Demolition

Overall I am surprised at how little reconfiguration these walls have seen over their 120 year lifetime. The closet in the old sunroom appears to have been original. All the stud walls that we see appear to have been here from the start.  I’m not seeing much evidence of this room having been a different configuration in the past, except for maybe a closet or small bathroom over in the corner by the stairs. What I do see, though, is evidence of old, abandoned systems: orphaned wiring, what looks to me to be cut-off lead water pipes, gas pipes for gaslights that are clearly original, at least two generations of electrical wiring, and an old stovepipe hooking into the chimney:

The false ceiling in the old kitchen proper is indeed, as we suspected, concealing all the plumbing from the bathrooms on the second floor — as well as some heating pipes — and removing & rebuilding it would only gain us a couple inches of height.  We’ll see if the contractor wants to shore it up in place, or tear it down and rebuild it entirely. One surprise is that there is no center beam — the joists in the ceiling are single boards spanning from one side of the house to the other. These two things taken together mean that I think they’ll have no trouble at all hiding the beam for the wall we’re removing.

As I posted on my Project 365 today, it looks like — under several layers of floor — we may have the original 120 year old fir floor.  If this is the case, and it’s in good enough shape, and there’s no asbestos layer we’d have to deal with, I think we’d strongly consider restoring this original floor in the original kitchen and trying to match it in the new part.