GrahamsGreen: April 2011

Last year, I got a call from Suzanne, who got my number through a common friend. She needed a couple of random small things done and I was happy to do them for her. Soon, her list took on a life of its own. It went from adding a little bit of trim here and there to "please tear down this wall". And once I tore down that wall, I haven't looked back since.

Here's the new wall:

Before I knew it, I was renovating Suzanne's whole kitchen. She had a couple of slightly unconventional ideas about her design. These ideas kind of made the job both challenging and a pleasure to work on.

Suzanne's house was a typical NDG mission-style semi-detached duplex probably from the 20's or 30's. Nothing in this house was level, not the floor, not the walls, not the ceiling, nothing. This is actually pretty standard for a house this age, and not surprising. For example, from the back door to 12 feet in, there was a difference of 2.5 inches in the floor. The ceiling was two inches off. Generally this is only a challenge for the cabinet makers. But in this kitchen Suzanne wanted a California ceiling. Suzanne kept calling it a drop ceiling which profoundly confused me for a long time. (Typically a drop ceiling is a framework of aluminum supports filled in with light insulated tile like this.)

conventional drop-ceiling

I kept picturing this and what she really meant was a series of connected bulk-heads framing the room, sitting about a foot down from the ceiling. In the middle of the bulk head is an 8'x4' recessed area. Unfortunately I couldn't use the existing ceiling because it was incredibly wonky (previous builders/renovators simply added layers of ceiling). I had to attach shims to the existing ceiling, screwing through to the above joists (support beams). Then I screwed my new ceiling to the shims.

Part of California ceiling

Further complicating this whole job was reconciling the plaster and lathe with the new gyprock. Most residential walls built in the early 20th century were built by nailing 1/4 inch by 1 inch wooden slats (with about 1/4 inch space in between) up to studs and then coating the wood with about 3/4 inches of plaster all done by hand. This created kind of a beautiful idiosyncratic wall, with various dimensions. Everything looks "touched by hand." The issues with this method has to do with repairing the surface or any type of renovation. As soon as you move one wooden slat, unless you cut it off with a hand knife, you are liable to destroy a significant section of wall. If you either move or vibrate (via the use of an electric tool) the wood, the plaster will, guaranteed, break apart. And if you ever need to do electrical work and wire needs to be fished behind the wall, it's near impossible to cut out just a small chunk to create an access point. Everything becomes a bigger job with plaster and lathe. It takes longer and costs more.

Old kitchen

The next big challenge for this job was the chimney. We took off the cabinetry and tucked behind this wall was about a four inch deep chimney. Chimney's often become a structural aspect to a house so, generally it's not a good idea to remove them. In the interest of maximizing the space and fitting appliances and storage in, we needed to literally cut about 4-5 inches off the width. Wow! That was something else. The bricks used to build chimney's are especially dense and thick and they have a hollow cylindrical core to allow gasses and soot to flow upwards. We went to Reno Renavature and rented a hand concrete saw. This thing weighed about 40 pounds. We decorated the kitchen with hanging plastic in our attempts to control dust. I donned ear plugs, eye, hand, and head protection and got up on a ladder and started cutting. It was the loudest, dustiest, messiest work I've done in a long long time. I was coated head to toe in dust. But! I cut the most perfect line. Obviously I drew the line before I began, but still, dropping in a 40 pound saw and keeping it level to the ground is an incredibly difficult task. You only get one chance to do that kind of thing right. In the following picture you can see the edge of the chimney sitting up against the cabinets. (You can also see how unlevel the floor is if you look at the kick-plate at the bottom of the cabinet)