It’s amazing what just throwing a little light on a situation can do.

The Kitchen Triangle gives me a headache every time I step into it. I hate the cupboards, the knobs, the vinyleum (what little is left of it), the countertops, the powder blue paint that someone saw fit to paint the door trim with, the abysmal backplash tiles and the fact it’s cramped and has no window…I could go on, but I’ll spare you.

It’s kind of our last frontier in terms of renovating – lots of great ideas, but no money to execute them. That and the disruption kitchen renos place on your family life have made us gun-shy about taking any major steps in the area where our appliances and inherited cupboards reside.

I like to think we’re just honing our skills for the day when we can afford to really go all out on the kitchen…but I’m probably being delusional. We’ll be doing a band-aid renovation in this area, and I must say we’ve been taking our sweet time about it.

But now, when I feel hopeless about our progress in this room, at least I can look up and see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Since we didn’t really have a better place to store it, we went ahead and installed the light we purchased at The Salvage Shop last Saturday. It looks better than the pigtail that was hanging there before, and definitely brightens up the room (and me).

technorati tags: houseblog, home+renovation, DIY, vintage+lighting, salvage

What better way to celebrate Earth Day than to reduce, reuse and recycle—and for us, Saturday meant a trip to The Salvage Shop in Toronto.

We’ve frequented this shop for years—always finding something interesting or inspiring, and forever baffled at what prompts people to remove some of these beautiful items from their homes.

Roy, the proprietor, is a pleasure to deal with. He has some wacky stories and can recall the origin of most of the stock in his shop. In addition to salvage sales, he’s a popular source for film and theatrical props, and gets great business through Toronto’s many studios.
Our house is testament to some of the great items he carries—we have lovely French doors with glue chip glass lights separating the mudroom and kitchen in our addition. As well, Roy has antiqued several brass items for us in the past, and can be counted on to find a mate for a particular unique hinge pin or doorknob plate.

Incorporating salvaged finds into your home isn’t always the easiest thing to do, and our recent experience with a French door we’d picked up at The Salvage Shop several months ago is a perfect example. My husband spied the door, made of fir and with a gorgeous entry set, and noted that its measurements matched those of a more modern French door we have separating our home’s front hall and dining room.
Now, any veteran salvage junkie will tell you that when you find the perfect piece, jump on it—because it will likely be gone tomorrow. So, even though we were neck-deep into another project (our addition) at the time, he went ahead and purchased it with the intention of eventually replacing the dining room door with this gem.

It’s relatively straightforward to utilize salvaged doors when you’re building new doorways to accommodate a piece you have on hand—we’ve done this successfully several times—but problems can arise when you try to take a door from an old house and retrofit that into another old house.
Why? Because old houses are never square. And the likelihood that the doorway you plan to ‘a-door-n’ will be not quite square in the exact same way the door’s previous doorway was not quite square is…well, unlikely.
And so, we found ourselves with a beautiful door that would look quite askew if hung as-is, but if we’d tried to square it up, would be about an inch shy of the doorway at one end. Multi-light French doors have a nasty habit of being particularly unforgiving when it comes to looking balanced. Rats.

It was nice of Roy to allow us to return the door—not a lot of places would, especially after that long. What was nicer still (for him, I mean) was that we didn’t have to carry a store credit for very long, because the perfect light for our kitchen was hanging right there beside his head!

This one is very similar to the Rose City pendant light offered through Rejuvenation, and has a 16” shade. Roy had several fittings in various lengths, so we were able to get one just right for the 9” ceiling in our kitchen. Apparently, this particular fixture came out of one of the University of Toronto’s many older campus buildings.

technorati tags: architectural+salvage, houseblog, home+renovation

In preparation for the big day that will be finally saying good riddance to the boxes of flooring that have lived here since before Xmas, we’ve been cutting holes in the subfloor of our kitchen addition to accommodate the heat registers and cold air returns.

We lucked out at a recent antiques show held at the local high school, finding two matching vintage registers in good condition. When it comes to aesthetics, new ones just don’t compare to these babies, and probably would have cost as much.

We also managed to procure two nice cold air return grates from a good friend and fellow hardware-hoarder, who had them bead blasted before dropping them by last week. One (shown above) is located in the kitchen, and the second is going in the bedsitting/family room (which will get some of the new oak flooring as well).
As the day draws nearer, John also decided to relocate the coax that was coming up from a hole drilled in the floor of the bedsitting room. We removed some baseboard along the closest wall, and managed to fish the cable up behind the drywall, so it will now originate from the baseboard and the hallowed oak floor will not be scarred by an unnecessary hole.
Aside from ripping up the horrid ‘vinyleum’ in the kitchen (and at least two layers are lurking under the first) I think we’re good to go . . . whenever we’re good to go.