Relocating built in buffet

[Mellydramatic]

I'm brand new to the site, so I hope I'm posting appropriately.

We're looking at putting an offer on a brick bungalow house, 1926, in a small farm town outside of Chicago. I love all of the original pine woodwork and beautiful built ins that are characteristic of this type of house.

One of the plans we had was to expand the small kitchen by removing or widening the wall between it and the dining room. However, the beautiful built in buffet in the dining room is in that wall. Has anyone had one of these built ins removed and relocated to another location in the home? I believe I have access to skilled cabinet makers.

Please let me know what you think. Thank you.

[phil]

you might need to consult with a structural engineer if it is a bearing wall, so far as moving the built-ins yes that does sound doable. Newer homes often use trusses which make the attic useless. but they carry a longer span and open concept homes are the later trend. older homes don't have these pre engineered trusses so something has to be there to hold the middle up. Often you can use a beam and some posts or something like it instead or maybe it isn't a structural wall at all.
My house has some posts in the basement and beams above them under the basement trusses, then on the main floor there are walls that run pretty much under the peak of the roof. You can transfer how that load is carried but you can't just knock all the walls out unless you carry the weight some other way.

[Neighmond]

Alooha! Welcome in.

I always recommend living with the house as it is for a year before making major changes that aren't mandated by safety or some such. Often, what seems like the best idea in the world looses its shine when quirks of the house become known.

If move it you shall, the good news is that a lot of times the built-ins were supplied to the builder as a unit that was installed whole or assembled from components on site. If you carefully examine the buffet with the trim off of both sides, and the drawers out you should be able to see where and how it is in there. If it was stick built on location, you may be able to save the facade and build a new carcass in its new location.

Cheers!
Chaz

[Gothichome]

Melodramatic, welcome to wavyglass. As mentioned by Neighmond, a lot of us advocate the 'live in the home for a while.' The home will tell you what it needs and you'll be surprised at how workable these old homes are in their original configuration. Phill mentioned load bearing, open concept is a real nightmare if not done correctly. If the wall your thinking of moving is middle'ish in the house and runs perpendicular to the rafters there is a good chance it does take some roof loading. If there is a wall in the basement or a large beam under the wall in question you can be pretty sure it's load bearing. One other item, if the home looks like it was 'as built'. You may want to think about over all condition of the home. After 90 years there may be stronger priorities than moving a wall.

[phil]

It is a pretty extreme modification. Lots of people who aren't used to old houses or who watch a lot of the TV dramas where they remuddle houses and make them worth more seem to get it into their heads that any house is more livable if it is open concept. at one point in time there were people with the concept that the ceilings were too tall and I have seen several homes where someone actually dropped the ceiling to 8 feet. lol .. you really have to think these things through. even little thinks like oh I didn't realize that wall had a vent in it or oh now I need a new range cable all the way back to the panel can be gotcha's..
in mine two weeks after I bought the plugged sewer and leaking plumbing and the hot water tank that was puking water because there never was a pressure regulator became proiorities. some renos are best dont before moving in though especially kitchens.
Some think the windows are too small and go stick in a big picture window which really messes with the look of a house. You really do have to at least try to keep the style of a house. I see so many where they just throw off the craftsman style trim and go with other windows and I think geeze how hard would it be just to keep that detail even if you went and just cut new wood and painted it.
I think the home reno dramas are responsible for a lot of the messes people create and you really have to remember these are mostly made for TV dramas. there is almost no learning in most of them. If they are all hugging the owner and saying oh how you saved our house etc I just switch it off.
when i bought my house my ex wife wanted me to take one of the only three bedrooms to make a dining room and that involved load bearing walls. she wanted french doors into a room that already had a door and had no concept of the construction of the house or why the walls were situated the way they are. i put it off and now I am so glad that mess never happened.

when we were looking at old houses, they weren't the biggest mansions you could find and about 9 in 10 of them had some strange modification that was the result of some brain fart , usually to divide up suites but done by a homeowner with a half baked plan. I guess thats why most were in our price range !

[Neighmond]

I don't see that the OP is looking to go all HGTV on it-they said they liked the trim and details, it was only moving a buffet. In defense, I can sympathize with them, My house in Emmetsburg had a cramped and miserable little cheese box of a kitchen that was solely economy-minded even in 1916, and the only saving grace was that some PO enclosed the kitchen porch and I had four by eight feet of extra space and a beautiful wall of windows to make it seem less like the stuffy little hole that it was. I lived there a year, kept a note pad of what I had, needed, wanted, and wasn't going to get, and then a sensible renovation of the kitchen commenced. The owner two parties later is still using my kitchen, so I must have done something right.

[CS in Low Hud]

Hi and welcome Mellydramatic!

I'll echo the "If you can, live in the house for a year before making big changes" comments. It will save you money in the long run and show you where that money is best used when you decide to move forward.

Good for you for recognizing the value of your built-ins. As others have indicated, these are often possible to relocate (should you decide to go through with that). Pictures would help, but generally you would start by removing exterior trim and the drawers to give you an idea of how it's attached.

Our kitchen was the original 11' X 9' for the first seven years we lived in the house. We finally decided the best way to gain some room was to add an addition. We were not lucky enough to have an original built-in sideboard, but I went ahead and built one into the dining room/kitchen wall that was double-sided. This saves space, as the cabinets can be accessed from either room, so I no longer needed a freestanding piece of furniture for a sideboard.

It seems like you would have to move your cabinet to some other wall in the dining room, otherwise you will need to replace it with a piece of furniture that's NOT built in - you'll need some place to store the dishes and put food, right? Have you thought about where exactly you would move it and what you would gain/loose by doing so?

Chris

[Mellydramatic]

Thank you all for your respectful and insightful tips. You're right in that I don't want to change the character of the house at all. The reason we're buying it is because of its innate beauty.

As for moving the buffet, I was actually considering making it a part of the kitchen instead of the dining room, then it can still provide it's original use while allowing me to use the antique dinining table and free standing buffet I have from my grandparents within the dining room itself. They are not craftsman design, but are large American Victorian oak pieces. I know it's not purist, but wouldn't necessarily be unusual for original builders to have mixed genre pieces.

All of the trim and built ins in this house are douglas fir, which is more orangish than the mission oak I've usually seen. I'm kind of worried about picking paint color too, because I want the beauty of the wood to show without it being an overwhelming color. Could someone point me to some resources on paint?

[Neighmond]

I'm colour blind, so that is one topic I keep my big yap shut on!

[nlswitz]

Welcome! I agree with others who suggested living with the house for a year. We too have a buffet between the kitchen and dining room. All our wood trim is also Douglas Fir. After refinishing all the wood we painted the walls with BM Georgian Green. This or similar shades of green look really nice with the wood. Have fun on your old house journey.