Our Bungalow

Actually, I’m not sure what the mice are planning, but they always seem to be up to something in this house.

The men and women, however, have a plan. And here it is (click for enlarged image):

Main Level Plan

This isn’t going to be very useful to those of you who haven’t been in our house, and it might not even be useful to those who have.

It’s a drawing of a remodeled back three rooms of our house: Dining room, kitchen, and family room on the main level. “But I thought you were refinishing your basement!” you say? Yes, we are, but we realized that we wouldn’t even be able to get lumber or sheet rock into the basement, because the entrance to the stairway going down is to cramped with turns. So, we need to blow a hole in the family room wall to get a straight shot down the stairs (Stacy’s been wanting to do that since we moved in).

So, we thought we should decide what that hole in the wall could eventually be part of. We spent less than two hours with an architect, David Wagner, from SALA Architecture. It was time well spent. He pulled all of our ideas together and solved some problems that we couldn’t figure out. He sketched the plans you see here.

I think the mice will be happy.

Dining Room Corner Cabinet

You might have caught a glimpse in a previous post of some built-in corner cabinets in our dining room. We had to pull one out to get the radon pipe up the wall.

They’re nice cabinets, but we didn’t like them from the start because they didn’t fit into the style of the house. The rest of the house is mission style heavy quarter sawn oak, and these cabinets are more closely aligned with a colonial style (my sister has a colonial home with similar cabinets. They look great there!).

They are in what was originally the kitchen when the house was built. However, we believe that around 1940, the current kitchen was added on and the old kitchen was turned into a dining room. By 1940, the bungalow style had somewhat lost favor, so it’s understandable that these “more 1940’s stylish” cabinets would be installed (along with a faux tin ceiling).

Cabinet Removed

But it was time for them to go. We posted them on Craigslist, and they sold almost immediately to a gentleman from St. Paul (a cabinet maker, in fact). It’s fun to sell things that you don’t want, and know they’re going to someone who really wants them.

So, I removed the second cabinet from the wall, loaded them into his truck, and away they went! So, now we have two bare spots in our dining room that we’ll need to live with until we figure out what we’re going to do to remodel that space.

The money we made from selling these pretty much pays for the oak bookcases we purchased last week. Sweet! Thanks again, Craigslist!

Now You See It...

...Now You Don't