What a difference a week makes. The entire world can change and it regularly does in our lives, This Old Farmhouse is testament to the kind of physical change we can affect in our living environments, simply by grabbing a wrecking bar (or whatever tool of destruction you favor) and getting down to work. A warning though, taking action without proper thought can lead to great big holes in your environment, holes which may end up being patched and put back to their original form–at least that’s what I’ve heard.

Moving back in time, we inherited in This Old Farmhouse a system of electric baseboards which were outdated, not to mention extremely expensive to operate. As we began to poke around we also discovered two chimneys, one in the kitchen and one in the living room both covered with drywall, since the upgrade to electric.  We were delighted to find the chimneys, particularly in the Living Room which gave us an opportunity to put in a wood burning stove, which was high on our list of  priorities. Michigan has long and cold winters and  particularly when we first took over This Old Farmhouse, with the windows rattling and the wind blowing right through the house, this was a major priority.  First we needed to create a hearth to protect the wood floors, as well as a heat shield to protect the walls from the heat of the stove we chose–super high efficiency, which keeps us warm on most days in the winter–and warms much of the house, on very little fuel. Burning wood like this is a non-guilty pleasure, and a very eco friendly way to heat during the winter, we are able to keep our thermostat turned down and heat the house for a small amount of money relative to the electric which came before and the gas forced air system we put in with all of the pleasure of a roaring fire–see what you think.

The living room prior to renovation--the chimney can be seen to the left of the image, hidden behind drywall.

What we found behind the wall.

Opening up the floor to create a stone hearth.

The hearth and wood buring fireplace installed--we used 12X12 slate, cut into 4X12 to create this look and protect the walls from the considerable reflected heat. The trim is still uninstalled, leaving the gap exposed.

Different view shows the doorway opening much improved from the first image.

Renovation projects ideally help a home to evolve, although in our experience they occasionally cause a home to devolve, as in the case of many of the “builder grade” projects we come across, in our own lives as well as projects at KitchenLab and Design in a Bag–hopefully we can help people to get their homes back on the evolutionary path; we hope that This Old Farmhouse helps people to envision what is possible in the same way that we are constantly inspired by great magazines like House Beautiful (we love their Kitchen and Bath of the month) and blogs like Charles and Hudson, to name only a couple.

This Old Farmhouse was in a stage of devolution when we found it, faded orange shag carpets and dark panel walls could have put us off, but a bit of madness is part of the makeup of a DIY’er–and a short memory is also very useful. We are having so much fun working back through time on this retrospective, it can almost make us forget the current sorrows in our next project “This Old Burned Coach House” (please feel free to suggest a better name), which is wallowing in City of Chicago B.S at the moment, I challenge anyone to make sense of the machinations of this cities’ building department, it truly is impossible. The cities reputation as being difficult is well deserved. We sincerely hope that our new project takes off in the next month or so–we have waited for two months for an appointment in the City of Chicago’s building department, it seems it could be longer, we’ll let you know. Happily, today we are going to look back at the evolution of a room in This Old Farmhouse, one which had many incarnations during the project: as a temporary kitchen, a storeroom, a workout room (spinning on my bike indoors during the winter months), and of course as a living room, constantly in transition. Have a look through the photo gallery, it really is revealing in the evolution of this house. Please notice how the decor of the room constantly evolved during the project, which goes with the territory of living with a designer, lots of redecorating, even during construction.

Living room when we first arrived.

Lose the carpet, pull out approximately a gazillion nails from the particle board...and the legs you see sticking out are from the future dining room table.

Another step in the right direction--floors sanded and sealed--R added window treatments and end tables and lamps, which made a huge difference while construction continued, slowly. Walls have been painted--progress, slowly.

Add the Eames chair and let sleeping dogs lie...note the windows are in the process of being replaced .

Windows mostly replaced, adding a second window added a ton of light and brought in a view of the barn. Our prize 60's couches have replaced the slip covered transitional couches.

Evolution complete, at least as complete as anything in our lives ever is. The view today.

Another view of the finished room...

The recurrent theme in our remodeling of This Old Farmhouse was using what we found as much as possible. We fell in love with this place because of what it was, past tense, and what it would (we hoped) become, a classic period farmhouse with great bones, which needed a lot of love. Did you know that most people make the decision to buy their home within seven minutes of seeing it for the first time? We didn’t at the time but in retrospect the decision to purchase this house was made almost the second we walked in the door, we looked at each other barely able to conceal our excitement and knew, that if we could make it work, this would be our project; although at that moment it was impossible to know what kind of project it would become — a little paint, a refresh of the bathrooms, new cabinets, it will be as good as new…

The "company" bathroom. Linoleum, faded curtains, dark cracked vanity--but with a solid layout, just repair and replace.

One of our first priorities was to tackle the bathrooms, This Old Farmhouse had two, strangely we thought, both on the main floor of the house. My sister actually told us that farmhouses sometimes has two bathrooms on the same floor, one for company and the other for the farmer.  I remembered that growing up in farm country in Southern Minnesota this was the case in several of my friends houses, when we came in from the barns or the fields, we we shooed into the mud room and the nearby bathroom to clean up in, whether this is actually true from a design standpoint, I don’t know definitively, what do you think? In any case, here we found ourselves with two bathrooms, both in serious need of a face lift, and neither particularly functional.  The “farmer’s” bathroom was grimy beyond saving, or disgusting, depending on who you ask, the “company” bathroom was somewhat better, but only had a bath, hardly practical, with old stained ceramic tile and dark wood vanity (a recurring theme), peeling linoleum floors and faded mauve walls. Still, it had good bones and we just needed to remove what was there and replace what needed replacing. We used the same plumbing without moving anything which makes the project so much more affordable, so in your projects, remember, if you can leave the plumbing and electric in place, you will really save–pretty basic stuff, but so valuable.

Tub, no shower, faded basic tile and a mauve paint scheme...

A recurring theme in affordable renovation--keep the tub, plumb for shower, replace toilet, tile.

And Voila! Something old is new again, a proper "company" bathroom. We used ceramic hex, great period look at an affordable price. Slightly difficult to install, but worth the work.

Beadboard, a Kohler Memoirs sink which we love for the period detail and affordability...

Matching Kohler Memoirs toilet, new subway tile, Benjamin Moore French Canvas paint, a new bathroom is born.

The 'farmer's' bathroom before renovation. Unfortunately the duck border running along the top of the wall was cropped out of this picture.

‘farmer’s’ bathroom after

As many of you might have suspected already, the kitchen is pretty much the most important room in the house for us, as it is for manypeople… So when I think of the kitchen renovation part of our This Old Farmhouse project, the first things that come to mind are an onslaught of maxims and adages: “Don’t put the cart before the horse,” “slow and steady wins the race,” ” measure twice, cut once” and a bunch of others that are escaping me at the moment. All and all, the way we went into the kitchen renovation sort of sums up our relationship and the differences in our personalities…My wife likes to jump in headfirst and ask questions later, and I….well, let’s just say, I don’t. So when my in-laws showed up for a weekend visit to see the new digs, and R’s stepfather decided to demo the kitchen cabinets while I was at the hardware store…well, let’s just say, that wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to get the wood burning stove in before winter -  that and laundry list of other half started projects were put on hold when we were forced to deal with the kitchen now being totally gutted. The kitchen took longer than the rest of the project put together, between the work on the floors, the ceiling, the French doors, etc. Once all that was done, in addition to the wood paneling on the walls in lieu of drywall to pay homage to the old walls of the dining room that were hiding behind the faux wood veneer –   the cabinets were roughed in. We opted for classic white cabinets, white marble countertops complete with farm sink. We re-purposed the top of the an old work table and cut it to size, putting it atop a new restaurant island base from the local restaurant supply store. When you do an island with open storage, you can get the furniture look and seating at a narrower than standard island, since your knees have a place to go when it’s open underneath. With a small kitchen, every inch counts, so we built a pantry for food storage as well as the toaster oven, microwave, dog food bin, extra pots and pans, and small appliances. Looking at the pictures of what the space was before, it’s hard to believe just how much work was required to get to where it’s at today.

The reality of DIY projects is that if you can’t roll with the punches, you will hit the canvas – hard. I have to admit that I have absorbed my share of punches, to extend the metaphor,  the kitchen renovation here at This Old Farmhouse was the source of several. While rebuilding the entire floor and replacing part of the foundation were “body blows”, the pulling down of the ceiling to create the volume of space we now enjoy was a hard right to the chin, we truly bit off a bit more than we could chew.  However, in the true spirit of the DIY, we had an idea and pushed through, damn the torpedos. In our last post we described discovering a volume of space in the eves of the attic, today we are unveiling what we did with it, which we ironically refer to as the Sistine Chapel, because it took so long to complete. We are certainly no Michelangelos, but in the end having this sense of space which spills onto the patio through our well loved kitchen, is our crowing achievement here at the farm. Let us know what you think.

Before

After.

The reality of the ceiling is that while it looks wonderful now and we can’t express how irreplaceable it is to the feel of the kitchen and the home in general, in order to line up the bead board in each continuous bay created by the rafters created a nightmare of contrasting angles. The roof rafters were nowhere close to being straight, twisted with age and as a result lining up the beadboard across the bays in the ceiling was extremely difficult.  I am happy to report, however,  that we eventually triumphed, not without a few bruises, and feelings of complete defeat. A better solution in retrospect would have been to create new, “sistered” roof rafters which were straight, which would facilitate straight lines, and saved a great amount of time. Still, we love the texture of original “dimensional” lumber, which has the patina of age and a rough milled character which is hard to replace using modern materials.

After. The Schoolhouse lights help to fill the volume and make it more intimate, while providing vital light for the island underneath.

Ceiling sloping along the roof line to the patio doors.

If there is an overriding theme in this blog it would be creating a sense of space through opening doorways, letting in light, banishing dark, gloomy colors and generally creating “flow” in a modestly sized home, pretty basic stuff. What would be the first, most pragmatic rule? Paint. Pure and simple. The biggest bang for your buck is always, always painting and in the This Old Farmhouse project we used literally dozens of gallons to lift the gloom and add surfaces which reflect the abundant natural light instead of swallowing it, as illustrated here.

The gloom.

The gloom lifted. A light paint palette and mirrors to reflect light and add to the sense of space.

In the kitchen we faced the same gloomy palette of colors and a very claustrophobic layout, with no direct natural light except in the form of a small casement window.  As we detailed in an earlier post (s), we opened up the back wall to the patio with a triple set of french doors, still, the space felt closed, even after opening up the doorway to the dining room to create a better flow of the space and light to pass all the way through the house from the new patio doors to the front door and porch. We puzzled about the space and wondered what we could do within our minimal budget to create a functional center to the home, the kitchen is, after all the center of the home, isn’t it? Finally, one night, no doubt with wine glasses in hand, we looked at the low, oppressive ceiling and the shed roof line and realized that there was all of this space above the existing ceiling and below the actual rafters of the roof and we suddenly knew what we had to do – tear it down and create vaulted ceiling. We immediately went to work – I have to tell you that having an immense volume of rockwool insulation falling onto your head and into every conceivable orifice is not something I recommend – but in the end we had a great new addition to This Old Farmhouse–Friday we’ll take you through the after pictures as well as another cautionary tale of what not to do…

Friday: Why our vaulted kitchen ceiling project is jokingly called “The Sistine Chapel”.

More of the same gloom.

Once the kitchen ceiling had been removed, a great volume of space was uncovered.

A side view of the new vaulted ceiling--the old ceiling roughly corresponded to the line of the tops of the cabinets.

Another view, at the highest point we gained about six feet of volume. Note the considerable staining from the old roof which had begun to fail.

Well, here we are back on Friday and the day part is already in the books, although the things supposed to be done during the day part aren’t, this blog post among them. Where does it go? Time that is.  Since This Old Farmhouse was in its active renovation stage, we can now measure the time we have been here  by the size of the gardens which are threatening to take over vast swaths of the yard – plant perennials and they will keep giving back – until they have absolutely taken over. The pleasure we feel sitting here as twilight gathers, with hopes of seeing Mars in the southern sky later on in the evening have to outweigh the simple fact that when we actually stop at this stage of the week to take a breath the things that remain undone come crowding in – insisting they be heard. The trick is to push them out and let the cooling night air in – soon you will realize that it all can wait, tonight we can think about the work of on this project and the pleasure it gives us today;  the pleasure it will continue to give for years to come.

Funny, the contrast here is remembering when we were left without any kitchen for months, which is not strictly true because we created a satellite kitchen in the living room, with a rarely used hotplate and regularly used microwave, we grilled all winter long that year.  I can remember the look on snowmobilers’ faces as they sped by in the dark to see me standing over the grill firing off the protein for our dinner. The kitchen was left in this state because we pulled up the floor and discovered not only the sagging, worn out logs detailed in previous posts, but another problem, one of the reasons for the sagging was the foundation had begun to collapse in the corner of the kitchen, there really was no choice but to have it repaired. Foundations here in this era home are very interesting, as they are created from the stones which have been pulled from the fields when the farmers cleared them, manually loading them into carts no doubt, horse pulled, before the glorious invention of the tractor. Factually correct? Not sure, but that’s what I see when I think about the stones which make up our foundation, as well as create the base of our “rubblestone barn” where the stones actually are the base of the barn, no mortar, no footings, just large stones, finding a new use.

Rubble stone foundation.

In this particular case we found ourselves outside of the realm of our DIY abilities and hired a mason who was kind enough to replace the corner of the kitchen which had begun to collapse with cinder block, which, go figure is much easier than recreating that part of the foundation with “rubble”, it doesn’t really create a level top to rest the house on, cinder blocks, problem solved. We were concerned that the outside of the foundation wouldn’t match the rest of the house where the cinder block repair had been made, he was able to use smaller pieces the actual “rubble” to create a facing matching the rest of the foundation, problem solved. Check out the photos to see what you think…

A view of the foundation patch.

Closeup of the repair--note where the stonemason created the "mend" between the new and old foundation.

We left off Friday discussing what we found under the floor;  sadly no buried treasure, although we did find several items of note, mainly skeletons of long deceased creatures (let’s not discuss how we found them), sadly, what we really discovered is what phrases like “you opened up a real can of worms” mean in a renovation context. Still, undaunted, we pushed on, finishing up reframing the floor and getting down a particle board sub-floor. The next question, constantly debated, was what to put down on top of the subfloor? Our dream kitchen floor would be limestone, like the classic French farmhouse floors we loved, but the cost made that impossible. We needed to find something affordable which would ideally patina to complement the original hardwood floors we had refinished, complete with thousands of tiny nail holes, complements of the subfloor and carpet which had entombed it for decades. What we ultimately decided was to use French Vanilla slate–which is a lesser known variety of slate which is much lighter, where people often associate slate with black, green and multicolored, French Vanilla is quite light in color, as you would imagine, although it skews a bit green on our floor, after we coated it with multiple coats of sealer (note: you can install it unsealed for a much lighter, more representative color, but be prepared to clean)! The cost can range between $2.50 and $5.00 per square foot, uninstalled and we chose to purchase the tumbled version, which softens the edges and creates a much more representative stone feel, whereas having square edges will create a more “tile like” feel.

French limestone floors--yes, please.

Finishing leveling the floor and adding new joists, subfloor.

Subfloor in, waiting for flooring choice.

The flooring installed. Vanilla slate worked well for our budgetary and aesthetic needs.

Thanks to Country Living Magazine for shooting the McIntosh’s terrific country getaway  -  in the September 2010 issue on newsstands now! Thanks to Amy, Joe, Jack, Sam and Duke for opening your home for the shoot. You guys are picture perfect! This project was a unique challenge -  adding character to a not-so-old-home, and of course, gallons and gallons of white and off white paint!

One of the great joys of renovation is the absolute knowledge that you never know what you are going to get (insert your Forest Gump quote here), if you aren’t amenable to change, do not apply. It is renovation after all – change is the point. Still, regardless of your personal experience, you can never fully “see” what is behind that wall, or under that floor…  We have already done a post on our happy discovery of the original wood floors in this old farmhouse, which are actually part maple and part tulip poplar, and are responsible for much of the style and feel of the house.  It is impossible to recreate the patina which old floors have, the style they add to a room is the best possible base to build good design from – it makes it that much easier. Funny that we are currently obsessing over what we can do on our upcoming project–tentatively called This Old Burnt Coach House -  floors on a budget are hard to do, another red oak floor, while functional and better than some, won’t really cut it. In any case, back to this post and this floor, which is the kitchen floor.

What lurks beneath?

We had hoped that the kitchen floor would be salvageable as well, did that fantastic orangish linolneum hide another  hardwood sub-floor as well? In fact, one feature of homes of this era is that whatever local wood was available was milled and installed directly over the floor joists, which in modern building would have a sub-floor of plywood or particle board with the hardwood flooring installed over the top, we could actually see lines on the floors before they were sanded from where the rugs had been, all those years ago.

In the kitchen, linoleum removed, we discovered a slight problem with the hardwood floors, which appeared to be oak, rather than tulip poplar, corresponding to the various stages during which This Old Farmhouse had been built. We believe that the kitchen was actually a one room cabin in its first iteration, the living room and “Michigan Basement” added later and the two story addition added last, when the family had grown. This admittedly amateur archeology was clear as the house was under renovation, we even found old newspapers from different periods (1930’s, 1950’s) to substantiate our theories and the kitchen floor was actually one more clue (even I was wondering where this is going). This is another of the great joys of renovation, actually participating in another period of the homes improvement, adding to its legacy (now did we actually put any newspapers in the walls, hmmm).

What we found under the floor was beautiful strip oak flooring, however, in keeping with the theme of this post, we found what could only be described as a “lake” in the middle of the floor, where the flooring had sagged over time. The plywood that was over the old oak floor was covering up to a 4″ dip in some places!  The source of the problem needed to be addressed and because this first part of the house was over a tiny, nasty crawlspace, it was necessary to pull up the flooring to see what had created the problem–game over for the oak floor. Could the flooring be salvaged and reinstalled? Possibly, but taking out the strip oak without damage is a tall order and some boards inevitably splinter beyond use, particularly in the area which had sagged over time there was nothing to be done. As a result what we were able to salvage is in our barn, waiting for a second use and we were faced with a dreaded “change order” something those of you who have done projects with contractors are no doubt familiar. We needed a new floor and sub floor, not to mention new floor joists (the horizontal structure which holds up the floor), as the original floor” joists” were actually trees, and pine trees at that, which are quite soft and given to sagging, particularly when they had had a bad case of the “bugs” at some point in their past. Un-milled trees also maintain their original form and thus aren’t quite straight, which created part of the sagging floor problem. Have a look at what we found under the floor, perhaps you can relate to your own projects?

Next up: How to create a beautiful floor on a decent budget (with a great patina)!

Next, next up: What else we found under the floor, or why you don’t want to pull up floors in the first place.

The original strip oak floor underneath plywood and "sleepers" which hid the large depression in the original floor.

A growing problem, exposed. South wall, beautiful strip oak floors, needed to be pulled.

The problem under the floor, exposed. The original logs indicate that this part of the farmhouse is at least 100 years old, we were told.

Adding the new floor joists, creating a strong and level base for the new floor.

View of the sink/plumbing wall.

View of the passage which led to our fridge in the back hall during this extended period of fixing the kitchen floor, lending a completely new meaning to going to the fridge. We lovingly referred to this as 'walking the plank'.