I’m not sure what it is about demo day that is so exciting? Is it the act of demolishing things or the fact that you are left with a beautiful clean slate at the end? Nonetheless demo day at the Victorian on Van Buren was exciting, history was to be found in every corner we demoed!
Personally I think demo day is super fun, I love cleaning, so naturally taking something ugly and making it beautiful again is fun in my eyes. There were several areas that needed demo work. I’m going to break down each area and explain a little more about why the demo was needed and necessary.
Main Floor Kitchen
The main floor kitchen was in pretty rough shape. Layers of various paint colors, VERY outdated cabinets and appliances and flooring that looked like it came out of a horror movie. The cabinets and appliances were relatively easy to get out, whereas the flooring was a different story. The flooring had a tar paper that was very difficult to remove. Our hope was to salvage the original wood floor planks but the tar from the paper made things more difficult. Ultimately we had to do a new wood flooring over the original planks. Most of the kitchen needed to be demoed because we had to alter the arrangement of windows to allow for adequate counter top space too.
This was the original pine sub floor after all the tar paper was removed. You can see with the existing window placement it would be difficult to have any counter tops. The large object coming out of the wall is an original chimney, which will be covered with a faux oven vent.
Here you can see where the new window will be placed and the front facing window will be closed. We installed a new pine flooring, that will get a neat painted checkered floor. Be sure to keep on the lookout for that blog post coming soon!
Second Floor Kitchen
The Victorian on Van Buren was originally a two family home. The second floor had its own entrance, kitchen, living area, dining room, bathroom, and bedroom. Interestingly, the second floor was added on to the home 15 years after it was originally built in 1880. Naturally this 2nd floor kitchen needed to go. This kitchen had the most beautiful historic bead board cabinets, which we saved for another rainy day. My favorite salvage from this space was the vintage sink, that will get installed into the new first floor kitchen! This space was tricky too because it had a water heater that was VERY old and still full of water and sediment. It was extremely heavy even after it was drained. Fortunately, this kitchen space had a small entry alcove with the original door. The door leads to a 20 foot drop, because the original stairs had been removed. So push came to shove, the water heater was pushed out the 2nd floor door, for an easy removal. Yikes is right, no one was hurt in this demo process!
This water heater was still running! Thankfully it was one of the first things to go!
Bathrooms
All of the bathrooms had to be gutted. Many had water damage, so a fresh start was needed in all areas. The main floor bathroom was a new addition to the home. The second floor bathroom was original and it took a little more leg work in this room. The ceiling needed to be completely taken out, to provide for new HVAC work, a portion of the floor was removed to allow for new plumbing, and a wall was removed, to allow for the addition of a small closet for a washer and dryer. We were able to salvage most of the bead board in the upstairs bathroom, which we plan to reuse.
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- After
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- Main Floor Bathroom
Parlor Room
A large wall in the parlor room had to be demoed to make way for a beam, so the grand staircase could be exposed. This was a relatively easy project, as my husband did the demo and I did the cleanup. It truly makes the whole room feel so much bigger. I can’t wait to see it with a beautiful staircase in the end! This room will get new maple flooring as the flooring you see below is the original sub floor. We determined it just wasn’t stable enough, so new flooring will be put over the top to tie into the original maple flooring in the living and dining room. You can see here in this photo where the faux “rug” was in this space. It was almost like a wallpaper material.
All opened up!
Favorite Finds
My favorite part of demo day was uncovering history. We found so much STUNNING wallpaper under every layer we tore back. Wallpaper from the early 1900s that was so gorgeous. We found a few fun trinkets – a skeleton key, a marble, old heaters, an old diamond locket – we even found the original marble sinks for the home in the attic! In every corner, history was to be found! Stay tuned for more progress of this historic beauty as we bring her back to life!
