118 Henry Street

The P.O.’s (previous owners) of 118 Henry Street had a very specific vision when they commissioned the addition. Designed as a family room, it was the best insulated and quietest room in the house. When we first were considering the purchase, our meetings with the old couple would always find them in the back room, the addition, watching TV. They bragged about how warm the room was in winter. It was dark, quiet and cave like.

As mentioned in Part 1, the entrance to the addition was cut into the back wall of the kitchen, also the back wall of the house. This entrance removed a very large part of the usable wall space in the kitchen. The loss of this wall in tandem with the kitchen remodel, removed all remaining hints of the original 1921 kitchen floor plan or design.

Not long after finishing the mudroom, we innocently believed that the kitchen would be the next room to restore. My no-love-lost affair with the kitchen had begun even before purchasing the house and some…umm…changes to the floor plan had occurred early on.

We planned to take almost 2 years to repair and restore the kitchen. Unfortunately, we could not have predicted what the hurricane seasons of 2004-06, combined with the melt water from winter snowfalls would do to our plans. We basically spent almost 3 full years dealing with the effects from roof leaks, bad plumbing (hint: that ain’t exactly clean water), and other old house horrors.

Still, in 2004, our hope, and naivety, were strong…so began the wholesale demolition.

Our final plan for the kitchen has changed a couple of times. It’s really good that we were coerced by circumstances into taking our time and considering all possible designs.

Here is an excerpt from the current floor plan:

The mudroom renovation gave us another room

Here is the proposed kitchen/addition floor plan:

We’ve always used the “real” living room as our family room

The overall goals for this part of the Henry Street restoration/remodel are:

1. Carole and I will split the addition as work space for our projects, tools, and materials
2. We will restore the usable wall space in the kitchen so we don’t have to put the stove in an island, and
3. Make the mudroom a “real” mudroom, not a laundry room

It’s pretty evident how important restoring that back wall is to the whole plan.

A few items remain to be updated from the mini-hiatus this past winter.

One of the more significant changes to 118 Henry Street was the creation of a porch over the mudroom entrance at the side of the house. Once a porch, the mudroom has gone thru at least two transformations (the last one documented here) to manifest it’s current function/form. One result of these transformations was that there was no rain cover over the entrance.

One, very important, design goal of the new roof was to put some weather protection� back over this entrance.

Protected from rain, but not very pretty

Framing in place, kinda drafty

Basics of a ceiling in place

The ceiling is all new tongue and groove pine flooring that needed a little edge routing to match the other porch ceilings. One of the interesting things about 118 Henry Street is that the pine floor boards, the porch ceiling boards and the original roof sheathing were all the same size and type of southern yellow pine t&g boards. The only differences between the 3 applications were small router cuts (or lack thereof).

A traditional southern porch ceiling, crown molding and all

Note, also, that we got the window to the kitchen annex put back in.

T minus 2 days till Xmas and not feeling much like the holidays. I’ve been on a big project at work for the last 2 weeks, we’re broke from helping our kids all year, and the weather is more spring than winter.

Carole is doing a great job of making the best of it, baking cookies, decorating the tree, etc. DeShawn has been busy making cards and drawings for everybody. This year’s tree has got to be the cheapest and easiest ever. We went to Target yesterday and their display trees were on sale for 75% off. We got a six foot tall one with white lights already installed for $18. Didn’t even have to assemble it…store to pickup truck to living room, plug it in.

Still work on the house continues…

This weekend we got most of the framing for the new porch ceiling and sidewall completed. Once more, the tough part of this work was matching the sizes of modern dimensional lumber with the old fashioned “true to size” boards. The old 2×4’s are actually 2″ by 4″ not 1.5″ by 3.5″. The original wall sheathing is 1″ thick, 5/4 by modern parlance. The matching is made worse by my obsession to make the new construction look like the original when done.

There’s still a day of work left finishing the soffit framing. I’m off work next week, so we are looking forward to having this big air hole closed in.