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.

"A Convenient and Well-Equipped Kitchen That Simplifies the Housework"

EACH room in the house has its distinct and separate function in the domestic economy. Therefore it should be remembered that before any room can attain its own distinctive individuality everything put into it must be there for some reason and must serve a definite purpose in the life that is to be lived and the work that is to be done in that room.  Take for example the kitchen, where the food for the household must be prepared and where a large part of the work of the house must be done.  This is the room where the housewife or the servant maid must be for the greater part of her time day after day, and the very first requisites are that it should be large enough for comfort, well ventilated, and full of sunshine, and that the equipment for the work that is to be done should be ample, of good quality and, above all, intelligently selected.  We all know the pleasure of working with good tools and in congenial surroundings; no more things than are necessary should be tolerated in the kitchen and no fewer should be required.

We cannot imagine a more homelike room than the old New England kitchen, the special realm of the housewife and the living room of the whole family. Its spotless cleanliness and homely cheer are remembered as long as life lasts by men and women who have had the good fortune at associate such a room with their earliest recollections of home. No child ever lived who could resist the attractions of such a room, for a child has, in all its purity, the primitive instinct for living that ruled the simpler and more wholesome customs of other days. ["I need something dark and bitter." -- overheard as I was typing this sentence at a coffee shop, spoken by a customer at the order counter.]  In these times of more elaborate surroundings the home life of the family is hidden behind a screen and the tendency is to belittle that part of the household work by regarding it as a necessary evil. ... 

In the farmhouse and the cottage of the workingman, where the domestic machinery is comparatively simple, cheerful and homelike, the kitchen, -- which is also the dining room of the family and one of its pleasantest gathering places, -- should be restored to all its old-time comfort and convenience. In planning such a house it should come in for the first thought instead of the last and its use as a dining room as well as a kitchen should be so devised that all odors of cooking are carried off and the arrangement and ventilation should be such that this is one of the best aired and sunniest of all the rooms in the house.

Where social relations and the demands of a more complex life make it impossible for the house mistress to do her own work and the kitchen is necessarily more separated from the rest of the household, it may easily be planned to meet the requirements of the case without losing any of its comfort, convenience, or suitability for the work that is to be done in it. Modern science has made the task very easy by the provision of electric lights, open plumbing, laundry conveniences, and hot and cold running water, so that the luxuries of the properly arranged modern kitchen would have been almost unbelievable a generation ago. [italics mine] Even if the kitchen is for the servant only, it should be a place in which she may take some personal pride. It is hardly going too far to say that the solution of the problem of the properly arranged kitchen would come near to being the solution also of the domestic problem.

The properly planned kitchen should be as open as possible to prevent the accumulation of dirt. Without the customary "glory holes" that sink and other closets often become, genuine cleanliness is much easier to preserve and the appearance of outside order is not at all lessened. In no part of the house does the good old saying, "a place for everything and everything in its place," apply with more force than in the kitchen. Ample cupboard space for all china should be provided near the sink to do away with unnecessary handling and the same cupboard, which should be an actual structural feature of the kitchen, should contain drawers for table linen, cutlery and smaller utensils, as well as a broad shelf which provides a convenient place for serving.  The floor should be of cement and the same material may be used in tiled pattern for a high wainscot, given a cleanly and pleasant effect.

Quoted almost in whole [leaving out none of the rather rosy nostalgia] from Craftsman Homes, by Gustav Stickley, pages 144-145, originally published circa 1915 (republished in facsimile without complete copyright notice, 2009, by Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY). The images are from the same article, too. There's another I forgot to scan into my computer; I may post it later.

Another book I checked out from the library illustrates a modern "Wilson" kitchen (presumably the cutting edge of kitchen design). (To be honest, I scanned in the image and forgot to cite it in my notes. But it is from a book with the words "craftsman" or "bungalow" in the title.) Note the built-in oil delivery pipes, which feed into the range, coming up from the basement in an attractive closed-in cabinet (letters A through D). Our kitchen had some similar arrangement, at least until perhaps the 1930s.

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.