Lots of kitchen news

Nothing terribly photogenic has happened in the last couple of weeks, but believe me, we've been hard at work.  We leveled every single strip of ceiling strapping, pounding shims above our heads while knocking decades' worth of dust directly into our eyes.  We've added fresh insulation in amongst the crazy framing (the best part about this is that now the area between the ceiling and the second floor are insulated all the way around the house.  Previously that area was totally uninsulated, which is why it was interesting to discover our upstairs bathroom pipes in that space).  Then we had to nail lath back onto all the studs - yes, the very lath that we just removed.  If you don't put some back after removing both plaster and lath, then you'll face all kinds of problems with your original woodwork later because you'll have removed too much depth.  Without the lath, you'd be about 1/4" off everywhere.  That would suck.  Luckily, you don't have to put it ALL back.  Just a few strips nailed vertically on top of the studs will do.  

Here's a close-up example of one spot that was super obnoxious to get to the point of being able to put drywall over it - note the layers of studs new and old, shards of lath jammed behind the door frame and thus unremovable, etc. It was tedious.  And dirty.  But we'll be glad we did all that leveling and measuring in the end.

That red strip will be a nailer for our new/old wainscoting. We recycled it, which is why it's red.  At some point, much of the wainscoting was hacked down to counter height of 36".  You can see where the original nailers were closer to 42".  But because we plan to use the freshly-stripped old wainscoting, we adjusted them all down to 36".  Another pain in the you-know-where that we'll be glad we did later.

Before we hauled off about eleventy billion pounds of plaster chunks, we saved a few to represent all the colors we found.  Poinsettia red, which we painted, that lovely fruit wallpaper, a shard of baby blue, a light green, a bright yellow, and yes, this kitchen was once pink. I'd pretty much kill for a picture of that. We put these all in a ziplock bag and shoved them back up in the ceiling for the next ceiling-tearer-downers to find.

Finally!  Time to start drywalling.  Champ lent a helping paw.

And we celebrated putting up the ceiling by cooking up something tasty.  No more ancient dust bunnies falling in our food!

Someday we'll look back at this and laugh.  That day can't come soon enough.