Kitchen Makeover

The biggest advantage to being a stay at home dad (hopefully not for to much longer) is that I get to spend a lot of time with the kids. But, they go to school every day leaving me with the middle of the day to do other stuff. Since we have a big house to live it I have put a large amount of time into maintenance. My most recent project was to pain the kitchen cabinets. ​

​The cabinets were the pride and joy of Mary mom. They were custom built for the kitchen back in the late 1970's. They are very nice, but they were beginning to show their age. They are stained cherry which is very dark. We thought we would go the other direction and paint them stark white to brighten the space up as much as we could. 

Starting in February I took apart the cabinets. Then sanded, primed and painted them. I last week I was able to call them done. A little paint can make a big difference! Check out the photos here. 

Then and Now

Mary and I found a stack of old photos as we were reorganizing the basement this past weekend and in it was this old photo of the four houses on North Franklin Street. Ours is the second one from the left. My best guess judging from the age of the trees is that this photo probably taken around 1910. The bottom photo was taken from about the same spot today. Our house is hidden by the big Norway spruce that Mary’s grandmother planted when they bought the house in the late 1940’s.

Much of the original features on all of the houses are still intact with only a few small changes here and there. One thing that I did notice is that the two middle houses (ours and Jason and Bethanie’s) don’t have fireplaces, which they currently do. So those were added at some later date.

In case you might have missed the blog about these houses on our old site, they were built for the managers of the Sharples Works, which was a factory that manufactured the first mechanized cream separators. When you look out of our front door you can see the old factory, which has now been converted into luxury apartments. The factory was built in the 1890’s and our home was built in 1900.