Kitchen Confidential, Episode 1

They say that if you like eating sausage, or respect the law, you should never see how either one is made.

I think the same is true of restaurant kitchens. You really don't want to see where your food comes from, and I don't mean just the farm. We inherited a partially intact restaurant kitchen, one that had been serving top-notch meals for more than 30 years. They were all well-respected businesses, with famous chefs, classy menus, and long waiting lists. And yet they all cooked in... this place.

Granted, the kitchen had gotten a bit old, and the two years of neglect before we moved in didn't help. But you start looking closely at the walls, the sink, the floor, and... yuck. Time for a refresh.

And here's the little secret we've been holding back. Kathy and I are going to reopen the restaurant. Sort of. It's not going to be a full-service restaurant like our predecessors'. Instead, we're opening a tea room. Say hello to

The White Hart
Victorian Tea & Treats in the Historic Hart Mansion

We formed the legal business entity back in January, and have been working away on the business side of things ever since. At the same time, we've been restoring, upgrading, and refurbishing the kitchen and ground-floor rooms with an eye toward reopening them to the public. When? Hard to say, but we're shooting for the middle of 2014. (You can come back and laugh at our optimism in July.)

As far as blog posts go, we've been withholding almost a year's worth of kitchen-related upgrades, so prepare for some backfill. Here's the kitchen in June, already partway through the work. Many of the old appliances are gone (range, freezer, dishwasher, etc.) but the kitchen makes a swell place to store tools and work on large sheet lumber!

One of the first things we did was tear up the old sheet-vinyl flooring. Demolition is always the best part of any project, so Kathy and I went to it with a will. Here's Kathy peeling up big chunks of vinyl. Of course, the vinyl top comes off, but it leaves the sticky padding and glue underneath.

Rather than deal with that stuff, we just demolished and removed the wooden underlayment. It was mostly half-inch particleboard, so it breaks apart real nice-like. Besides, I don't like the idea of using particleboard under a (potentially) wet floor; it does bad things when it meets water.

The vinyl flooring extended into the two adjoining bathrooms and "utility room." Trouble is, it's not all the same vinyl, so the pattern keeps changing, and the floor heights are all slightly different, so there were threshold strips across every door. Time to fix it all.

Once we got all the vinyl and the wooden underlayment out of each of the rooms, we laid fresh plywood on the floors. The trick here was to even-out the floor heights, so we used a mixture of half-inch, three-eights, and five-eighths plywood from room to room. One room actually got two layers. Now we've got one flat, continuous surface across five rooms and five separate doors, from the dining room all the way to the backyard. Progress.

Next up: new flooring. And this is where we had our first run-in with the vast bureaucracy that manages restaurants and foodservice facilities. (You'll hear lots more about this.) Restaurant kitchens can't have just any old flooring. They have to be "smooth, cleanable, and nonabsorbent," among other things. We found a nice faux wooden plank flooring that looks like it matches the rest of the house but passes the S.C.N. test. As the final step in preparation, we screwed down special ACX plywood (grade-A finish on one side, grade-C finish on the other side, and water-resistant adhesives) to give the new flooring a completely smooth surface. Here's the ACX going in.

If I'd been smart, I would have removed all the appliances and tools before we started, but no... Instead, I got to play a big game of "move the furniture" whenever it came time to lay down a new piece. Notice that my table saw is upside-down in the sink, and that the floor drain and gas pipe are still in the back corner of the room. That will all change.

Finally, we got all the underlayment in, nice and smooth, and filled in the screw holes and gaps between boards. It was about two more weeks before the installers came to put in the flooring, so in that time our nice clean underlayment got all dirty again. But they seemed okay with cleaning it up.

Installation day dawned and the installers did a bang-up job. One guy installs all the full-length boards, while his helper has to cut all the odd pieces. Then I saw them pull out a blowtorch -- "what's that for?!!" Turns out it's easier to cut the flooring when it's warm, so they heat it up whenever they're working near the corners or edges.

We're really happy with how it turned out. The color and even the grain pattern match the floor in the dining room, so you hardly notice the floor changes at all, even though one's wood and one's water-resistant synthetic. And it runs smoothly through all the adjoining rooms, from kitchen to bathrooms to utility room. One small step toward opening up for business.