Before I get too far into the kitchen update, I wanted to circle back to a follow up to a picture I said I’d post. This is the final version of the outside of the kitchen wall, the one that we had to fix because of rotten siding and studs. Once again, Paul did a fantastic job. You can see what the house will be. (don’t look at the window, I haven’t done my part yet. 🙂

With the sewer line incident and fully repaired now, we found ourselves back on track with the kitchen. The first order of business was to run new electrical wires for outlets and switches. Here are photos of what we found before. Not all of the wiring is this way, there are many wires that are new and have been replaced but it’s a combination throughout the house. We found ourselves for several days slowly working to untangle a maze of wires to determine which line went to what wall, back to which circuit and if it needed to be replaced.

Below you can see some of what we found (and with the old fabric encased wires). Again, fortunately many wires in the house have been replaced but there are a few of these still out there, so we are systematically searching and correcting each one as we go.

We met with the inspector on all of this originally and had suggestions from him, as well as we have since learned. He will of course come back out and ensure that our work was done correctly. We then researched and studied what we would need to do. I won’t go into the details but to say that the kitchen has its own circuit breaker box and came with 20 amp circuits. This means we needed to use 12 gauge wire. For those familiar with wire gauges, suffice it to say it’s not easy to bend. :-/ But we got through it and we bought a testing tool to confirm if we made the connections correctly on each outlet. We tested as we went each one and yes, the tool shows the outlets are correct!

Next came the framing. The 3 rooms we used to combine and expand the kitchen footprint each had 3 different ceiling levels. Yep. They were all built on one at a time and one was slanted because it was at one time a porch. The various ceilings had plaster and one had not only plaster but wire mesh behind the plaster. For the most troublesome ceilings, as high as they were, we decided to clean them but left them in place and built new framing just under it to which we will attach drywall. Tearing down plaster makes such a mess.

A few pics of the framing. We checked and it’s level all the way across and square!

This next part was fun for me! We were so lucky when we discovered the beautiful brick under the plaster above the radiator. This was the back side of the dining room fireplace so we assumed there would be brick but what did it look like? We finally took the plunge and I got to tear off the plaster and expose it all.

Down it came and we are in love with it!

We’ll condition it and have it sealed but we think it will be an incredible focal point for the kitchen. And I kind of like the old hole in the middle section of the brick (you can see they filled it in with cement). This appears to be where a wood burning stove was connected at one point prior to the radiator. It’s all part of the home’s history and is actually charming to me.

This vision is coming together!