You see this pile of cabinets? We’ve been hoarding them since January of last year (well, most of them anyway), paying to store them off-site until we’re ready to remodel our gross-but-mostly-usable  kitchen. We had grand plans for these babies, to strip the disgusting paint, rust, and goo off of them and repaint them a glorious, gleaming bright white. We even bought a vintage 50s Chambers stove to match the theme, one without a pilot light and with an oven compartment so tiny that I would have had to buy all new tiny baking sheets to fit inside, and which we recently sold to a very stylish barber from Riverside because we just couldn’t reconcile ourselves to the idea of eventually using it on a daily basis. That was a sad day, giving up that gorgeous hunk of porcelain and chrome, but it had to go.

It’s time for this pile of cabinets to go, too. With so many pressing items on our list of shit to do with this house, the kitchen is pretty far from even being considered ready to renovate, and the monthly expense of housing these supplies has really stacked up. We finally came to the conclusion last night that, once we’re ready to gut and remodel, we’ll either find another set of metal cabinets (in better condition, hopefully), or else we’ll buy new from somewhere (this is starting to become my preference, due to the customizability).

With this decision in place, I’m allowed to start fantasizing in earnest about IKEA kitchens, which is my current favorite in the running for new kitchens.

My friend Alice's new kitchen makes me swoon

via flickr

mmm, shiny red! via flickr

via flickr, love the whitewhitewhite

Anna from Door Sixteen's ikea kitchen, which I love

In the meantime, I need to go through the room and decide what I can do to it to make it less depressing. Sigh.

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?

I wonder if I could convince Kevin to help me set this up if I promise we can do one for him in the garage, too. Hmm?

I know what you’re thinking.

“Wait wait wait, the kitchen? It’s usable! What about finishing the bathroom? What about working on the lounge area in the basement? What about what about what about?!”

We’re both pretty sick of the kitchen, and if we’re going to be trapped inside over the winter, the season during which we do our most labor-intensive and creative work at the stove, we’d might as well be in a room that we like to look at and use, am I right? I think I am.

Anyway, before I get to a few inspirational photos that I’ve collected lately, I want to ask you readers a couple of questions:

1. What is your favorite thing about your kitchen?
2. What do you wish you had in your kitchen?

On with the pictures:

From Retro Renovation

Pam's Kitchen from Retro Renovation

From Design*Sponge

From Design*Sponge, I love the FermLiving wallpaper and black countertops

From Decor8

Alice's kitchen from bread&honey, I love the green cabinet interiors

From Apartment Therapy, I love the shelves around the window

From Apartment Therapy, I think I want a tile backsplash

From Apartment Therapy

From Apartment Therapy

From Apartment Therapy, we're definitely doing black and white checkered floor tiles

Anyway, one of the projects we’ve got waiting in the wings is the kitchen. We’ve been smart about this room, though, and we’ve decided not to even start on it until we have all of the pieces we’ll need to finish it collected or purchased, so we can do it all in one go. It’s such an important room of the house that we can’t afford to lose use of it for longer than it’ll take to do the work. In the meantime, Kevin’s workshop has slowly been filled with bits and pieces that we’ll incorporate into the room. Want to see what we’ve got so far?

This is the sink cabinet that we picked up for free from the owner of the stove below. Metal cabinets with a sink in great condition.

Check out this fabulous original Chambers stove! It's in great condition, and I can't wait to see it installed in my house.

Remember these guys that we picked up over the winter? Original Youngstown Mullins kitchen cabinets from the 50s. We'll paint them all white and put on matching hardware.

Things left to collect for full kitchen assembly:
black and white checkered ceramic tile flooring
Formica laminate countertops referenced here
Dishmaster kitchen faucet referenced in the same post
Lots that I’m forgetting

The kitchen we were driving out to pick up was found in an 1880s farm house on about 8 acres that had been bought by the new owner at auction. Apparently, it had been a bachelor pad for about 10 years before it went to auction, and it was not very well taken care of. This kitchen was really easy for Kevin to dismantle, and he was able to take it apart in about a half an hour, after a bunch of unscrewing of 50 year old screws.

While Kevin was busy in the kitchen, I decided to take a look around the rest of the house. While my heart lies in the interior design of the 50s-70s, seeing turn of the century homes allowed to rot and decay hurts my feelings a little, and this was a really sad example of that.

It had your standard 12ft. ceilings, some of the original light fixtures (at least original to whenever electricity came to this neck of the woods, which I’m sure was long after 1900), incredibly tall baseboards, windows that reached almost floor to ceiling, and even some wonderful push-button light switches:

I could have even sworn that I could see the plaster patchwork that was done behind the plain white wallpaper to cover up transom windows. Sigh.

I was happy, at least, that we were able to salvage a gorgeously molded front door with a somewhat peculiar glass window encased in it, featuring a ship on a stormy sea. It also featured one of those awesome turn-knob door ringers.

You can’t see the detail in my crappy cell phone pictures, but the center pane is surrounded by very intricately etched panes. One of the previous owners of the house decided to put siding up about 40 years ago, and while doing the job they decided that they didn’t want to use this as the front door anymore, so they plugged a bunch of insulation into the door frame and sided right over it. We pried it out of the frame and took it with us for a very reasonable price. We actually managed to pack the kitchen and the door up and made it all the way back to Iowa City without hurting any of it. We stowed the cabinets and sink at Kevin’s shop and made it a block away when one of the panes of the door’s window shattered. Kevin was pretty heartbroken, but it was one of the lower corner panes, which happens to be the least intricate, so I’m thinking we’ll be able to copy the pattern and etch it into a new pane of glass.

Wish us luck!

Probably more cabinets than we need

From the looks of it, this sink is probably cast iron. Also, over five feet long!

I'm digging the hardware, too.

We’ll be getting a Dishmaster kitchen faucet, which are awesome retro faucets that are actually still in production and made in the USA. You can read about a tour of the factory and a little about the company’s history here.

Now, I know I was talking about fancy stone countertops here, buy why spend thousands on rocks when you can spend hundreds on period-correct boomerang laminate with stainless steel edges?

Poo!

I think Kevin took some pictures last night, but I didn’t have the energy last night to worry about uploading them, so here’s a picture of the sewer pipe coming out of the old toilet, rimmed with a glorious coating of poop. I know it’s going to make your day.

Last night, there was some sort of snafu with the screws not being long enough to hang the sheets of concreteboard on the walls for the tub surround, along with issues with the wall layers not being the same depth, so I think Kevin and Mark did a lot of standing around and scratching their heads, until they finally decided to call off work for the evening until the next day when longer screws could be purchased. Thank goodness Mark is willing to work on it during the day while we’re at work.

While they were mid-scratch, I set about completing the cleaning of the kitchen. I scrubbed out the fridge with some sort of orange cleaner, finished wiping out the cabinets, gave it a thorough sweeping, and even managed to clean up the filthy window sashes over the sink. It’s ready for move-in! Tonight, I’ll probably spend most of my time running carloads of dishes, pots and pans, and food between the houses to fully transfer the room from our rental to the new place. Actually having some of our belongings in the new place will further solidify that it’s really ours.

I had already scheduled to take tomorrow (Friday) off in order to be there while the duct and carpet cleaners do their thing, and through a happy coincidence, Kevin may be able to take the day off as well. Last night after Mark left, we spent over an hour cleaning everything up upstairs, gathering up the last of the trash, and moving Kevin’s “keep” pile down to the basement. We were able to swing a 10% discount on the carpet cleaning because I told them we wouldn’t have anything for them to have to move when they did it, so cleaning last night meant that once work is done tonight, we can just shove the few items left in the living room into the basement or bathroom to keep my promise. The living room looks so much bigger when it’s empty! Let’s hope we don’t fall into the old habit of filling it with crap.