Weekend work, urr, non-work

[Updated version to correct text over-writing images. At least, I hope so. I also made a few textual edits to clarify some details.]

Saturday ended up being a day off, although we didn't plan it that way. HomoDommi invited me to his book club (which was quite pleasant) and then the household joined old friends for the evening, just to kibbutz.

On Sunday, we geared up for work and almost instantly were at a standstill.  This is what much of Sunday felt like.

That is, staring at a hole in the floor, scratching our heads, in more than a little exasperation.

The cause: the hole we made when we removed the chimney.  It's a nice, clean hole down into the basement, about 18" square. When it was filled with chimney, it was surrounded by drywall (in fact, we only removed the last remnant of the drywall last month during the deconstruction). When it was a chimney surrounded by drywall, contractors would use the small gaps to run wires and plumbing through.

Here is a photo, taken when we began this project 3 years ago.  It shows the chimney still in place in the kitchen (although the front wall of covering has been removed).

Next, the same view after getting rid of the bricks (and the ceiling except for the 2x4s).  You can see all those wires running through the gap behind the chimney, and, less obviously, a couple rigid, pale yellow pipes running up the near corner -- between the chimney and the (still-standing, in the photo) drywall. (I've talked about them before, in my list of infrastructure opportunities.)

I blogged about a ten days ago about the productive day HomoDommi and I had, moving the pipes that run up to the second floor -- some of that involved moving them from the front corner of the space shown back into the true wall, between the joists. And the electricians came in and wired the area for a light switch, and also ran wires through for the ceiling lights in the new kitchen.

In all this, we didn't realize that one wire -- one very fat, large wire -- hasn't been neatly tucked back into that between-joists frame.  You can see it in the two close-up photos.

This wire, which is taut, goes all the way up to the attic and provides most (if not all) of the lighting on the second floor. We need it to not be crossing out into the airspace in front of that hole.




Another issue is, how do you fill a hole?  I mean, solidly, so that a refrigerator can rest upon it (that's what the masking tape shows, the front of the fridge), and so that people might someday walk across it.  That is, without reflooring a massive area around the hole, and while adding a laundry chute to the area.

Still the day was not totally given over to frustration.  The Texan and I installed the second of the two concrete boards backing the sink.  And we picked out a window to install over the sink in that wall (as shown).

Removing Drywall (Day 10): Portals and Flow, Then and Now

The last day HomoDommi was here, we pulled down the remaining gypsum on the east wall.  (We originally had hopes of leaving it in place and patching the holes, but it was clear that there was going to be as much patch as wall.)

This allowed some fun: finally getting to uncover the original doorway in the east wall. It was walled up in the 1950s remodel.

(The view from the front door of the house.)

I believe HomoDommi had still harbored a desire to reinstate the doorway, but all the framing had been removed.  And despite strong temptation to have that doorway back -- returning the room to its original integral flow, and encouraging the fen shui of the house ("energy" flow all the way from front to back of the house), I have not come up with a workable design that would allow it.

We don't yet have the full story of that corner of the kitchen, but we believe that in the original layout, there was a door to the east (gap showing above) and around the corner in the south wall, a swinging door leading to the dining room. Each were about a foot away from the southeast corner. Useful for flow, perhaps, but in essence cutting a 6 foot square of useful space out of a 13x11 kitchen. Because of other portals in the room (the door to the bathroom in the north wall, the "entrance" hallway from the west, which itself has a door to the basement) the walkways essentially cramp the usable kitchen into an 11'x7' space with, even then, one walkway passing through it.

The original kitchen, of course, didn't require space for a dishwasher, refrigerator, or a microwave. (The icebox, if there was one, or cooling box, would have been in the back landing -- which is now the bathroom.) The stove with oven took up a major portion of the floor space. There was always only one cook, and no need for eating or hanging-out space in the kitchen.  And frankly, the cook's needs were considered secondary to other needs of the household. (It astonishes me, living in a post-feminist, usability-aware world, how the back-to-nature architects of the Craftsman and similar styles could be so sensitive to other human needs and entirely ignore the cook, leaving her with essentially the technology she'd had available for 100 years before.)

By mid-century, space was needed for a refrigerator. The stove had changed considerably, shrinking down from a massive house-heater to something more familiar (more about that in another post).  One person still did all the cooking, but at least the concept of a "work triangle" had been recognized.  The solution by the 1950's remodelers was to crunch the kitchen into that 11'x7' workspace (with that walkway passing through it), but with an efficient layout for the cook.

The more I study the kitchen and even the detail work on the cabinets (which we hated so much), the more respect I have for this particular project. It does not suffer the same mistakes of so many other projects in the house, caused by poor design and cheap materials.

At that time, they also entirely removed the east door, and shifted the south door about 3 feet further out from the corner -- creating an eddy in the flow between working kitchen and dining room that could be used as a little breakfast nook. A mid-century telescoping lamp hung over a little table there until shortly before I moved in, bringing with me (as Girl-Child once complained) Many Changes. This family didn't use the table much, and it generally was littered with piles of cans and newspapers for recycling.

Part of the reason the table didn't get much use is that a person sitting at it half-obstructed the passageway from kitchen to dining room. Because a  door opening into the kitchen would have ended up banging the back of the diner, the swinging door that was originally in the neighboring position was converted to a sliding pocket door, as shown below.  A clever solution, but the sliding door often falls off its rails, proving a frequent irritation.  As long as we were pulling down the drywall from the east wall, we uncovered the sliding door on the south wall, too. Perhaps, we thought, we could repair or replace the hardware. The Texan is not averse to reconverting the door back to a swinging one; HomoDommi has misgivings about children slamming through it.

(The pocket door on the south wall, hardware exposed. The door is pulled out a little into the portal area.)

Having seen it up close now, HomoDommi says that the hardware would not be easy to replace, and there's not much he can do (given the design of it) to make it less likely to derail. The other thing we discovered, though, is that there might be structural problems with the sliding door.

When they hollowed out the wall for the new form of door, the remodelers removed one of the structural supports.   They did install a strong cross-support -- two 2x6s framing over it, as you can see.  But one of the 2x6s is buckling, ever so slightly, cracking apart in the middle of a large knot unfortunately placed right in the middle of that board.  

We could, I suppose, try to replace that one beam, or we could reinforce it with a couple of 2x4s hammered vertically underneath it, and put the door back on hinges of some sort, swinging or not.  Or we could leave it -- in 50 years it hasn't collapsed -- if we hadn't followed a whim and removed the drywall, we might never have known about it in the first place.

Another opportunity to ponder.

Merely a mid-term comparison shot: this is the kitchen a month ago, from the same vantage point as the top photo, before we started the latest renovation.