One of the most evident challenges of the house was the kitchen.

Because of a long standing, full-width addition stuck on to the back of the house and a bathroom that had been shoehorned into it, the kitchen suffered from a lack of light and space which gave it the feeling of a passageway to nowhere. 

Our first step in this space was to demolish all the kitchen cabinets, which were unsalvageable particleboard modules sprinkled liberally with mouse turds. (The source of these was later definitively established when, upon taking up the floorboards under the old range, we discovered a rodent graveyard containing dozens of mummified little bodies, light and crispy as popcorn.) 

While we were demo-ing, de-mousing, and de-cluttering--and trying not to snap each other's heads off, metaphorically or literally, as we hoiked the old range and fridge out to the sidewalk--I was feeling out the space, arranging and rearranging it in my mind. There were a few preexisting elements which I knew I would have to contend with.

First, we were certainly not going to get rid of the bathroom. Second, there was an original pantry with wainscott (minus its doors); it felt wrong to demo this. Third, the chimney breast, hidden behind wallboard, had to be contended with. Fourth, a window and door giving into a pitch black middle room which was itself connected to the room at the very front of the house on the garden level. Fifth, the original pressed tin ceiling. Sixth and finally, the old rear window and door had never been taken down when the addition was put on, and I wanted to avoid the major headache of hiring a contractor to pull those load bearing bricks and add steel. (Also, recall: shoestring budget.)

As I look at images of the house at this stage I am struck by how orange everything is. There was a curdled quality to the light in the house in those early days that I now realize is there in all the memories I have of that time. It's the color of age, really: age and neglect. Over time that sepia tone went away, and I can picture it in my head as a kind of shifting frontline of renovation, one room cleared and cleaned followed by another and another, each becoming by degrees lighter, tidier, less burdened by its age.