The Start of the Dining Room

 Hello dear friends.  I hope your summer has been going amazingly.  Mine has been lovely and somewhat productive.  I have recently begun taking on the dining room.  A room that has been cold cold cold in winter due to lack of insulation and a room that has been used as a living room for much of its life as a duplex.  A room often overlooked and unloved, but it is time to change some of that.

When we purchased the house this room was UGLY.  A drop ceiling with tiles, carpet in half the room, lowered windows that were 1970s replacements and just not a nice space.  The 1st project upon moving in was to take that ceiling down to see what was under it.  

This was just after closing so how excited we were and how little we knew the amount of work that would come after this.  After taking the ceiling down and painting the walls there was nothing done to this room.  It was functional and there were many other projects to work on.  17 years later I decided enough was enough and it was time to change.  The big motivator was that I brought the original hutch back from upstairs back down.  My beautiful hutch that I spent YEARS stripping (you can read about that here) : Hutch Stripping

Here it is before I began the stripping:

Here is the hutch that was placed in the dining room but was built much later and was a lower quality.  It will fit nice elsewhere in the renovation, but for now it will go to storage. 

But I had to put the original one back because you know I am obsessed with this kind of thing.

 And as I took the old one out and got ready to put the new one in its old space I found that one of the load bearing beams for this wall was cut to put in the later bigger  hutch.  This was a problem because it allowed this part of the house to sag about an 1".  So that meant I had to partially rebuild this wall and make it stable again.

  Then the disgusting job of gutting began.  I would have LOVED to save the plaster in this room but there was absolutely no way.  There had been drywall placed over the plaster and as I carefully removed the drywall huge sheets of plaster fell to the ground.  It came off all very easy but oh so oh dusty.  This was a problem because this is a room I could not easily close off.  I put plastic on the doors around the room, but it doesn't do much.  I was releasing 130+ years of dust and after everything a thick layer of dust settled in my beautiful finished rooms.  Sigh so they will need a deep clean at some point.  I also forgot how heavy this stuff was.  I hauled out of this room myself around 85 bags full of lathe, plaster, old insulation, bird nests and crap out of this room to a waiting dumpster.  I got a good workout but man it's not as easy to do when you are not 25.

THE HUTCH IS HOME!!!!!!

Insulation in the walls for the 1st time ever.  It's going to be nice and cozy in here on a Minnesota winter. 

See that window behind the plumbing?  This is one thing I will sadly not be able to return to this house and that is a pass through from the butlers pantry.  This home only had 1 bathroom when built on the 2nd floor.  The butlers pantry had log ago disappeared into a large closet.  This closet is becoming my new 1st floor bath and so sadly I cannot keep the pass through open, ,but this opening will be where the new medicine cabinet will be.   The passthrough was interesting.  No door left, just the pocket and the wheels.  I so wish I could have put this back, but it was one thing I have to be OK with letting go.

Pass through wheels

Pass through pocket long ago disappeared. 

This radiator will also go away and be moved into the kitchen.  I now have to have a long low radiator to go below the picture window. 

A typical day of gutting.  If you know, you know.

Gutted and insulation and plastic up it was ready for drywall.  There are a lot of things I can do, but drywall is one I can't do well.  I also HATE it.  Putting it up and taping and mudding it is not a good skill of mine.  This is something I am happy to hire out.  The crew was done is a few days to put the room back together. 

Hutch looks perfectly at home right?  WRONG.  When a bathroom was placed on the first floor they built in in the kitchen, just behind the hutch.  They built a wall behind the hutch but they put it 1" TOO CLOSE! So I figure they pulled the hutch out, built the new bathroom and then tried to put the hutch back and realized that it wouldn't fit.  It sticks out 1"!!!! I am not happy because that means I will have to take that wall out to finish the dining room completely to put the trim around the hutch.  It is never easy is it.  

The room is once again a blank slate for me to begin.  I have to order the custom trim for the room to match the rest of the house since this was all gone.  No small task as it will cost around $3,500.  So this expense will be a big one to swallow.  On the bright side I do have the light fixtures for this room.  A beautiful slag glass chandelier and similar sconces that will match the stained glass window.  It's a process, but this room just got a huge step closer.

Can't wait to get these beautiful fixtures back up!

So it's a blank warmer slate again.  I can't wait to get it to the next step and make it an actual dining room.  Probably hasn't been a formal dining room for around 100 years, but it will be and will be more glorious than ever when I finish it.  Hopefully within the next 500 years.