What We Did Last Week

We Stahls spent last week visiting my parents in Roseville, Minnesota. A big project we accomplished (okay, mostly Barry accomplished, we helped somewhat) was to sand and refinish the hardwood floors in the dining room and hallway. These floors have been under carpeting nearly all the time since 1958 when their cute midcentury ranch home was built. So the floors are in great shape, just needed some love.

Now my mom says she thinks she'd like to have more floors exposed, since this turned out so nice. Those will be much easier, as this area was the part that you basically have to walk through to get to any other part of the house.

Red and White Kitchen: Take a look at this flooooooor!

This is from Pam's Retro Renovation blog site and it just makes me happy. Click the picture to learn more about this adorable, non-gutted kitchen with original cabinets.

Blenback Oilcloth Shelf Edging with Strawberries

This is 1940s-1950s Blenback oilcloth shelf lining with an edge that you fold over. I bought a bolt of it on eBay thinking I'd use what I wanted and then sell the rest at LulusDressShop.com, but it's very brittle, and I'm afraid my buyers would be disappointed.

Gratuitous Living Room Pictures (because I want to)

I worked on our living room a little more this weekend, moving a couple of bookshelves in there. It's not a large room and there is very little blank wall space, so we are pretty limited on arrangements. We traded a couple of rocking chairs for a second Kroehler Ko-Dav loveseat from the 19-teens or early 1920s and now I'm happy with the way it looks. It's a cozy, comfortable room. No television. When we moved to this house I said NO TELEVISION IN THE LIVING ROOM. If I hadn't decided this right from the first I could never have made it stick. Now it's the place for reading, sewing, and talking, and sometimes for lying on your tummy and putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the middle of the floor. I love this room.

We don't have all the original window and door trim, and replacing it has been an expensive experience, so we're doing it a little at a time, hence the trimless windows. That maple floor is original and had never been stripped until we did it. Shawn Leppert was extremely happy about that beautiful, untouched floor!

One final backsplash post | EDITED

Here it is with the outlet covers installed and the stove back in its cozy little cubby-hole.

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Mrs. Mac asked for pictures of the cooktop on that stove.


This stove is from the first half of the 1930s and was made by the Detroit Vapor Stove Company. I bought it at a garage sale in Bangor, Wisconsin, about 10 years ago. I did not have it restored. I did have to find replacement knobs, and I had Jay Heisel make me some oven racks out of steel. My father-in-law has adjusted the burners for me a couple of times, but really there is not a whole lot that can go wrong with a stove like this.

All grouted in

Barry: "Wait a minute, let me get this stuff out of here... DID YOU JUST TAKE THE PICTURE? I SAID TO WAIT!!"

What Barry Did with his Memorial Day Weekend

The backslash for the stove!! Isn't it purdy?

Finally, a decent picture!

Barry took this portrait of me in the nearly finished kitchen tonight so I finally have a decent picture of myself. Bo wasn't supposed to be in the picture but he sneaked in and looked so pitiful that we didn't kick him out.

Look What Barry's Working On Today

Countertops!

First he glued down cement board to the plywood.

Next he worked on the layout of the tile and all those bitty little spacers.


Now he's chopping billions of little tiles in half for all the edges. He's about to run amok with that tile chopper thingie there.


He muttered something about how this countertop was not going to be worth all the work to anyone except me, that when we sell the house the first thing people will probably do is rip out those countertops and get something more modern. I keep telling him, I am NEVER selling this house.

Later:

One of the fun things about new cabinets

You can get inside them and lurk.

Giving my Butcher-block Countertops Some Love

The countertops to either side of the stove are chunks of rock maple butcherblock, from an 8-foot butcherblock baker's table I bought years ago at an auction. John Pitts' team cut it up and planed it and sanded it, but it was left to me to season it.

I rubbed 2 coats of food-grade mineral oil into the surfaces, leaving about 6 hours between applications for it to soak in, and then this morning, at the recommendation of a website I cannot find right now, I grated up some pure beeswax into a saucepan, added an equal amount, approximately, of mineral oil, and warmed it over the stove while stirring to melt the beeswax. I put a thick coat of that on the wood, left it for about half an hour, and buffed off the excess with a soft cloth, and now I have one more coat on it. The wood is saying THANK YOU!! by being beautiful and smelling great.

I think I'll save my application cloth and substitute it for the yucky old grease-rag I use to wipe my cast iron after I dry it on the stove.

More Kitchen Cabinet Pictures

The cabinets are all in!

The sink is just stuck there, not hooked up or anchored or anything. Also the tile is just laid there on the plywood so I can dream about how pretty it will look someday.

That's the famous IKEA Domsjo apron front sink, and that is NOT an IKEA sink base. It's one John Pitts built. It fits beautifully.


By the way, sometimes the ceiling lights show up yellow in my pictures. They aren't. They are white, with a wide red band painted around them.

Look what's happening at my house today!

That's right! It's Cabinet Day. Or, Cabinet Day #1. But these folks work very efficiently and they may just get most of it done today. It's so fun to see the design I had tried to imagine appear before my eyes. This kitchen is going to be so much fun to cook in.

Praise the Lord, we have heat!

Drumroll, please! Yesterday around midday, Matt Troendle flipped the switch on our geothermal system. And nothing happened.  An hour or so later, after some adjustments, he tried again, and this time, the pumps started pumping, the compressor started compressing, the heat exchanger started exchanging, and the blowers started blowing lovely warm air out our vents! Glory, hallelujah. I'm not swearing, I'm really praising God for this.

It's very exciting. I'm amazed what a difference being warm has had on my general attitude. The kitchen remodel is back to being an adventure, and I am back to being able to sell the latest inconvenience to my children as just something fun and unusual (as in, "We can't walk on the kitchen floor for two days! Here, take this bridge across to the stairs to go to your rooms! And climb through this basement window to get to the basement! Yay!").

The floor that Les laid a week ago has been resting and settling to its new home, hidden under collapsed cardboard boxes for protection.  
Yesterday morning Shawn Leppert of Silver Creek Hardwood Floors came and sanded it and put down the first coating of finish, and then he came back and put down another coat another today. By this evening, we will be able to walk across it in stocking feet, and by Monday we can cover it with kraft paper to protect it while the cabinet makers do their work. The fridge needs to stay in the dining room for at least another couple of weeks, most likely, and the stove needs to stay on the porch. The lovely grain of the wood jumps out now with the finish to accentuate it.

One really neat thing is that while he was here, Matt and his assistant Aaron replaced the gas line from the propane tanks outside to my kitchen stove hookup with a larger gauge pipe, so whenever the stove is hooked up again, it will get much more fuel. Right now it's hooked up to a 5-gallon propane bottle and it just goes to town.  A pot of water boils in, like, 4 seconds. Well, not quite. But close. They also added a line to the family room so someday we can get a ventless propane stove to keep us cozy on cold, dark winter nights. We can snuggle by the light of a pseudofire instead of by the lights of the XBOX for a change!

Another really neat thing about this whole remodel project is how we have been blessed with good workers. They may run into glitches, but they fix them, and they are honest, hard working people, and I don't ever feel unsafe letting them into the house. I know I take that for granted far too much. When your house is being remodeled, you invite all kinds of people in to see you as you really are. They see how you interact with your kids, they see how good or bad a housekeeper you are, they get to know your pets (in our case, they get to know the pets more than any of them probably ever wanted to).  It's a good thing to feel confident that these are honest, kind people who are seeing us with our... well, I was going to say, "with our pants down," but I sure hope that hasn't happened. (Anybody out there ever see "The Money Pit"? With Tom Hanks and Shelly Winters? Yes, that's what I was thinking of, too.)

Shawn Leppert is our latest blessing of a workman. He is so careful, really a professional. He did a lovely job on finishing these floors. And he likes chickens and dogs and guinea pigs and old houses, and he met his wife at Bible college, and he works with the youth ministry in his church. He's pretty great, and his wife, with whom I have spoken several times now on the phone, is also lovely. We're glad to have added them to our list of "nice new people we have gotten to know while our house was in tatters."

Self Indulgent Whining

Or whingeing. That's a better word. It sounds exactly like what it is.

Here's what I'm whining about:
1. Being cold.
2. Wanting to cook.

Ever go on vacation, or even more on a business trip, and at first eating out at a restaurant is really great, you revel in being served, in picking anything off the menu and having somebody bring it to you all pretty on a plate, and not having to wash that plate when you're done? And then by about day 3 you start getting sick of it, just wanting to have a salad because everything seems so heavy? And by about day 5 you can't wait to get home and cook again? In fact you are all inspired by what you've eaten at restaurants and are anxious to implement some new things in your cooking?

That's how I feel right now. I CAN cook, but it's only about 40 degrees out there on the porch, and that is not conducive to creativity. I'm in microwave-and-run mode and have been for a couple of weeks now, ever since fall started in earnest. I am so anxious to have a real kitchen again, with all the tools I need laid out in easy reach, a maximum of 3 steps to take within my work triangle, and not having to scoop ladybugs or Japanese beetles or whatever the stupid things are called out of the frying pan every time I try to saute something. I'm serious, those bratty little ladies are all over the porch ceiling and they love to plop down in the food. Eugheublech!

And of course being cold has a lot to do with this, because it's already chilly in this house, and then having to go out in the cold to prepare food makes me even colder, and the only relief is to go wash dishes in the basement, which is usually the coldest part of the house but right now is the warmest, actually, because we at least have a baseboard heater down there, and besides the dish water is warm. Only you have to be REALLY careful where you step because otherwise you're likely to fall in one of the trenches criss-crossing our basement floor for the geothermal piping.

There. I feel better now. See, a little whining IS good for the soul.

I'll pull myself together here soon, I promise. I have nothing really to whinge about. Life is really good, especially compared to what many people's lives are like these days.

EDITED: After hitting the POST button, I noticed the radar map there =======> . What is that BIG GREEN SWIRLY THING to the west of us? It'd better be only rain, that's all I can say. I don't think I can handle snow. At least until a) the furnace is working and b) the finish is down on the kitchen floor so we don't have to tramp through the snow to get from the backporchkitchen to the rest of the house.

Sure glad Barry isn't here...

... to see what is happening to his yard.

Seriously, they are being extremely careful of all the stuff - the ponds, the trees. The house.

Here's where the trench runs up to the house. Those pipes are the tubing for the geothermal wells.


Here's something interesting: They found not one, but two, wells in the trench. The one you can see very clearly. The other was right at the edge of the trench, so they left it alone. You can just see the concrete cap there in the trench.

That's a great view of the old well. It was half full of dirt. They filled it up the rest of the way.

Despite their care, the team had a very tough time yesterday, as after they excavated neatly around our water and sewer lines, a chunk of concrete from the fill pile tumbled down and broke both lines. This was at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. They tracked down supplies and kept at the job until 10:00 last night when they got the water and sewer lines repaired. I was very impressed that they cared.

The one fellow is just an artist with a Bobcat. Watching him in action is almost like watching a ballet - a big, metallic ballet dancer on treads. He perched that 'Cat right on the edge of the trench and delicately slung the bucket around, moving dirt with such finesse. He was a pleasure to watch.

We're soooo close to having heat now, I can almost taste it. Just one more step to go - hooking up the electricity at the box. Then we flip the switch and go. (Right?)

Kitchen Remodel Slideshow - Now with Less Annoying Music!!

Kitchen Update

It has been mentioned that I have been parsimonious with my updates on the kitchen. It's true. My excuse is I have less time than ever because everything takes about 3 times as long, seeing as we're sort of camping. Cooking, serving and cleaning up from cooking take forever. I'm trying to feed the family well so we don't all die of scurvy or something from living on fast food for the duration. We do have running water, though I have to carry it from across the house; we do have a working stove, but it's on the back porch. And the fridge is in another part of the house entirely. I don't have any right to complain, but I AM slow. Not to mention the fact that I sometimes must run around the outside of the house to get from the main part of the house to my back-porch kitchen when Les is working on a scaffold, or has the doorways blocked with plastic sheeting, or whatever. The kitchen of this house is right on the way to just about everywhere else in this house. It should be really interesting when we're finishing the floors and cannot walk on them for a few days. Maybe I'll just go to Paris. Yep, that would be the simplest thing: We go to Paris for a few weeks and come back and it'll all be done. Sure.

Anyway I have taken a few pictures but they are not too exciting. I'll add them later. The drywall is all up. Les is taping and mudding today. The ceiling is presently bare lath covered with a sheet of plastic as a moisture barrier. I spent part of yesterday painting all the beaded board for the ceiling RED. It's stacked in the garage, awaiting that part of the project. And the gorgeous hard maple flooring - 4-inch planks - was just dropped off and is currently stacked in the front room, bundled by length, smelling wonderful. It is so pretty! This is not the very top grade of wood; I didn't want it totally clear. Neither is it "character" or "rustic" grade. It's somewhere between those extremes, with some grain to it, and a few closed knotholes, and it has such life. It's pretty now, just rough sanded. When it is installed, sanded and treated with polyurethane, it will just glow. This is local maple, mind you - cut by Konkel Forest Products, kiln dried by the Amish, then sent back to Konkel's Hardwoods division, where Tony Konkel cut it into planks and then tongue-and-groove cut it. Our planks were a little more pricey than the standard 3-inch boards, but still it was $3.85 a square foot, for a floor that should last for the next 100 years or so of this house. In fact, it will probably outlast the house.

Let's see... What else? Oh. John Pitts came back to talk more about the cabinets, and we worked out a few more details. He's not ready to start yet, still has 2 projects before ours, but he promises me we'll be done by Thanksgiving. Good thing, too, because we just invited my parents and two college students to come to Thanksgiving. When he gets ready to actually start the cabinets, he will pick up our range hood, our IKEA Domsjo sink, and... something else, I can't remember what it is, and take all this stuff over to his shop and build the cabinets to suit all of them perfectly. Oh yeah, I remember -- not a thing that he has to take, but he'll take the leftover paint from the ceiling planks and use it to match for the cabinet fronts, that's it.

My jobs at present are:

1. Stay out of Les's way as much as possible.
2. Earn as much money as possible to pay for all this stuff.
3. Pick out some white paint and
4. some metal grid to put in the door panels below the sink.

The metal grid panels are not cooperating with my searching so far. What I'd really, really like would be fine half-inch chicken wire, maybe in stainless steel wire for strength. It can be obtained, it does exist, but it's EXPENSIVE. Still looking.

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Hey, look what I found right after making that post!

I'll have to see what Barry thinks. He's Obstacle #1 for any of my design ideas. If he goes for it, then I have to try to convince John Pitts. Heh.

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Another update. Barry said no, and for a good reason: Too much stuff will show through, and cabinets-under-the-sink are full of gross stuff. So I am back to no cabinet doors under the sink and little curtains. Which I love anyway.

What color paint is Jade-ite?

If you Google for that, you'll find several possibilities, but none of 'em are just right!

I took Loretta's old Jade-ite coffee cup to Menards and found the perfect paint. It's Dutch Boy "Patina Verdigris,"DB0DT108, and it is perfect. So now, all you Googling for the perfect Jade-ite, Jadite or jade green paint, that's it. You found it.

It's what will be going on our kitchen walls - the part that shows where there are no cabinets, which will just be one wall and the top 2 feet or so of the rest of the kitchen.

I also took my beautiful red Ice-o-Mat ice crusher and tried to find that red, but it didn't exist. So she color matched my Ice-o-Mat. That's going on the beadboard on the ceiling! I could take a picture of the Ice-o-Mat and the can of paint, but it won't have the same impact. You'll have to trust me on that.

Oh, and the hex tile is in! It's adorable! The hexes are so teeny. They are officially an inch in diameter but they look smaller than that. They look like... Chiclets or something. They look delicious! I just want to play with them. Rub them between my fingers. Click them together. Shake 'em like dice.

Kitchen Progress: Bare block walls, hurray!

The sink is gone, the cabinets and counter are gone, and the lath and plaster are gone from 2+ of 4 walls. Yay! In that last picture you can see through the door onto our back porch, which is our temporary kitchen for the duration: It's really actually rather pleasant out there, though there is no running water of course. But lots of windows. And as long as the lovely autumn weather holds, it's not too cold nor too hot, either.

Les Goetzinger worked like a madman yesterday. I had to leave for several hours. When I left, he was finishing up the windows from Monday, and when I got home, the cabinets were neatly stacked out in the yard and all this was done.