Magazine Covers From the late 1920's

I love old magazine covers.  Here are a few from around the time my house was built.  There is plenty of color inspiration in old illustrations.

Kitchen Archaeology

Gross-ness aside, pulling out the 1970's cabinets exposed the original silhouettes of the first, very shallow, built-in cabinets and the location of the gas stove and its pipe.

All those white stripes on the right corner were supports for the shelves, and also the countertop, covering up virgin plaster. On the left, it seems the gas stove was not moved when the kitchen was last painted and vinyl-ed. So we can see the 1920s cabinets lasted at least until the age of the golden vinyl.

The sink on the right (unseen here) had a high back, judging from the height of the window. The hole for its inlet pipes is still in the ledger board at the base of the inside wall, since they ran up to the sink back from inside the wall.

The sink was bookended by the two built-in cabinets, the left cabinet being the one shown above. Nearly the entire wall above the countertop line was removed and replaced with drywall, two layers in some places, and this is where I assume there used to be the old white subway tile found under the house. When it was removed, it must have taken the whole wall with it. I'm replacing it on a more extensive scale, probably using in-store tile from Home Depot. It's $.23 a tile, and no longer has the wide spacers or rounded edge as it did just a few years ago.

Plans for an (IKEA) 1920's kitchen

The current plan for the kitchen is to restore the gas service and install a 20's-30's stove. Photos from the last trip under the house show the gas oven installed where the modern electric one is, and the water heater in its same spot in the laundry room as well.

Space is very tight in the laundry room - I believe it used to be a sunporch, perhaps screened, with the security back door in the kitchen instead. With this in mind, it would be a neat thing to get a smaller, on-demand water heater which wouldn't take valuable laundry floor space. At the same time we would restore/re-install the stove line, its business end being only 6 feet away.

This plan is just in its beginning phase; I haven't contacted a gas plumber yet. The supply pipe coming from the mound of dirt under the laundry room is corroded through at the surface, as happens here in Florida, and it may need replacing to the street. No longer do we have a meter, although our neighbors do and I'm going to check to see if it's still moving. This could cost $$$$! We would receive about $800 in cash rebates from our local gas company, though, for replacing those two electric appliances.

This is my rough drawing for the kitchen, pretty similar to the original kitchen of this house. I did a bit of research in the past year, including peering into windows of old houses for sale, looking at available period apartments, ebay sales, books and internet resources like Indiana Historical Society's model home collection; also online state photo collections from MN and FL. Much of it was surmised from house archaeology, like the 2, 12" deep upper cabinets, unpainted areas behind the current cabinets, and the rotted hole below/behind the kitchen sink.












It's clickable, but huge. The bottom drawing, a little undecipherable, is the other side of the room with the intact ironing board cabinet on the right. Somehow the drawings remind me of a Calvin & Hobbes setting.

Just reinstalling the chair rail will add instant 1920's value, cheaply. I can reuse our one intact base cabinet shell (1970's plywood) in virtually the same spot, with a new face frame. Multiple doors on a single compartment are annoying when those doors are separated by a face frame. I'm ready for demolition!

Cat count= 5 outdoor, 2 indoor.

Cornell U Human Ecology Photographs

From up where we used to live, Cornell's library has made available online photographs of their home and institutional economics classes, homemaking apartments (5 weeks of learning how to properly clean and cook and even practice with a real loaner baby!) interior design, nutrition and agricultural fairs. Most photos date from 1910-1945. On their HEARTH website there are 1003 volumes of books and journals, mainly from 1850 to 1925, consisting of the stuff women's days were made like dressmaking, gardening, decorating and chosing colors for your home, and childcare.
From the HEARTH front page:

"Home Economists in early 20th century America had a major role in the Progressive Era, the development of the welfare state, the triumph of modern hygiene and scientific medicine, the application of scientific research in a number of industries, and the popularization of important research on child development, family health, and family economics. What other group of American women did so much, all over the country, and got so little credit? ... We must do everything we can to preserve and organize records and materials from this important female ghetto."
- Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Stephen H. Weiss
Presidential Fellow and Professor, Cornell University College of Human Ecology

Bathroom mystery solved!

When I first looked at the marble chunk, "threshold" crossed my mind but thought, it's way too thick to waste as a threshold, and it's also set in wall plaster. I looked at the marble threshold in my sister's bathroom, c. 1926, 6 blocks away, and realized that I could see rough plaster around her doorframe edge. This morning I removed my modern wood threshold, and under the floor layers was a broken bit of matching marble still stuck to the 1" deep plaster threshold base, and also a gouge in that threshold to match my plaster/marble chunk. Most of the plaster surface is flat even with the hallway wood floor, but below the level of the green and white checkerboard tile. I'll guess because the marble chunk is 7/8" thick, it was probably beveled at the sides. I'd probably trip over it frequently. Perhaps people did and maybe that's why it was removed.

Shiny, gold!

This is the new light in the dining room. Labor was about 5 hours, doing touch-up paint on scratches, re-wiring (although I skipped re-wiring the little twist knob at the bottom), finding a plate to hang it from, and then hanging. And some more touch-up.

The gold paint was mixed from craft store liquid acrylic leftover from a medieval icon project in college. It has a metallic sheen. The light has 4-5 different shades of gold and amber, so I mixed in raw sienna and raw umber canvas paint to make the colors. It took an hour of patient mixing and painting in thin layers to match chipped and scratched areas to the lovely original brass, green and coppery color. Even though the original finish held up to a soft toothbrush and water, when I tried to gently flake off acrylic errors the first finish came with it in specks, exposing tiny bits of clean aluminum underneath. There was no going back. Then it was covered with two coats of Zinsser spray shellac with a yellowish tinge. The tinge was helpful because the acrylic paint touch-ups didn't have the same translucence of the original "brass" paint. I think there is no finish as beautiful as the aged original; it makes me angry to see the "Professionally Refinished" fixtures on Ebay covered in swaths of solid, bright colors that, at least on fixtures like mine, are nothing like the original, subtle polychroming.

There are companies online that carry replacement porcelain sockets and cloth-covered wire, like Sundial Wire and Savta, but I decided to try Lowe's first. Surprisingly they had the exact same porcelain sockets, and without the hard-wiring, but with a different bracket. Lowe's also had replacement candelabra sockets, for vintage wall sconcery. They didn't have the fake wax candles made of paper for the candelabra (just a note for my future project) or the cloth wire, but I went ahead and bought zip cord and twisted it into a similar look. One of the bulbs is an appliance bulb for now. The existing fan support -which was only attatched to the ceiling plaster, not to the box!- is now attatched to a new multi-use plate which is sandwiched between the light fixture's support and two metal rectangles included with the plate. I removed most of the chain after realizing that chaining it to a hook above the dining table (off-center in the room) looked silly.



Pretty!