The back ceiling has been opened up, and the old, unnecessary header is gone.

Julio, after a day of tearing apart the kitchen.  The old cellulose insulation mixed in with ancient dust was definitely the messiest part of the job.

Rather than run a few extra feet of wire, they had sealed up this splice in the wall. While it’s doubtful that it actually would’ve caused any problems, it’s not a good practice (nor does it meet code) to seal up a splice in a wall cavity.

Although this wasn’t as bad as the wire that was routed into the bathroom plaster (and skim coated over), it was one of many finds that led us to the decision to rewire the entire house. Since wiring is one of Julio’s strong suits, it was much more of a time issue than a money one. And in the early stages of the project, time seemed infinite. Months later, that sentiment would change..

This was our pile of old cabinets out on the back patio.  Since they were solidly built and in good condition, we wanted to try to find a new home for them.

We did end up getting a response from craigslist, and a guy took them with the intention of pulling them apart for the wood and creating new cabinets for a friend of his.  That felt much better than just chucking them.  We went to great effort to find homes for anything salvageable in this project.

This was the original, narrow cabinet.  We later expanded it after removing the chimney.

This was how we figured out that there used to be a back porch behind the kitchen.  While the tongue and groove boards were charming, we really wanted to get the full height across the entire kitchen.

This is the header that divided the main kitchen area from the nook (which used to be a porch).  Once this was removed, we had the full height across the entire kitchen.  This is a shot from the kitchen side.  The area behind the header is the cavity above the nook.

This was the last of the plaster to come out of the kitchen.  While gutting a room is fun for the first 5 or 10 minutes, it always turns into a horrible, time-consuming project.

As is sometimes found in old houses, we had a sink that was shared between two upstairs bedroom.  We removed it, because we planned to build a 1/2 bath, it was in an odd place and the pipes ran right through our downstairs hallway.

Taking it out was a messy job, because the drain pipe had rusted so badly that it had completely sealed itself at the bottom.  Julio had to drill a series of holes in pipe and try to catch the disgusting water (if it could still be classified as such) in a bucket.  That’s easier said than done when a liquid is shooting out in a high powered stream, so most of it ended up on him.  We still have the sink but haven’t decided what to do with it.  While we love the style, the separate hot/cold faucets are the worst feature of old sinks.

A shot of the header that framed the dropped ceiling area in the back of our kitchen. Once we demo’d the kitchen, we discovered that the nook area used to be a back porch that was pulled into the kitchen in the 60’s. Since we wanted a ceiling taller than 7′, we opened the area up to give full ceiling height through the entire kitchen.