A few pictures, finally.

tinlail came over and helped with yet more cleaning today - this is all post-restoration work cleanup, tho' there's a lot of other gah underneath it all. Thanks again to him and lyricae for all the finishing help - I'm not very good at working on this kind of thing alone. I get weird about it. The kitchen is essentially done; the upper counter needs more cleaning (the one that's shared by the kitchen and the living room) and a little caulking needs to go in. Oh, and the sink got clogged, so that'll have to be fixed. And the refrigerator needs cleaning. But other than that, it's done.

Anyway, here are some pictures. I don't have any online "before" shots handy, though. I might scan what I've got later. Oh, a couple of these are pretty-tile shots for poodlgrl if she wants any of them.

http://solarbird.net/5038/DinKitchen/

No before pictures, but...

...since I just typed up this long explanation for a mailing list, here it is for you, too. Oh, BTW, the BBFC would rate me 15. (See below for quiz. ^_^ )

This is the upper apartment in the addition of the house we've been living in since 1996.

The room was originally the main house's main-floor sunporch, with a little alcove (where the large windows are) as some sort of tiny semi-separate bonus room. When they built on the back half in 1924 (apartments 2 and 4, three being in the basement of the original house) they turned it into... well, honestly, I'm not sure what they used it for. You walked through it from the dining room of the main house to get to the living room of the upper flat in back. (The back was originally run as a traditional boarding house with, I think, common meals.) It possibly could have been a sitting room of some kind, but that's pure speculation on my part. Then, eventually - after the back half had been a chocolate factory for a while - Mr. Fixit separated off the upper floor back there and made it a true second apartment. He made the former porch into the worst kitchen I've ever seen, by grabbing two sets of cabinets from who-knows-where, building one in of his own (the one with the sink), and re-using whatever laminate he had handy for the countertops. He also added a layer of plywood over parts of some of the walls.

Then he painted the walls pink, the cabinet backs white, and some of the doors pink and some of them green. The laminate on the countertops was... I think one section of it was yellow, and the other section was blue, but I'm not sure. There were four different kinds of pulls on the drawers and doors, and ... six different kinds of hinges, I think, of which four kinds were still in use after replacing the doors on the overhead cabinets with the glass ones you see there, made by Ian and his cousin from rafters salvaged from the original (destroyed) carriage house roof - he just used whatever was handy. He took out the original sunporch light fixture and replaced it with a ceramic bare-bulb light overhead.

Oh, also, the open wall with the upper counter was closed - just a big solid wall, blank on the other side - and the two cabinet sets with glass doors had opaque pink doors and were attached to the wall about eight inches above the long countertop, which meant you had about 6" of usable counter depth.

Then it was left that way until I got here. I had the wall knocked out and the tile done some years ago, and have been doing small things since then, but Ben not wanting me working on it while he was back there (and then later similar issues with the replacement tenants) meant it sat fully functional (and much more usable) until the last six weeks, when I've finally finished it up.

The little yellow backing plates behind the wall lights are my favourite part, just because they're so awfully changing rooms. There had been lights there originally, but Mr. Fixit had replaced one with a closed metal electrical box just sitting on the wall, and the other with an electrical outlet. (Meaning, yes, that one single bare bulb was apparently his idea of an improvement.) When I took those down I discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that the wiring was still live! But, being knob-and-tube under a plaster layer (and damaged, at that) there wasn't any way I could fit an electrical box - the plaster was too shallow for a lathe mount, and there wasn't anything behind it. So I came up with those, solely to add enough depth to support a shallow-mount electrical box. Second would be the millwork, such as it is, because I couldn't find matching and made a reasonable approximation with my table saw, because that's what I had. (When all you have is a table saw, everything looks like plywood...)

I also moved the lightswitch for the overhead light so that it was near the entry, rather than in the middle of the back wall by the stove (a position which made good sense originally, as the room had been the back porch, and that's where the door to the rest of the house used to be), put in a bunch of undercabinet lights (with switches, yes), stripped and wirebrushed all the hinges (because they don't make those kind anymore) before coating them with metal paint, got matching door pulls, found drawer pulls that I liked but only came in bright brass so I had to strip off the varnish and treat them with brass ager... and so on.

There's been a lot of work in the other rooms, too.

( Anyway, like I said: 15 )

What to do when ice cream cakes fail

I made Anna a layer cake with an ice cream layer in the middle for her birthday today, or tried to; the ice cream layer inexplicably but utterly failed to set. I didn't think I had to do it the day before last year, but maybe I did. Anyway, it didn't work.

So I scraped the semi-liquid ice cream back out into a bowl, got out fruit spread and made a think layer with that between the layers of chocolate cake, and whipped up a whipped-cream frosting, at which point I realised that ice cream is also cream, and tossed in the mostly-molten ice cream with the whipping cream. Pleasantly, it whipped up nicely into a tasty frosting which brought the flavour I wanted from the ice cream back to the cake, and also turned a surprisingly pleasant pink.

The cake was chocolate, the ice cream white chocolate raspberry, the cream ordinary whipping creme, and the fruit layer was blackberry.

As for the presents part, Amazon is still screwing up the present delivery part - bastards! - and so I gave her my Valentine's Day present for her early, a plush elephant I've temporarily named Tusky McFlathead until we find better. ^_^

I didn't get much of anything else advanced today, but at least I made a good cake for my lifemate's birthday. ^_^