Creative Solutions to Special Problems in our Kitchen Refresh

Our house is a 100+ year old bungalow in suburban Chicago. We truly love the plaster and lath walls, hardwood floors, radiators, crown molding, substantial baseboards and most of the other things that give it its character. But dealing with all that history can be a challenge.

A couple years ago we did a little kitchen refresh - new stove and refrigerator, paint, and flooring. I am a person who likes what I like and I usually like those things for a long time. So in the kitchen, we repainted the bottom part of the walls in the same shade of red and the top part of the walls in white, once again. I just love a red and white kitchen. Have had one all my married life.

We only changed two things on the walls. One was the chair rail because some years ago we had put up a decorative one that I later realized didn’t really fit with the rest of the wood trim in the house so we swapped it out for a simple style. Very simple.

The other thing, not so. At some point in this kitchen’s history someone had apparently tried to remove wallpaper, did a poor job of it, and painted it over. It would have been better if they’d either completely removed it all, or left it intact before they painted it, but since they didn’t there were higher and lower spots all over. Everyone says they never noticed, but it bugged me.

It would have been impossible to get through the paint coats and the old paper and get down to a smooth plaster surface. Another idea would have been to remove the plaster and lath and put up drywall. No. The third idea was to just let it be, try to believe what others said, that they didn’t notice until I pointed it out, and so I lived with it and even added a couple more coats of paint of my own over the years.

But as it goes with anything and everything around a house, one thing leads to another and since we were getting new flooring and appliances it seemed like the time to take action on those walls. I remembered hearing years ago that a friend had old wallpaper in her living room and instead of removing it, her husband “mudded” over it with drywall compound. At the time I thought that was a weird and lazy thing to do, but the idea stuck with me. Could that be my answer?

I tried it. I bought a five gallon bucket of drywall compound and put a smooth coat all over the walls, as smooth as I could, then sanded it smooth here and there, applied more drywall compound (“mud”), more smoothing - and produced TONS of powdery dust. Gotta say, problem solved. It looks great! It was hard work but not expensive and not nearly as hard as the other options. I love it.

The flooring was sheet vinyl. Love it or hate it, that’s what we had. We had taken up the old stuff years ago and replaced it with a different pattern, one that would go with my red and white kitchen. The product was holding up but looking closely, you could see the outline of the 4x8 underlayment seams starting to show. So we took it up, took up the underlayment, put down new underlayment and new sheet vinyl.

I know that many people would have chosen either ceramic tile or one of the new wood or wood-look products, or maybe luxury vinyl tile, but here’s my reasoning. Regarding ceramic tile, I don’t like seams and grout, but to me the biggest drawbacks are the unforgiving hardness of it, how cold it is in the winter, it’s practically permanent so not easy to change when styles/preferences do, and the fact that if a tile or two gets cracked or chipped, that’s a really tough fix. 

I don’t care for vinyl tile, even the “luxury” kind that is popular now because I don’t want seams. 

The wood products I’ve seen wouldn’t work because we already have beautiful original hardwood floors in two of the rooms that connect with the kitchen and anything less would be noticeably inferior, and it would be very expensive - too expensive - to put oak flooring in to match our other wood floors. It would have been great to refinish the original wood kitchen floors but they were not in good enough condition.

On the plus side for sheet vinyl, it’s inexpensive, there are no seams, it has a little give to it so is easy on the bones which is important when you are standing around doing dishes, cooking, etc., and it’s not as cold or as permanent as tile. I like it. I think part of the reason it has fallen out of style is due to the fact that one big sheet is harder to install than smaller pieces. I get it.

It was a big job to replace the underlayment but it had to be done and it turned out well. It was a little tricky for us two old-ish folks to be crawling around on our knees laying down the vinyl (good quality knee pads helped a lot with that - can’t recommend those enough) and it was tricky to cut neatly around the radiator pipes and near the doorways, etc. But our kitchen is a fairly square 12x15 space so it wasn’t too bad. We got it done and it looked great. Very satisfying.

A couple days later the stainless steel appliances that we got for about half price at a used appliance store were delivered. I figured that the appliances that were here when we bought the house were used and that didn’t bother me, so I was able to get really nice matching pieces for a good price. 

Here’s where the drama starts. 

As the appliance installer slid the stove into place, we discovered that one of the feet on the front of the stove was missing - as the screw that the foot would have gone on… tore a gash in my brand new vinyl flooring!

The installer was nearly as upset as we were. He texted pictures to the appliance company right away and they said they would replace it. That was a huge relief because I worried that they may say that it could be patched, but they were great about it. The next day the replacement roll was delivered. But it did mean more work for us because we had to lay it down again. I suppose we could have insisted that they pay for flooring installation but we just went ahead and did it ourselves.

Here’s the “lemonade from lemons” cool part. The gash was about two feet in from one corner, so the whole rest of the piece was fine. We rolled up the old piece and after we got the new stuff down and everything back in place in the kitchen, I turned my attention to it.

From our kitchen, there’s a door to the basement that starts with a landing (it has a wall of cabinets that serve as my pantry), then five stairs to the back door, another landing and another six stairs to the basement. I used the damaged piece of vinyl to replace the stuff that was there - both landings and all the stairs. The continuity is great. And believe it or not, there was enough to replace the stuff that was on our 12’x8’ enclosed front porch too! I had to piece that in one place, but we have a rug over the seam and it doesn’t even show.

So … what started as a spirit-killing problem turned out to be sort of a blessing in disguise, albeit with a little more work. Well, kind of a lot more work. Actually, re-doing the kitchen wasn’t too bad though because we are getting to be somewhat experienced sheet vinyl flooring installers. :) And let me just say again that good knee pads make all the difference. And the smaller pieces for the stairs and landing were a piece of cake to manage. The front porch has no cut-arounds so it was easy-peasy.

If you know the blissful satisfaction of a redemption like this, whether bigger or smaller, please let me know - I’d love to hear.