So.. the kitchen...

So after winning the house and closing on it, we got to dig in! We wanted to start with the kitchen, since it was in really poor shape. There were 2 windows that were divided by a brick chimney. The chimney was from the basement summer kitchen. The servants would cook the summer meals down there to avoid adding extra heat to the living quarters. (It didn't matter that some of the servants lived down there, apparently. Just important that the family was comfortable I guess)

We removed the chimney brick by brick and stacked them in the back yard to use at a later date.  The windows were pretty bad, since the squirrels had gotten into the house. So I happened to be on Craigslist and found someone selling a huge window with leaded glass on the top. We were able to buy it from him pretty inexpensively (which is important due to the amount of renovations we were facing). So we planned out the upper cabinets to fit around the new window. This room also had 2 layers of peel and stick vinyl floor that I had to scrape up, to expose the beautiful hardwood underneath. The cabinets were bought online and we built them and hung them ourselves. We are still working on finishing the tin ceiling look, but otherwise the kitchen is done. As with most of the house, the demo, build, wiring, installing, painting and finishing was done by us! We knew early on this was going to be a BIG project, so the more we learned to do ourselves, the better off financially we would be in the long run. And the sense of accomplishment is fantastic!!