Nice table Jeff. What will you use to condition and treat the wood finish?
Looking at properties for sale, all too often the houses are modified to reflect current trends. Open concept predominates. Kitchens with white cabinets are in.
It’s a pleasure to see a 100 year plus house that has been restored to it’s original design. No painted bricks or woodwork, no walls knocked down, no doors removed. Just my taste, not what many look for.
Nice when furniture is congruent with the age of the house. They look like they go together. Not something that you want to apply behind the walls to the water and electrical wiring.
Our house was built in 1917, and there was a lot of deferred maintenance that we've had to deal with. Everything was painted white, and the kitchen was a real mess.
There were some vestiges of what it
could have looked like back when it was new (an original pendant light in the inner foyer, door and window casing details, etc. So when we got around to doing the reno work we went with a combination of Craftsman and Prairie School for all the new woodwork/trim/casings, etc., plus the new fireplace mantel and dining room wainscot (which the house never had). We did have to gut most everything to bring up to code the electrical and plumbing, add insulation, all that kind of stuff, but what we now have is much better and way more in keeping with the character of a house of its age.
Yes, we have (off) white kitchen cabinets (Amish custom built), but that is appropriate for the era. And, we did take down one wall, and slightly rearranged a couple others up in the attic to make it into a far more functional room, and it now has a very Craftsman style staircase railing that replaced an out-of-code 22" high knee wall going around the stairwell). We did remove/replace a couple of doors, but we added two more back that had been languishing in the basement since 1961 (repurposing those two swinging French doors into pocket doors, although the swinging kitchen-dining room door is still down there!). If we get around to doing the upstairs back sleeping porch, that had been poorly enclosed in the 1940s, into the home office/birdwatching station we'd like, a couple of the doors we had removed (attic eaves access doors) into doors for a built-in cabinet.
We do have a white painted brick fireplace, but there wasn't much we could have done about that. The rug-faced brick would have been destroyed if we sandblasted to paint of (the only way for this type of brick) so we just repainted it so it looked better. There are lots of examples of white (and other colors) brick fireplaces in many Craftsman homes so we just made sure it still looks good. After we win the Lottery (uh huh!) we may tile the face of it (some excellent resources for that - my first choice would be from here:
Pasadena Craftsman Tile
