Kitchen @ MDHQ: East wall progress

The kitchen was a particularly challenging room. Our old kitchen is set in the back corner of the house, next to the library, and has little room to expand. We decided to move the kitchen forward, removing a shower stall in the downstairs bathroom and pushing the wall out to make space for the new kitchen. The kitchen has concrete floors and counters, ash cabinets, salvaged tile and sink, and new Energy Star appliances. Kitchen is still in progress, but here’s a little sampling of what we’ve done so far.

Master Bath @ MDHQ

Our master bath was the first  and possibly the nastiest room we gutted.  We removed five layers of carpet, linoleum,  and wood before reaching  the subfloor (and carpet that’s been down in a bathroom for 20+ years? you can imagine.)  We  had to change the space around to fit a double sink and jacuzzi tub, so we built a custom shower in the northeast corner, dropped double sinks into a vanity, and miraculously lifted a 500-pound 1970’s Kohler jacuzzi up our steps.  We also experimented with mosaics in the upper section of our custom shower, collecting miscellaneous remnants  of white tile an arranging them in a random pattern with thick gray grout lines.

Library: finished

As collectors of books and records, we needed a storage solution that could support our habits for years to come. We’d both always wanted a library, and thought hard about how we might create high wood shelves in an economically sustainable way. We ended up finding a way to use ash from a standing dead tree (claimed by the emerald ash borer.)

Our library uses ash wood for the shelves and other reclaimed woods throughout: the aged beams which offer structural reinforcement were salvaged from an old barn in Michigan, our floor was reclaimed from a demolished shoe factory, our door was taken from an old school in Indiana, wood from the attic was repurposed below once the ceiling was removed, antique fixtures and furniture throughout

Library before + afters

Sitting room off master bedroom: a photo journey

Upstairs hall (leading to master bedroom) @ MDHQ

There was a small 6×6 room at the end of the upstairs hall which was not quite big enough to be a bedroom (although we have heard tale from a previous renter of it being used as such - he had to cut his mattress to fit inside) but a bit too much for a closet. We decided to attach the room to the master bedroom as a sitting room (see more at the master bedroom project.) We covered the doorway, creating an inset bookshelf on the other side, and put leaded glass windows facing into the sitting room and above the stairs, which provide interesting pass-though daylighting on both sides of the wall.

Gallery Renovation @ MDHQ

As you probably know, MDHQ (the former Bad Idea) was originally a co-op, and thus, many of the rooms were divided to create additional private rooms. The large front room at MDHQ was initially broken into two odd, l-shaped rooms. The l-shaped rooms were cramped, cluttered with sleep lofts, and dark (since the windows in the rooms were chuked apart with the l-shaped partition.) We removed the partition, sanded and refinished the original 1900’s wide plank floor, and redecorated the room with salvaged materials. The gallery is envisioned as a flexible space that we can change and adapt to fit our needs, it’s first use will likely be a live-work gallery for visiting artists (more about our vision of a residency program to come.) We left the graffiti on the gallery’s front entrance door as a tribute to the former Bad Idea house.