Showing posts with label salvage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salvage. Show all posts

The Kitchen that Was

Dear Ralph's lonely blog,
I am sorry I abandoned you. Really, there was nothing to write about. Now there is. On impulse, the Sunday before New Year's we bashed the kitchen cabinets into nasty, dirty pieces, making them into the appropriate 4' x 4' sections for the trash truck guys. This is what was underneath, yuck. These pictures were before breaking off remaining rot, decay and plaster. Since we moved in, the only thing between us and the crawlspace and the exterior walls was 3' of clear packing tape that I used to bridge this hole around the pvc drainpipe. I'm amazed we didn't see rats more often.

Rat Poop Before Sweeping:














Hole in the Wall Where Sink Used to Be:














The golden-color floor material appeared to be vinyl, and came right up. It was lain over linoleum tiles that may have been early to the house. Neither of them extended into the business portion of the kitchen floor. There, under the current beige sheet vinyl, are glossy fake parquet vinyl tiles, which peel right up with the sheet, exposing beautiful but very sticky wood floors underneath.

My guess is that someone redoing the kitchen in the 70's had the the really old stuff stripped off and refinished the wood floors. The old stuff remained under the inaccesible cabinet bases. But then, some recent fool put down the fake wood parquet tiles, maybe a renter. Why, when there is real, finished wood underneath?? Anyhoo, the real wood floor was made so sticky by those parquet tiles that I decided the layers should just stay. They will be a good underlayer for new linoleum tiles.

This is the new shimmed wallboard and 3/4" plywood under-cabinet floor patch.














Here is Jason wetting and scraping the popcorn ceiling. Yay!


More to come!

Of plants and sinks

There hasn't been much going on at Ralph's House in the last 2-3 months, except for great new back steps and hooks I installed in the laundry room. Not nearly the progress that would be if money and health were normal. Especially money. It's better to be sick when there is enough money to buy basics, let alone get me a lovely new router table with 3hp motor and shaker cabinet door/45 degree joining bits.

So we'll focus on free things for a while. This is the butterfly garden I planted a few months back; now it's nice and overgrown. It has purple Swedish ivy, sweet potato vine, yellow moss roses, a leggy plant with striated leaves and tiny white flowers which the bees love, irises and random marigolds. It hasn't attracted any butterflies, but it has attracted bees, lots of them, where there were few before. Subsequently, we've had lots of tomatoes and bell peppers this winter, 3x more than in the regular growing season. Last week I made tomato sauce with a pound. I think I'll keep this plot around. It makes the vegetable plots and compost look more attractive.

Parsley loves mushroom compost.


The NY Botanical Garden grounds are free on Wednesdays. They say they have 90563 vascular plant specimens. When I went up last week to move my sister to Florida, we visited. How do you make these things in miniature for a tiny corner-yard?
























The bus from LaGuardia passes Demolition Depot, so we got off and looked. $$$.
















Since dreams are also free, this is my dream kitchen sink! I want to acquire one before starting the kitchen cabinets. Here in the south, it's harder to find the salvage you see in the north and midwest. Here, new construction is far more popular and old building salvage gets put in the trash; when you do find stuff like sinks, stoves, doors, it's silly overpriced or in very bad condition, usually from rots, rust and other water damage. As in many towns, lots of early 1900's stuff was torn out in the 60's and 70's, from cabinets and plumbing (my house) to entire Henry Klutho buildings. Currently, Florida is besieged by developers razing swamp ecosystems, farmland and trailer parks, and the Jacksonville City Council seems pretty susceptible to their needs in the name of slick progress, similarly to what happened here in the 60's. Without the internet and vigilant citizens' groups, much of the historical buildings that give downtown Jacksonville its character might have been razed in the name of building a glossy new downtown. I think true progress and revitalization in a city involves embracing history, rather than just building 10 new highrise riverfront condo structures to bring in the winter tourists.

Anyway, in looking for this sink on ebay, as I've been doing for 7 months now, all listings have been in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Michigan and the like. I kick myself every time I see a listing in upstate New York, where we used to live. If only I'd been psychic!

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