room to grow

While progress on the kitchen has been much much slower than we'd like it to be, we are making progress. This weekend we tackled one side of the buffet, which will eventually be built-in shelves instead of wasted wall space.

But first we had to tackle a little problem. These pipes were infringing on our shelving space, so they had to go. Except, those pipes bring hot water up to our second floor guest room, so they needed to stay. We compromised by cutting them off and (eventually) moving them to the left side of the opening.

The offending pipes are the ones on the left. We're only gaining about 5 inches of shelving, but in a narrow space that makes quite the difference! Or so I told the hubs.

85-year-old pipes aren't always ready to move easily, so Nick used a combination of heat (see: propane torch) and leverage (see: jack handle attached to wrench) to convince these babies to move on out.

Well, that and a lot of muscle.

He ended up only needing the heat on one of the four connections. The rest let go after some serious cranking with the wrench.

 Once the pipes were out of the way our next step was to remove the paperboard from the back of the cavity. We'll be filling the stud space with insulation instead, and pulling out the paperboard gave us deeper shelving. Perfect!

And finally....an open space! The line running down the middle of the cavity is the stud. Everything else is cleared out (for now). We'll have to put new copper pipes in eventually, but we'll do the insulation first. And there was talk of replacing some of the basement pipes first (hey look! scope creep!).

Progress. Slow but sure. In my head we're a million miles closer to done. With "done" looking something like this:

source

It doesn't hurt to dream, right??