Another Kitchen Restoration

[Texas_Ranger]

Kitchens have to be renovated on the other side of the pond too.

My parents have rented another apartment for decades, using it mainly as an office. The kitchen was more or less our shop and storage and remained more or less exactly as we found it when the previous tenant passed away in 1990 and his partner ran as fast as she could. I'll post pictures but I'm at the farm right now and don't have the camera with me.

The kitchen isn't that large and L-shaped because when they built the house they walled off part of the kitchen for a water closed accessible from the hall. There's one window across from the door with a "California Cooler" underneath, a built-in ventilated cupboard for cool storage. On the left-hand side there's another built-in cupboard that goes all the way from the floor to the ceiling. It's oddly shaped because it's built around the curved stairs on the other side of the wall - on one side it's only 6" deep and on the other about 24". All appliances are on the right-hand side, which is less than 10 feet long. Double sink (white porcelain with a dark blue rubber edge from the 50s), 1950 fridge painted brown in the 70s, a chest of drawers and a gas cooker from the 70s, in quite decent shape but oddly placed. The cupboard below the window protrudes about 8" into the room so the corners on either side of the window can only be used for open shelves. For that reason the cooker sits about 8" away from the wall, creating a useless and hard to clean gap.

The only other piece of furniture was a HUGE freestanding cupboard, over 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide. The lower section is obviously older, probably from the 1920s. Two tall doors (5 1/2') on either side, the one on the left with shelves and an ironing board compartment, the one on the right with shelves and pull-out spice bins (probably a later addition as the small bins are all plastic). In the middle there are low double doors with one shelf, a kind of flip-down secretary hatch and a top section with sliding glass doors.
The upper part is dated on the back, 29 September 1932 and has doors with shelves. It's ridiculously heavy, solid wood body and hollow plywood doors but unfortunately no longer usable for kitchen purposes. The plywood is cracking all over and shedding the paint but worst of all each compartment stinks differently - perfume, washing powder, mothballs etc. We moved it upstairs and keep it for tool storage.

The right-hand wall has tile that could be original from 1915 and will probably stay although there are a few holes and surface cracks. Two tiles came off in one piece when we started stripping the woodchip wallpaper and will probably be reinstalled.

Heat was originally provided by a wood-fired cookstove that was removed long ago. When we moved in there was a wall-mounted gas heater that was replaced with a hot-water radiator in the late 90s. Unfortunately it's poorly placed and we'll have to move it. We'll also have to move the sink a bit because it's not centred under the taps. Thankfully my uncle is a plumber.

Stripping the wallpaper was a surprisingly quick job and done in under five hours just using a big brush and cold water. In some spots I managed to pull off whole sheets of paper! Now that the room is more or less empty we found several old wall designs. The original scheme is more or less lost but I think it was white paint with some kind of dark blue design. Then there's an amazingly well-kept 20s design, off-white paint with a 3-colour roller pattern of lines and spirals in purple, red and yellow. On top of that, probably early-30s, greenish-grey paint with a white and dark grey pattern, pretty ghastly if you ask me. We found these two behind the large cupboard the green was probably painted around the time the top part was added in 1932. Then there's a 50s pattern, green and orange flowers on a beige background. This is waterproof paint so we found it more or less in its original glory behind the wallpaper. My youngest brother loved it so much that we'll probably try to re-create it. I'd prefer the 1920s pattern but this isn't my kitchen.

None of the furniture except the built-ins will stay but I've rounded up a cool early-60s kitchen that I hope we can pick up early next week for next to nothing.

Before we can put that in we'll have to get all the plumbing done and lots of painting.

[Graywings]

Any pictures?

[Texas_Ranger]

Any pictures?

Sure, as promised!

The first picture is taken standing in the doorway and mostly shows the layout.

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Second is the floor-to-ceiling built-in. The bottom part that juts out isn't original, probably added in the 20s when the first part of the big cupboard was put in. With that addition the built-in is ridiculously deep, well over 3' on one side. Originally there were two single doors, a taller one on the bottom and a shorter one on top. When they built the new lower part they changed that to double doors and switched top and bottom. Depending on the future layout we might remove the added part. It's only held to the original frame with a handful of screws.

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The monstrous cupboard is already gone, moving it was a bear, even with the doors off! The bottom centre double doors never closed properly because the hinge mortices were too deep. I took them off, added a bit of veneer and now the doors close perfectly.

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[Texas_Ranger]

The last picture shows nicely that the previous tenant was CHEAP - whenever painted surfaces were dingy or worn he had someone mix somewhat matching paint and patched small spots! The flash really highlights that. Some doors have at least three different coats of paint!

The top of protruding built-in and the window stool are covered with this weird stuff - I'm fairly sure it's asbestos cement.

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It's only screwed in place so we could remove it without disturbing it.

That's the sink area. You can just see the awkwardly placed radiator on the right. The electric hot water tank is small (only 5 l, that's about 1 1/4 gal.) and it's bowing visibly so it has to go. We'll probably replace it with a tankless gas unit.

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[Powermuffin]

I hope you keep posting pictures; we would love to see the "afters."
Diane

[Texas_Ranger]

The deal on the almost free vintage kitchen fell through I guess we'll have to keep looking. Cheap kitchens pop up nearly every day, sometimes even complete with appliances.

It'll be a while until I can post after pictures. The plumber said he'll take a look some time this week and can probably do the work next week. There's also a lot of wiring to be done (essentially a full rewire). Then it's on to the cosmetic stuff.

This is the oldest complete pattern we found. It looks like it was done with one roller and purple paint and then with a dual-colour roller and yellow and red paint.

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The greenish-grey with dark grey and white came later. Definitely not my cup of tea!

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The woodchip paper is gone now. You can see that the wiring layout is quite wonky. The gas line isn't that nice either. I suppose they didn't want to touch the tile when they replaced the gas lines.

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[Texas_Ranger]

A while ago we looked at another 60s kitchen that was really cheap but the price had reasons beyond age. The cabinets were in pretty bad shape with loose doors and drawers. There was only one original drawer to begin with and that was supported by a piece of wood on one side and three screws on the other. Below, hidden by a door, there were five more drawers hacked in, none of them operating properly. There were more cabinets than we could use and we'd have had to cut the worktops and reconfigure everything. Bummer!

The first plumber said he didn't want to do any gas pipework and the second one is on holiday until the 13th but we do have an appointment with the chimney sweep. Installing new gas appliances is a somewhat complex process as the authorities involved really want to make sure people can't kill themselves or their family. Any gas pipework has to be done by a certified plumber and then inspected by the gas supplier (I think three times, rough inspection, completion certificate and final half a year later to make sure all required vent openings are there and haven't been blocked or anything) and the chimney sweep needs to sign off everything too. If anything is to be connected to the chimney, he has to inspect the flue, if necessary install a liner (or tell us to have someone else do it) and he'll also tell us how long the stovepipe can be. So until we know where we can put the water heater there isn't much we can do.

[Texas_Ranger]

So far we've had the chimney sweep in twice, the first time he only told us that the cleanout door on the roof had been closed up and needed to be reopened. This week he checked the flue, cleaned out some 50 kgs (over 100 lbs.) of sand/crumbled mortar and said we'll need a cast-in-place liner (which is exactly what we expected).

Plumber #2 is from the countryside and moaned he didn't want to do any more work in Vienna. Plumber #3 was pretty annoying and kept trying to talk me into keeping the small electric tank. He did send a quote that came out at 1500 Euros IIRC. That was just a local company, 5 minutes walking distance from here. Then we called in #4, recommended by a colleague. That one seemed much more reasonable but his quote came in at close to 3500 Euros! Considering that the tankless is around 850 that seems an awful lot of money for installing some water pipes and bolting the tankless to the wall!

We then bought a fairly new used tankless, a model that's still in production so we shouldn't have any issues with the gas supplier getting it installed. It only cost 150 so we should have saved a bit of money. The seller didn't need it any more because she had her 1920s council apartment connected to the district heating system.

We also decided to put the water heater where the gas pipe for the old wall heater exits the wall as that saves us a whole lot of hassle with the gas supplier. That means longer water pipes though and possibly losing some tiles in the adjacent WC. The wall separating the two rooms is only 3" gypsum block so channeling for pipes could disturb the tiles.