Rejuvenation Projects Blog

Job number one was tackled shortly after we’d moved in. The kitchen featured a set of St. Charles metal cabinets in generally excellent condition. They were originally a swank aqua color if the top of the cabinets is any indication, but somewhere along the lines received a pretty nice spray enamel paint job in an off-white. Here’s a shot of the kitchen prior to move-in:

Note the sweet General Electric oven that I believe to be original, contrasting nicely with the ceramic cooktop nearby. One thing that may be of interest only to me is that the back side of the temperature knob on the oven features a movable slider that allows the user to adjust the actual temperature setting relative to the dial-indicated temperature. I’m an engineer, and even if I don’t do much cooking at all, I require precise temperature control. Speaking of engineering and the oven, if you have one of these that’s stuck in perma-buzz mode on account of a broken knob on the clock/timer, a section of a drinking straw used to center that knob will take care of the problem, so long as you’re not too concerned with doing the job right. I’d also recommend not inadvertently knocking that straw out of the opening for the knob and on to a hot oven door.

The wallpaper on the back wall wasn’t doing it for us at all, and the house as a whole lacked some color, so we decided to take a cue from the original cabinet colors and go bold. Of course, that meant the wallpaper would have to come off, and we were definitely apprehensive about how severe that battle might become.

Fortunately, the week before we moved I was mountain biking while on a business trip in Taiwan and managed to do quite a number on my wrist, so that meant I wouldn’t be holding up my end of the bargain. We were quite lucky in that my parents decided to come down to do what they could to help us get settled in. Little did they know we’d also put them to work with wallpaper removal. My dad and my wife doing some of the heavy lifting:

While the wallpaper came off easily enough, it soon became quite clear that when it was put up it was because that wall was in sad shape and somebody didn’t want to fix it. This meant discrepancies in wall flatness up to a quarter inch would need to be fixed, which was a bit daunting for me as I wasn’t wise in the ways of the drywall compound. Fortunately, this small wall provided plenty of opportunities to practice. Eventually the wall was approaching something remotely resembling flat and it was time to TSP it and prime. Learned a valuable lesson there: don’t try to mix in some old Kilz with new, unless you like stringy goo on your freshly-sanded wall. Eventually I fixed that mess and it was on to the paint.

Painting was definitely a non-OSHA sanctioned event as we had a bit of trouble reaching the ceilings around all the cabinets with conventional ladders, or even one of those groovy articulating ones. In the end, we ended up calling in a step stool and some small scaffolding as well, and used various combinations thereof. We even had my wife on the ladder on the countertop, but the ladder is wider than the countertop so I was supporting one side of the ladder. Not at all pretty, but it got the job done.

The next obvious choice to go was the chandelier. In something of a recurring theme, the existing chandelier was a very niece piece but we just didn’t think it fit the house (it will have a new home in my sister’s dining room, though). We settled on the Orbis Tri and got a custom length due to the high ceiling; the custom length took a little extra time but was well worth the wait. In the mean time, I ended up having surgery on my wrist, which put me out of commission for a while. I ended up having to travel a bunch too, so the seemingly trivial task of hanging the light ended up taking several months. When we did get to the light it was impressive to see how well packaged it was and how easily it went together. I will say that if you’re not super excited about being high atop a ladder hanging a lamp one-handed that you should probably still try to focus on not repeatedly ramming the globes into each other as you hang them, as you may find yourself with a cracked globe and a less-than-sunny disposition. That’s certainly no fault of the lamp as glass obviously doesn’t take too kindly to that sort of abuse. It was easy enough to get a replacement globe and all is well with the fixture now.

In any event, here are things as they sit today:

Current kitchen

We managed to find a complete kitchen’s worth of St. Charles cabinets near Chicago and purchased them. The set is in excellent shape and will be used to add cabinet space around the fridge. This will entail removing a tiny excuse for a desk, getting a cabinet-depth refrigerator that will hopefully be less intrusive, and then painting both the existing set of cabinets as well as the ones we’ll be adding. For now, we have a light for the front porch that’s been sitting even longer than the Orbis did, so we’ll get that installed and take some pictures of it as well.

Thanks for reading.