When we first walked through the charred insides of this house it was a pretty intimidating sight. The fire started in the dining room, and so that is the room with most of the damage--the door molding was for the most part not salvageable, and the three windows were completely burnt out. Almost every pane of glass in the house was broken due to the intense heat of the fire, but much of the trim work was only superficially
affected. In one way the fire had actually been helpful in that it stripped layers of paint from most of the trim and solid wood interior doors without burning them. This is not to say we don't have A LOT of scraping to do to refinish the doors and trim. That arduous work is underway. More about that later. However, there has to be a moment when walking through a house that is in this condition that something clicks, and you are irreversibly charmed by it--or you run screaming. One of the things that charmed both Joe and I was the passageway between the dining room and the kitchen. A small butler's pantry: built-in upper and lower cabinets that we both envisioned as a bar almost immediately. A gem from a bygone era. Maybe you are not convinced or charmed by the photo of this burnt pantry, and okay, I had fantasized briefly that a real butler would come with it, but it is ours now for better or worse, so we have carefully extracted the cabinets and will be refinishing them very soon.
When we first walked through the charred insides of this house it was a pretty intimidating sight. The fire started in the dining room, and so that is the room with most of the damage--the door molding was for the most part not salvageable, and the three windows were completely burnt out. Almost every pane of glass in the house was broken due to the intense heat of the fire, but much of the trim work was only superficially 
affected. In one way the fire had actually been helpful in that it stripped layers of paint from most of the trim and solid wood interior doors without burning them. This is not to say we don't have A LOT of scraping to do to refinish the doors and trim. That arduous work is underway. More about that later. However, there has to be a moment when walking through a house that is in this condition that something clicks, and you are irreversibly charmed by it--or you run screaming. One of the things that charmed both Joe and I was the passageway between the dining room and the kitchen. A small butler's pantry: built-in upper and lower cabinets that we both envisioned as a bar almost immediately. A gem from a bygone era. Maybe you are not convinced or charmed by the photo of this burnt pantry, and okay, I had fantasized briefly that a real butler would come with it, but it is ours now for better or worse, so we have carefully extracted the cabinets and will be refinishing them very soon.
Or it could be a Zombie Apocalypse safe room! Some shotguns in the upper cabinets, bullets and gasoline for the chainsaw down below... But a bar would be pretty nifty too.... :)
ReplyDeleteA Zombie Apocalypse safe room is our plan B--you're such a mind reader!
ReplyDelete