Old floor (ignore the paper bag man...)

I found this file photo from 2008 of the old kitchen floor.  Try to avoid being distracted by the prominent paper bag man in the pic:)  Big improvement, right?!

A brand new (old) kitchen!

We've been on hiatus here at domestic life for a couple of reasons, starting with a kitchen makeover, followed by a hospitalization (which incidentally was completely unrelated to the work in the kitchen).  This resulted in very little actual "domestic" life being accomplished over the past month or so, unless you include calling for food delivery domestic (and it supposed it is in a way...) but not exactly what I'm looking to promote here on this blog.  You could also say that the work in the kitchen was "domestic" and I suppose that would be true too, except that I didn't take photos of that process so it doesn't count...:)  Honestly, I considered taking photos many times during the process, but was so freaked out that the project would not turn out well that I couldn't bring myself to document.  But all's well that ends well as they say and very fortunately (and thanks to a lot of hard work by my hubby, father and brother) everything turned out quite well and now we are the happy recipients of a brand new kitchen floor!  Of course, the floor is not new at all- we pulled up four-ish layers of horribly ugly flooring only to find the original 1920's wood floors!  I had always suspected there were wood floors somewhere under our loose, cracked and otherwise homely tile kitchen floor.  One day something got into me and Andy and before we knew it, we had removed about 3 square inches of tile and then sub-flooring to reveal what we thought at the time was wood floor (more about that later...).  Before you know it, we were ripping a very loose tile floor up and having a ball- that is until about halfway through when I looked around and thought "oh (expletive)- there's no going back now!" That's about when I exited the kitchen and practiced breathing techniques while Andy continued to happily demo and destroy.  Under the tile layer came the plywood subfloor, which seemed to have been nailed down every couple inches or so by whatever genius installed the tile in the first place.  The plywood cracked and splintered at every pry of the crowbar, making this an ever-so-slightly more difficult job than we'd initially anticipated.  Shortly into the sub-floor prying came the moment where Andy and I paused to look at a now two-foot area where the tile and plywood has been removed to stand back and admire what was to be our lovely new wood floor.  Of course, when we took a good hard look, there was a moment on silence as we both came to the realization that this was not a hardwood floor at all, but terribly ugly linoleum instead.  At that point, I really had to exit the room and take a moment to gather myself.  That was indeed the low point of the project.  Well, perhaps that moment was tied with the when we first attempted to remove the linoleum, only to find that it was cemented down with tar (yes, TAR) that came up in one centimeter pieces at a time.  Did I mention the kitchen is 12' x 12' plus a pantry?  Well, let's just say that through hard work and dedication the linoleum was removed, we ate lots and lots of takeout, then the floor man came and re-refinished the floors and now we have a much improved new/old kitchen.  The floors aren't perfect- in fact there's a large rectangular outline next to an old coal stove vent we found when Andy moved the refrigerator, and I'm fairly sure it must be the old outline of said coal stove.  But I think that just adds character and tells a nice story so I'm kind-of fond of the imperfections.  This project has also given us an opportunity to re-organize and clean the kitchen (you don't hear much about "cleaning" on this "domestic" blog, but we're working on it...) which has made the kitchen far more useable.  So, please enjoy some pics of our new/old kitchen.  I've also included a pic of our first meal created in the new kitchen- a dish of pappardelle which incorporated sausage and spinach from Natick Community Farm and onions and hydroponic tomatoes from the Natick Wintertime Farmer's Market.  Enjoy! 

The ?coal stove outline

New pan organization

The floor takes her close-up

  

Pappardelle