To See or Not To See

We decided to start working upstairs after all. First stop, the girls' bedroom. When we moved into the house, we noticed an odd little access panel in an alcove shaped area of the bedroom. At the time,we were not sure what the layout of the house was, but we were too busy moving in and getting settled to do much exploring.

The alcove is located opposite the window. It was obviously going around some obstruction, but was the perfect space to put one of the dressers, until it was eventually relocated and replaced with a crib.

Here is what the alcove looks like mid renovation. As you can see, it was hiding a body! Not really, that's just my wonderful husband checking things out. Apparently, the alcove was made to go around the chimney. The method for doing this was to screw this really, really cheap plywood up and then glue, yes glue, the drywall to the plywood.  It took us a few hours, but in short order, we had it all cleaned up and looking good.

I am sure many of you looking at this picture must think that we are crazy to open up the alcove area the way we did. We can understand that, except for one thing....it was never meant to be closed off like it was! How do we know? Once again, we have found original wood flooring and baseboards behind the alcove wall!

I have no idea what this space could possibly have been used for originally. Do any of you dear readers have any suggestions? Or seen anything like this before? We are actually thinking of opening it up on the opposite side into the master bedroom and turning it into a built in bookcase, since I love to read so much. But we are not sure yet. Do you have any ideas?

Of course, cleaning up the chimney upstairs made us reconsider the chimney in the kitchen. When we last worked on the chimney, we thought we were "finished" with this look...

Obviously, the plaster would need to be cleaned up and the old adhesive removed. Since it was obviously originally plastered, based on the remaining chair rail and base board pieces, we thought we would simply clean it up and leave only the dining room facing part of the chimney exposed. However, since I loved the look of the chimney upstairs so much, out came the hammer and chisel...

With the chimney exposed this way, our house is really starting to look kind of "lofty" - exposed brick, beams, and wood floors. One thing that really surprised us was discovering the original stove pipe still in the chimney.

Unfortunately, the chimney is currently being used to vent the hot water heater and the furnace. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the venting was going up through a metal conduit (which you can just barely see on the left side of the hole), but we were still concerned about any fumes that might escape. We didn't have time to order a proper stove pipe covering, so we decided to improvise.

The trick was trying to figure out how to affix our improvised covering. Using Gorilla Glue, a piece of scrap wood, and my husband's trusty Little Giant Ladder, we had something that would work at least long enough for the glue to dry. We left it this way all night. Of course, we had some trouble keeping the little one off the ladder!

This morning, I was finally able to take the picture of our improvised stove pipe cover. Originally, I was planning on painting the kitchen red and decorating with vintage coffee cans, mills, and advertisements. Now, I think we will go with a sage green, similar to what was on the plaster, but decorate with watering cans instead.

I really love the finished look! The green in the plate is a good match to what we took down and I like the kind of vintage look of the watering can. This plate was part of a mixed set that my mom had given to us last summer when she was moving. (Thanks Mom!) I am finally feeling as though we are actually making some progress and actually making improvements!