you will always find them in the kitchen at parties

Those of you who have been to the Gin Palace have seen our odd little kitchen. Our house was built back when coal and wood stoves were the norm, so instead of putting it inside the house it was housed in a small wooden structrue attached to the outside of the main brick building. That way if your stove caught fire you stood a better chance of just loosing the kitchen instead of the whole house.

So that means that the door to the kitchen is an opening in an external wall. Aka a supporting wall.

You see where this is going, right?

We always thought the door to the kitchen was unusually narrow. Turns out when we opened up the drywall on one side of the door we discovered that there was a big empty space behind it. Unfortunately we already had a support post where we thought the edge of the doorway was, and that effectively put the kibosh on getting a wider doorway out of the deal. Oh well. Then in the most recent round of work Charlie pulled the cement board off the other side of the door - and found a big empty space there too.

Turns out the previous owner had tried to move the doorway - by dint of taking a sledgehammer to the brick on one of side the doorway and walling up the other side. Without doing any of that fancy stuff like putting in a new lintel or in any way attempting to support the brick wall directly above it.

I would like to pause here and note that this is the third time we have found that there is nothing actually holding a part of our house up and that in accordance with the Universal Law of Threes I would very much like for there not to be any more please and thank you.

So this week our house has sprouted with support posts and wooden struts and metal beams. Brick dust and sawdust and the smell of fresh mortar wafts in the breezes. Some of the reno work moves slowly and with incremental changes; with this project we walk in the door every night, turn on the light and say, "Wow, look at that!"

And the best part is that they have built the new lintel to take the weight of the support beam so that one post can be removed. Which means we now have a doorway that will allow us to one day fit a new stove into the kitchen.

I really have to get around to posting those pictures.