Rob is making good progress on cabinets of Douglas fir he milled on site. Tile splash in the kitchen doesn't cut off where the stove will be, it extends all the way down to the floor. Tiles aren't repro, they are original subway tiles, another gem acquired from Demolition Depot. Vintage subway tiles have a special gleam from a glaze that can't be achieved today. Why? It's illegal. Original glaze was made using arsenic. Bon appetit!
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Rob is not only a superb contractor, he's a master carpenter. He set up shop on a back porch to make cabinetry for kitchen and breakfast room out of vintage Douglas fir salvaged from an airplane factory.
The Glenwood stove will be relocated to the breakfast room and replaced with a 6 burner DCS. Bill is building out the wall to accommodate a larger appliance. The neatly stacked planks are reclaimed wood that Rob has milled and will use to build kitchen cabinets.
West-facing window added to the breakfast room will make KP duty easier by providing the dishwasher with a lake view. Silhouetted against old, wavy glass panes is vintage soap-holder faucet from The Old School Plumber.
This vintage beauty Chris found at Old School Plumbing fits perfectly into a pantry off the kitchen. It's a hefty, working size. With gorgeous gams!
Rob Anderson, the contractor, specializes in "green" restorations that reuse materials that are already onsite. Here, he's turned a kitchen cold pantry into a mudroom/powder room using a sink retrieved from the basement. The sink had originally been used in the kitchen, but when the former owner redid the kitchen in 1972, he moved it into the basement for a dark room. Rob retrieved it and Mike the plumber removed years of photo chemical stains from the porcelain and rigged an artful copper drain below.
To give us an idea of how the kitchen island would look, Rob sets up plywood on trestles. We decide it's too big. Ellen suggests moving the Glenwood stove to the breakfast room. We didn't know this was possible! Frank the architect agrees it's a better use of the space and is redrawing plans to accommodate a smaller island and a new stove where the Glenwood now stands.
After months of exterior work, Rob and the team are making progress indoors, and I am beginning to think of the house as a home instead of a project. We are doing wooden cabinetry to match the vintage feeling of the slate sink that Chris found. Rob, a master carpenter, will build the cabinets to match this photo from Ellen's archives. He'll build them out of aged wood: 80 yr old fir reclaimed from beams in an old aircraft hangar. "Reclaiming old wood makes for a truly green renovation," says Rob. "Plus, aged wood is more beautiful. It takes 50 years to get fir this color."
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who we areWe are a couple of Upper West Siders from NYC who never set out to buy an old mansion in Connecticut. But the moment we walked through its massive front door, we were smitten. The info on this site is earnestly cobbled from a variety of sources, including the web. Please let us know if we've gotten something wrong, or if there's a story about Holleywood you'd like to share. forewords
December 2021
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