Oooooh, pretty!

Old houses have issues but they aren't its fault (I know, I talk about them rather like they're sentient but go with me on this). Old houses also have lots of really great things in them that usually have to be uncovered. I've learned that I’m not fighting the house, I’m fighting for the house to make it a real home. More than anything, I think I’m fighting the people who did all of the crap to kill its homey spirit and trying to prevent it from happening to another one.

As you may recall from our first post about the kitchen here at Isthmus House, it’s a pretty traditional 1910 kitchen. At about 120 sq. ft., it has a door on every wall, a pretty good-sized window, the main stack for the house and some brick that’s covered in plaster jutting into the room.

One of my sorority sisters, Chrissy, is a kitchen designer in metro Detroit and has been helping me figure out exactly how to deal with all of the fun that comes with such a kitchen. Kitchen designers are fantastic resources for kitchen redesigns because they know all of the caveats and considerations. Chrissy is no exception to that rule and came up with a bunch of good ideas for dealing with the odd layout.

While we were discussing and finishing up preliminary plans, I decided that the kitchen was too dark and dreary for me to wait for the full restoration to make some changes. It’s going to be a expensive to do completely and I’m having trouble with opportunity cost (i.e. if I do the kitchen, I can’t do much else around Isthmus House for a bit).

The obvious solution was to repaint the cabinets I already have until I could replace them. A relatively quick project, I got to work this past weekend. With all of my supplies compiled to get the doors down and to get all of the grease and grime off of everything, I got started. Taking off the doors wasn't too challenging even with the hardware painted over. With the first one off, I realized that there might be something interesting underneath.

Underneath all of the grimy paint was what looked a whole lot like decent wood grain. After texting a few pictures around and thinking about it, I took one of the door upstairs to my workshop (aka the former upstairs unit’s kitchen) and got started on stripping the paint off the back so I could get a better idea of what was really underneath the 29340823* layers of paint.

There’s one really important PSA when working with paint stripper: read the directions. You need to wear protective clothing, chemical-resistant gloves and glasses at the very least and sometimes a special mask too. I was using stripper that’s specifically made to be used indoors but stripper contains some really heavy-duty chemicals you don’t want to play with.

After working on the back of the door for a few layers, it occurred to me that the doors might just be replacements and the cabinets (dare I think it?) original.

I came to the conclusion that I couldn't just add another layer of paint to the cabinetry; I needed to know what was underneath all of the layers.

So downstairs I went to start brushing paint stripper on my cabinets.

One layer down, the wood was indeed as pretty as I had hoped.

The end panels, it turned out, have been lots of colors over the past many years including whatever the color is called that they were when I moved in – I’ll go with taupe, a biscuit-y yellow color, bright orange, and white.

Really, they remind me a little of the paper we pulled out of the cabinets when we first moved in. We took a lot of paint off:

Once I got down to pretty clean wood, I sanded them down lightly (fine grit sandpaper, friends – soft woods are easy to gouge!). 

What I found is pretty astounding.

The cabinets are nice quality wood although I’m not sure what kind – maybe multiple kinds. Guesses are welcome!

What I’d like to do eventually is move these cabinets over to the other side of the door out to the foyer. The range is in front of it still (you can see it in the very top picture above), but it won’t be forever! 

This particularly happy find might save me a few thousand dollars (custom cabinetry is a schwee bit expensive but often, as it is in my case, less expensive than stock). Let’s hope it’s the start of a beautiful kitchen!

*numbers are approximate