Renovation: Home is Where the Kitchen Is

The design of the house is coming along!

The original footprint of the house is an 1100 sf rectangle, and long, long ago someone put a two-story addition on one side of the back of what had been an entirely brick house (and then put a first-floor "bump out" on the addition, then a porch extending away from the "bump out"). While the envelope of the house (i.e., basement, exterior walls, and roof) is in generally good condition, the plaster on the rear wall where the addition is attached has come loose and water has been seeping in and down for who knows how long. This means that the pantry cupboards have molded and the roof of the "bump out" and porch is sagging. The back porch itself is collapsing under its own weight.

From Margarete's Kitchen 1914

Frankly, the house is already plenty big without an addition (2500-2800 finished sf). And the walls that extend inward from the additions chop the space up into cramped quarters and harken back to a day when household work was not recognized as a profession worthy of the application of design principles. While new homes in 1914 were equipped with electricity, gas, indoor plumbing and sewer lines, and electric home appliances were becoming quite popular, the idea of built-in anything was very new, and kitchens were often a hodgepodge of free-standing units (e.g., cabinets, stove, sink, possibly a fridge but ones appropriate for domestic use had really just been invented and were full of toxic gasses). On top of that, only households that were staffed had Downton Abbey-sized kitchens. (I'm talking about places like the future estates of the Fords, the Fishers, and the Scripps.) Middle class kitchens were solely the domain of the stay-at-home housewife, and working class kitchens were used by the wife once she got home from the job that she held to supplement her hubby's income.

Nowadays, kitchens are where all house parties end up. And what with Chai (my better half) being a fabulous cook (as well as an architect), the space needs to be at least big enough for her to work her alchemy and for our planned, rotating roster of food samplers to witness the magic without being in the way. So, the plan is to tear off the addition, restore the house's original footprint, and knock out some interior walls to make the entire back half of the house a sunny kitchen/dining space with an open view of the backyard. Of course, there is no small matter of the Historic Designation Advisory Board of Detroit. I'm not sure how much they'll care about a part of the house that the public cannot see, but it is an exterior wall, so we won't know until we get the plans detailed enough to be worth applying for the permit to make changes. In the meantime, we're having a ton of fun ideating.


Here's our current thinking for the first floor.

Before.

After.
Black lines are the house as it stands and
the purple are our proposed changes. 
The living room (top left) stays pretty 
much the same. A bathroom is added to 
the front entry. The back entry (back left) 
is extended, and the rest of the back of 
the house becomes a combined kitchen  
and dining room. The additions are gone.