Kitchen Wainscot & Trim

It has been a long while since I've posted and not sure if anybody is still watching, but I will do better to keep the progress updated here. Although Mom and Dad are still working constantly on the house, it is down to mostly the details now. Their strategy is to finish the interior one or two rooms at a time instead of working on a lot of projects little by little with nothing getting completed. The kitchen is the most important room in the house so that is what they have been concentrating on. Dad spent the last few weeks on the second floor where all of the old trim is stacked, cleaning, stripping, scraping and priming the original trim from the kitchen to have it reinstalled. Mike McCarthy, my general contractor, came back last week and installed the trim in the kitchen and Mom immediately painted it, twice, and finished that project this past weekend. Not only is the trim now restored and complete, but the room is almost completely finished and they will be moving on to other projects now throughout the interior. The kitchen looks great, and its character has been restored. 

The trim was painted gloss French Gray, the same colour as the cabinets and doors in that room. Below is the door from the front porch.

Below is the door as it looked when I was there last June

 

 and today...

 

The new floors are an inch lower than the original floor so a new base trim was added at the bottom to cover the gap. 

Below is the new wider opening to the rest of the house as it was last June, and below that, as it looks now.

 

 The kitchen as it was... 

...and this is the narrow window behind the stove, finished...

...as well as the window looking out to the road!

Below is the north west corner of the kitchen, as it looked until 2010.

The door to the dining room has been widened, and the door to the pantry has been moved to Mom and Dad's new closet in the basement. Below is last June.

 

This is the same corner now.

This is Lois, Ralta, Sandy and Loreen sitting on the fainting couch in the kitchen during Dad's 70th birthday party in July of 2008.

 The same window today, above the sink

The trim below the sill is new. The old stuff was pretty much destroyed by the removal, as was almost half of the trim. This couldn't be helped. It was built like a fortress and held in place by 100 years of paint. Dad discovered that the wainscot is maple, and the original finish was varnish. That would have looked great when new but far too much work to restore, and too much damage would have been visible. We always knew it to be painted anyway, so it's painted again, ready for another century.

Thank you very much Lois for taking these photographs of the finished trim. It is always wonderful to see the progress, and with every passing day, to know it is becoming a home again.