a solid floor elled around the metal chute, although it still needs a layer of tongue-and-groove flooring to bring it to the level of the hallway floor. I took on this task towards the end of our push, and was so tired that thinking in three-dimensional space was beyond me. The particular difficulty here is that the bottom of the hole is 9 feet off the floor of the kitchen (a bit taller than me on our ladder), and the upper part of the hole is partially covered by the hallway flooring. That means filling it has to be done from above, while lying prone on the floor and holding heavy drills sideways over a 9 foot deep hole. In other words, this hole was filled by trial-and-error, with much swearing and huffing, and finally a brief visit from HomoDommi who restructured my hours of tinkering to be more solid and level in 15 minutes. The chute itself at the moment remains capped (for fire safety purposes) and once there is time to think about non-kitchen things, we will come up with a child-proof, fire-safe, door for it.