The Pompeii of Plumbing

So I told you yesterday that we got really lucky.  Of course I’m lucky my wife stays married to me despite the myriad of reasons not to, and she’s lucky that I don’t mind that she can’t take a picture to save her soul. Like that last one, which appears to be taken underwater. Anyway, we were lucky together, at the local flea market.

They didn’t call it a flea market. They called it a barn sale, because that sounds better to tourists, I guess. Maine has plenty of places to flense the flesh from unwary antique lovers from out of state, but it’s also got all sorts of people selling all sorts of things for short money in sheds and mostly abandoned buildings and tents by the side of the road. The barn guy had all his stuff in a garage with a tent outside it. It was in an out-of-the-way place, in a slack season, so the proprietor was happy to see us and make a deal. He had this sink.

It’s a pretty big cast iron sink, with two basins. The left-hand basin is really deep. Unlike most old cast iron sinks, it wasn’t chipped around the edges or the drain holes, and wonder of wonders, it still had the sliding panel you can (almost) see on the left in the picture. If you’ve ever wondered why these old sinks have that thin, flat chamfer around the top edge, this is why. The panel is really useful, so people throw it away or lose it, because people. The panel slides back and forth on the groove, and entirely covers 1/2 of the sink at a time. If you have a cat that likes prospecting in the sink for bacon residue, it’s the perfect solution for hiding the pan until you get around to washing it.

It functions perfectly as a drain board for the dish rack, too, and that’s how we use it. It frees up two feet of counter space, and the sink is still always usable.

Kitchen sinks, especially big honking ones and Victorian jobs, are in high demand these days. If you go to an old house parts store looking for a sink like this, bring a grand or two with you. The fellow with the barn sale sign and no barn had been using the sink as an ashtray. There was about four thousand cigarette butts piled on top of an inch of sand in both sides of the sink. Wonder of wonders, the sink was sitting on its original steel cabinet. The cabinet looked like it had been thrown from a second story window, once or twice, or maybe a third time just for fun. The inside bottom panel was covered with many layers of shelf paper, dried chemicals, and rust stains.

“What do you want for this?”

He looked us up and down. I assume he assumed we were locals, and gave us the local price.

“Eighty-five bucks.”

“What about the cabinet?”

“I’ll throw that in, if you don’t make me help you lift this thing.”

You’d need a degree in quantum mechanics to figure out the portion of a second it took us to say yes.  We counted 85 bucks in his hand, and went home to get a teenager to help me muscle it into the truck. We were taking a bit of a chance on it, as pawing around in the ashes might not have revealed some rusty spot hidden in this Pompeii of plumbing, but it was worth it. Hell, it’s hard to find a crappy stainless steel drop-in kitchen basin for under a hundred bucks these days.

Once we got it home, we risked getting third-hand-cancer from the butts, but we cleaned it out thoroughly. There was caulking residue and various stains, but they came right off with a little acetone on a rag. The thing was essentially spotless.

The cabinet looked so rough that I planned on making a wooden replacement and chucking out the metal one. I decided to give renovation a shot, first, because even if I ruined it further by banging on it, nothing of value would be lost. We were playing with house money, as it were. So I banged the dents out of the sides. The thing started to sit flat after that. I took the doors off their pivot hinges, and did a little sloppy surgery on their hinge pins, and they started working again. I tried the acetone on the mess in the bottom of the cabinet, and the whole lasagna of shelf papers and goo peeled off in a sheet like a facial mask. The bottom of the cabinet wasn’t even rusty, another miracle.

After I got tired of beating on it, I went to the hardware store and bought some epoxy spray paint for appliances. I was really surprised, but the stuff really worked. The cabinet looked like new, and ended up with a very durable finish on it.

The sink required two hanging brackets to be affixed to the wall, and only one came with it. But it’s such a standard thing, still in use, that we were able to order one online for a few bucks. But the sink/bracket/cabinet combo would have to be assembled with a precision that my house laughs at. I’m not complaining, but I was planning on fitting the cabinet to the slope-y floors and cockeyed walls, not the other way around. Metal cabinets don’t do “fitting.” You adjust yourself to them, not the other way around, like the IRS or plastic Adirondack chairs. I’d have to fix the floor better.

[To be continued. If you enoy reading Sippican Cottage and want to help us out, tell a friend about us. Thanks!]

Luck Is Where You Find It

I told you I was lucky. You don’t believe me, because I recount stories about hitting my thumb over and over and getting Lyme disease and discovering a geyser of excrement in my basement and snow in my driveway. Everyone moved two times zones and a couple of meridians or something else cartographic just to get away from that last one. They have hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires and mudslides and droughts and tornadoes and riots, but that’s nothing compared with being forced to push a plastic shovel up and down the walk a dozen times a season. But I must insist, I’m lucky.

Take this kitchen for example. It’s not a little wrong. That would be unlucky. It’s exactly wrong. That’s lucky. The refrigerator is where the sink should go. The sink is where the stove should go. The stove is where nothing should go. It’s unbelievably lucky, because I can work on the places where stuff is going to end up while it’s still in use where it should never have gone in the first place.

Regular construction has a more or less predictable set of operations. You make a plan, you buy your stuff, you stack it on-site, you assemble your workforce, and then you perform each step of the construction process to its completion before moving on to the next one. Eventually it’s done. You can’t do that in an occupied house. If it’s your own house, you can get away with much more hardship than if you’re doing construction for money for strangers. There are still limits, however. After all, there are a lot of knives handy in the kitchen, and if there’s no running water or electricity in there for long periods, certain ideas enter a frustrated homeowner’s mind.

First things first, though. It’s pitch dark in there since we cut the power to all the knob and tube wiring. There are no overhead lights working anywhere in the house now. It’s dumb to work in the dark unless you’re a gigolo or a projectionist. Luckily (there’s that word again), we have no money. If we had lots of money, we’d spend endless hours of time and oodles of dough while trying to select from the dizzying array of perfectly hideous light fixtures that every lighting store sells. I assume that’s how it works, I’ve never been inside a lighting store. I just noticed that no matter how much money people have to spend, pretty much all light fixtures that aren’t antique reproductions or salvage are awful-looking. If there were any good looking ones in there, I figure someone would have bought one by accident occasionally. LED ceiling cans to the rescue! Luckily, we were poor, and couldn’t afford any light fixtures. So what? We want light, not Calder sculptures with Edison bulbs and switches.

Back when we went shopping, the government was trying to make everyone forget about that time they attempted to force us all to put curlicue mercury hand grenades in all our light sockets. It didn’t work, so they decided to subsidize LED light bulbs to keep us from buying weird Mexican incandescents at the dollar store and ruining the ecobiospristinowildernessoceanoearthosphere and stuff. I’m sure the bulbs weren’t cheap to make, but they sure were cheap to buy that year. We cut five holes in the ceiling, and fished wires in a daisy chain from one to the next to the switch. This was the easiest time I’ve ever had fishing romex wire in any house, because the joist bays were 34 freaking feet long, remember? Nothing in the way.

So as I’ve bored you with already, there are really only three things in a kitchen: stove-fridge-sink. The rest is connective tissue. Get those right, and you’re bound to have a good kitchen. The refrigerator is on wheels, so he’s no problem. Move it aside and plug it back in. The stove is free-standing electric, so it doesn’t need to be installed into anything to work. It just needs a big, honking plug where it lands. The reefer was placed on the only wall with a window, along with a cabinet run. That’s where the sink will go, because if my wife has to wash one more dish with a cabinet door in her face, well, there’s those knives again. Rule number one in any kitchen is to put the sink under a window. Period. Stuck in an island isn’t as daft as putting a cooktop there, but it’s still pretty goofy if you ask me. You’re reading this, so you did ask me.

Ah, all the French designers say the layered look is in this year. It was in every year for the last century at my house. Layers of paint and plaster and paneling and homasote and wallpaper borders and linoleum and shelf paper, all held together with the ultimate adhesive, a clever mixture of nicotine and spider webs and cooking grease. If our predecessors kept laying it on like that, the room would have ended up about the size of a phone booth, with six-foot-thick walls. I was lucky there was no hope of salvaging any of it, so we could safely nuke it all and not feel sheepish.

Perhaps you’ll notice something else dumb and lucky in this photo. Not my son. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t be helping me. I’m referring to that plastic pipe sticking out of the wall. Back when we enjoyed our geyser of excrement, we discovered a clean out and drain in the basement on the opposite side of the house from the bathroom. It’s more or less right under that pipe you see there. We added a bath, upstairs in that hideous blue room we showed you yesterday. We ran the DWV (drain, waste, vent) pipe along the ceiling in the kitchen, bored a hole in the outside wall, and ran the pipe down two floors to the main drain leaving the house. Luckily, while we were at it, we remembered to stub out a kitchen sink drain on the way by.

The lad is replacing the lath we demolished. We put in very beefy blocking, which is leftover blocks of framing lumber set between the studs and screwed to a fare-thee-well. When you mount cabinets and sinks and things to a wall that has wood lath, it’s deuced difficult to find studs after the fact. Stud finders are confused by the lath. But we keep the lath, and restore it with new stuff we ripped from leftover lumber, to keep the wall the correct thickness. Then we replace the old horsehair plaster coats with 1/2″ drywall sheets. The blocking lets us find sturdy screwing spots wherever we need them, without cursing at the stud finder all day.

This next picture is a good illustration of the incremental aspect of the work. We ran the pex plumbing on the surface, because the house is timber framed, and I didn’t relish the idea of trying to bore holes in the big wooden members, and disturbing all the loose rockwool insulation, just to get the plumbing in the wall. I’ll be making the cabinets, and the plumbing will be hidden behind the dishwasher and the cabinets anyway. We wired a couple of new GFCI plugs. We had to tape and finish the drywall to keep going. We’ll have to do all the same operations three or four more times to keep from disturbing the whole kitchen at once. It’s not as efficient, but it’s necessary.

The building inspector showed up.

She said it looked OK, so we proceeded. But the new hot and cold water pipe would have to be ripped out, however, because we got really lucky right after this.

[To be continued]

This Old Dilapidated House

If you’ve just tuned in, we’re fixing our deplorable kitchen in our $24,000 house, in fits and starts, with no money. I know, I make it sound so sexy when I put it like that. Who hasn’t dreamed of living in a tumbledown Victorian dustcatcher with a bombed-out kitchen, two hours north of civilization, that occasionally sports four feet of snow on the roof?

I really didn’t mind the four feet of snow on the roof at first, because it plugged up all the holes where the squirrels went in and out. Old farmers say that snow is the poor man’s fertilizer. Like most old wives tales, it sounds silly, but it’s right on the money. Snow has nitrogen in it, and it enriches the soil when it melts. I didn’t need any nitrogen in my attic, but I didn’t need any more squirrels, either, so it worked out for me anyway.

Oh how my wife suffered as we tried to get the house propped up enough to really work on the kitchen. She prepared countless meals for the four of us in that makeshift mess. Luckily, we got a dishwasher right away. It was a housewarming gift from a generous relative. We kept it in our bedroom closet for years, and stored sweaters in it, because if you’ve got squirrels and mice and spiders and bees and flies and bats in your house, you probably have moths, too, we figured. I assured my wife that we’d only have to wash dishes by hand until I leveled the floor in the kitchen enough to install the dishwasher properly. We had to jack up the back of the house first. My wife washed a lot of dishes in a tiny, rusty, stainless steel basin, with her back facing the windows, and her face staring at a tatty cabinet door the whole time, with a brand new dishwasher slumbering in the closet. Why yes, I’m still married. Why do you ask?

That reminds me of an opinion I’ve held for most of my life. It’s especially trenchant when it comes to home design and renovation: Never listen to what people say. Just watch what they do. As a useful aphorism, it’s right up there with professor Gaye’s daisy, believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear. You see, I’ve been in a lot of different homes of all kinds, and tried to help people alter them to make them more pleasant to live in. I only rarely actually made houses more pleasant to live in, but it wasn’t entirely my fault. I was forced to listen to what people said, because doing what they told me instead of what I thought they should do was the only way to get them to sign the checks.

I was always very specific with my input. I’d stress that it wasn’t because I didn’t like what they were going to do, that they shouldn’t do it.  It was because I knew they wouldn’t like it after it was done. It’s a difficult concept to get across. Everyone just wants what they want, and they don’t know or care why they want it, but boy howdy do they want it. The home and garden industry is based on it. Whenever you hear a woman on a TV show say something ticks all her boxes, the marketers must smile and buy another sailboat. People are regurgitating what they’ve been taught, not thinking. Home shows are based on envy, not comfort.

So, for instance, I’ve given up counseling people that they don’t want a huge soaking tub in their bathroom in front of a giant expanse of windows. Men don’t take baths, and women will not take a bath in front of a big window, no matter what they tell you. It’s a colossal waste of money, but everyone wants it, and that’s that. After they move in they board up the window with blinds and go in the shower stall to wash themselves and pay the elephantine mortgage and are happy. Sort of.

I watched my wife struggle with what she had, so it was easy to determine what she really needed to improve the kitchen. Eventually, she got a working kitchen by her standards, not social media’s idea of it. When you see someone trying to do something with lots of impediments in their way, but they keep going anyway, you can trust that they’re serious, and figure out how to help them. People who think they’ll exercise if they only had a gym membership is the obverse of this coin. I doubt it.

So where can you go for good advice about home design and renovation? Beats me. For the most part, you have to have a library card and some common sense, not premium cable and YouTube red. You can find stuff on the internet, but you essentially have to know the answer before you start, because you’ll have to look for it in a sea of wrongness. Let me give you a concrete example.

This Old House is the granddaddy of home improvement shows. Their original carpenter, Norm Abram, was like a god, and his successor, Tom Silva, was at least a vestal virgin or something. So the last time I remember seeing anything from that show, someone asks Tom Silva how to tell if a wall in an old house is load bearing or not, and he tells them if the wall is made with 2″ x 3″ studs instead of 2″ x 4″ studs, it’s not load bearing, and you can tear it out to achieve the huge, undifferentiated space everyone craves for some reason.

Tom should know better. The former occupants of our house didn’t. They wanted to take out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and they did. The wall was built with 2x3s, so they figured why not? The house didn’t fall down or anything, it’s true. That minute. But another of my favorites sayings comes into play, regarding the law of unintended consequences: something else happens. Here’s the something else:

That’s the room directly over the kitchen. Let’s zoom in on the baseboard at the floor, directly over the spot where the wall used to be, but currently wasn’t:

The floor had sagged over an inch where the wall had been removed. The room on the other side had the same dished-out gap at the floor. The dining room ceiling on the other side of the missing wall had a huge sag in it. So they house didn’t fall down, but it was falling down. Why for, you might ask in the vernacular? Because you have to understand what’s going on before you know how to fix things, or in this case, break things.

What guys like Tom and the former residents don’t know or don’t care about, is that earlier generations had reasons for doing what they did, and you have to understand their thinking before you go Dresden 1945 on walls and things.

The lumber used in old houses (ours is from 1901) is undersized for what it’s doing. The floor joists here are only 2 x 7 framing lumber. There’s no such thing as a 2×7 at the lumber yard, or on a span chart nowadays. They’re actually 2 inches thick by 7 inches, unlike a modern 2×8, which is 1-1/2″ by 7-1/4″, but they’re still not stiff enough to span long lengths. How long a length are they spanning? Why, 34 goldang, dadgum, motherloving feet, my friends.

Framing lumber doesn’t come in 34 foot lengths anymore, but it did then. If you don’t believe me, call a lumber yard and ask for price on 2″x 7″x 34′ joists. You’ll be on hold for a long time, and may hear giggling on the other end of the phone. Why would carpenters use 34-foot long joists to span from the back wall of the house, all the way across the kitchen, all the way across the dining room, ending when they got to a bearing wall in the living room? Because they knew there would be an interior partition about halfway to cut the span in half.

Tom wasn’t crazy, a 2″ x 3″ framed wall isn’t wide enough to lap joists on top of. That’s what he thinks of as a bearing wall, because he’s accustomed to ordering lumber from today’s lumber yard. Our wall was plenty strong and wide enough to use it as an intermediate support. They framed this partition with 2 x 3s simply to end up with the correct wall thickness after layers of wooden lath and three layers of plaster was applied to both sides of the wall, not because the wall wasn’t doing anything structural.

So, let’s take out the sag, and add some wall space back. People are crazy to remove all the walls in their houses to achieve an open plan, but walls are useful, especially in a kitchen. The floor above made some interesting noises when we lifted it up, but we didn’t have 1″ gaps under the baseboards anymore.

As you can see, all the former occupants accomplished with their open plan was to open up a vista of the side of the wretched kitchen cabinets they installed ten minutes later. We’ll put the wall back, with a big 6′ x 7′ opening remaining between the kitchen and dining room. Just how open do you need?

[To be continued, of course. If you’d like to support this blog, keep reading, recommend us to a friend, leave a comment, or hit the tip jar. Thanks!]

Time Won’t Let Me

Alrighty, we’re going to fix this kitchen. We’re going to fix it but good. We’re going to fix the plumbing. We’re going to fix the electrical. We’re going to fix the floor. We’re going to…

Hmm. “Going” is a verb. I think it’s a future tense of the verb “to be.” It’s good that it was in the future tense, because it fit in with our circumstances perfectly. In the future, we’d all be richer and smarter and more popular. Hell, the way our minds work, in the future we’d be younger, too, you just wait and see. And we’d have a great kitchen to be younger in.

But we had to live in this house right away. To quote those famous philosophers, The Outsiders, time won’t let me wait that long. And we couldn’t live in it the way we found it. We’re daft, but not daft enough to cook on a stove with a wood shingle backsplash. So my wife and I gnawed it over a bit, and decided what we could and should do right off. Non-negotiable stuff.

You’d be surprised how well you can adapt to your circumstances if you have no other choice. I also was kind of lucky, in that I’ve renovated lots of houses while the owners were still living in them. Experience in these matters helps. Some of these customers were, how can I put this delicately, demanding. They weren’t going to put up with much of any discomfort or mess. My family would be easy compared to them.

I remember one customer from way back in the day. She was some sort of harpy from Greek mythology. Her husband, while leaving for work, actually said, “Good luck” to me when he passed me in the driveway. I took it as an ill omen. I wasn’t disappointed.

One of the renovations on the agenda was redecorating their master bedroom. It was chock-a-block full of expensive furniture, and lots of bric-a-brac I couldn’t afford to drop without getting backing from a hedge fund first. I had a smallish crew working for me at the time, and I cautioned them over and over not to make a mess or break anything. We removed pictures from the walls, and stripped off wallpaper to begin. Then we patched all the plaster, because the walls would be changed to paint, and we prepared and primed the wood trim.

I covered everything in the room with brand new, sparkling white, padded canvas dropcloths, because I had an inkling how this job was going to go. At the end of the day, I took out Polaroid photos I’d taken before we began, and we put everything back precisely where it was before we started. Then I sent the crew out of the room, and slowly crawled backwards out of the room on my knees, wiping the floor down with a sponge as I went. It was immaculate. We’d have to move and cover everything again the next day, but the customer specified that she wouldn’t put up with any disruption of her normal routine.

She wasn’t home when we finished, so we locked the door and I drove the 45 minutes home. When I got there, I was greeted by several VERY AGITATED voicemail messages indicating that the house was a mess, and I’d better get back there pronto, or go to my lawyer’s office, my choice. I drove back.

I stood in the bedroom with the husband and wife, and I tell you that place was cleaner than an operating room. I was flummoxed.

She said, “Well?”

“Well, it looks pretty clean to me. Can you give me some idea of the problem you’re seeing?”

“It’s obvious. Don’t play dumb.”

I almost told her it wasn’t an act, but thought the better of it.

“I don’t get it.”

“You forgot to hang the pictures up.”

“Er, ma’am, we’re going to be painting those walls tomorrow, and the hooks you used to hang the pictures were adhesive strips, stuck to the wallpaper we removed.”

“You didn’t bring hooks?”

“No, I didn’t bring hooks.”

“Typical.” She stomped out of the room.

The husband got interested in the ceiling all of a sudden, and other things other than looking at me. At that moment, I looked down at the night table, and noticed one of those orange plastic containers that prescription drugs are dispensed in. I’m used to seeing regular sized containers, tiny little cylinders with white caps and a typed label, but this one was the size of a can of motor oil. The cap was off, and there was a pitcher of water and a glass next to it. I’ve never seen that many pills in one place outside a pharmacy.

The husband must have noticed a modestly horrified look on my face, and said, “That’s my wife’s prescription for valium. But honestly, it really doesn’t matter which one of us takes them, as long as one of us does.”

It took all my strength not to laugh like a hyena until I was safely in the truck with the window rolled up.

So I do know how to work around people, even people I’m married to. We decided on the bare minimum we could accomplish right away. The most bang for the buck, as it were. We demolished the baseboard heat, to cut down on cut ankles. I cut the power to the knob and tube wiring, and my wife made do with a torchiere in there. We removed the shingled backsplashes, and then made temp backsplashes with cheap shelf paper stuck on cheap unfinished hardboard. I went to the hardware store and bought a random assortment of plastic parts, and made the sink drain a bit better. We ran pex plumbing to the sink, the second of many such runs in the house. C’mon, you know the toilet was first.

I demolished all the unsafe plugs and wires, and put cover plates on all the boxes. We bought a bunch of extra cover plates and screwed them over the largest holes in the floors, which inconvenienced the mice somewhat.

A neighbor came by and told us one of their relatives was throwing away a dozen vinyl windows. They were replacing them with other vinyl windows because Ricky Roma sells windows in Maine now, I guess. Anyway, would we like the old ones? Hot damn, yes.

The donor house was as old as ours, and may have been built by the same people in 1901. The windows were exactly the same height as ours, although slightly skinnier. Fool luck is the best kind. I could pad out the frames a little in width, with no adjustment for height, and pop them in. Fantastic. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but people in Maine are nice, present company excluded.

The spare heir steamed off the hideous wallpaper border. It was winter, and we fought over the steamer job to keep warm. I’m meaner than him, but his elbows are sharp and he won out.

Then I went rooting around in the basement and found some kind of yellow wall paint, and we gave the place a coat to take the curse off it.

We painted right over the paneling, because I was too afraid to look behind it without a stash of valium of my own. Please note that the ceiling molding was installed upside down. It made my eye twitch every day I entered the room until we finally got around to really fixing the kitchen. We’ll show you that, starting tomorrow.

Say, What Is a Kitchen, Anyway?

Say, what’s a kitchen?

No, really, I’m asking. I’ve seen television once or twice, and I’ve gotten confused about what a kitchen is for. I used to think it was a room in your house where food is stored, and prepared, and sometimes eaten. Heaven help me I don’t know what it is now.

First of all, I apologize for referring to anything inside a house as a “room.” As I understand it, if a TV host slips up while reading their cue cards and utters the word “room,” a kind of SWAT team rushes onto the set, gags and hogties them, and takes them off to a This Old House gulag. They’re heavily drugged, given electroshocks and other assorted mental massages, until they chant, “It’s a space, it’s a space, it’s a space…” and then released back into the Home and Garden gene pool. Of course, if you go outside the house, and put up an awning, buy a $2,000 grill, and arrange some plastic chairs around it, it’s an “outdoor room.” Don’t ask me how everything got backwards, I didn’t make the rules.

Hmm. Upon reflection, you can ask me. I actually know who started this fad of calling a room a space, and a space a room. His name was Bruno Zevi, and he wrote the most destructive book in the history of the printing press, Architecture as Space.

Now, you might think that’s a bold claim on my part. There were some books written by some other dastards back in the day that did a lot of damage. That brushy mustache guy’s self-help book caused a lot of trouble, for instance. The least funny Marx brother’s book got bad reviews from Solzhenitsyn, too. But Zevi’s got them all beat. He ruined housing, or at least talking about it, and nearly everyone lives in some sort of housing. Only a small portion of the population ever marches in torchlight parades or salutes missiles as they roll by the grandstands.

I went to architecture college until I wised up. I wised up plenty when they made me buy a copy of Architecture as Space, and told me this was the next big thing ooh la lah cutting edge hipster revolutionary foofarah, and I’d better get with the program, buster, and learn it. Because I was paying for my education with money I earned, instead of borrowed, I decided to actually read the thing. I’ll save you some trouble, and sum up its contents: Three hundred pages of drivel, and don’t forget to call everything a space! The end. My classmates apparently only remember the title, and wave their arms and call everything THE SPACE. I dropped out and built houses with rooms in them and called them that.

I was also front and center for the final destruction of the modern kitchen. Ramming a run of cabinets into the corner of an undifferentiated chasm where three rooms used to go was just the warmup, architecturally. Now they’ve taken to putting the cooktop in the island, facing out into the great beyond. It’s an especially piquant way to cook when there’s seating on the opposite side of the island. I don’t know about you, but I like to eat while perched on a stool with bubbling cauldrons and pans spitting grease at me. It makes me feel like I’m an extra in Macbeth.

So where did this bad idea come from? Where all bad ideas come from, television. A long time ago, I met Julia Child. She wanted me to do some work on her house in Cambridge, Mass. She was a stalwart lady. She was one of the few customers I’ve encountered who was tall enough to look me straight in the eye. She was as pleasant as rain in the desert. She needed this and that done in her house, and showed me around. I was in the kitchen where they filmed some seasons of her show. It was a perfectly traditional layout, and quite pleasant. She told me that the TV people installed a big island with cooktops in the middle of the room for her to cook on, so the audience could see what she was doing. She also told me that no one in their right mind would cook on a setup like that if they had a choice. She had a big, gas range against the wall, with a flat area on both sides to hold stuff while she worked, and that was where she cooked when the camera was off. So according to Julia Child, everyone has lost their mind, because everyone saw her on TV facing the wrong way in the kitchen, and mimicked what they saw.

So what is a kitchen? It’s basically three things. A sink, a stove and a refrigerator. That’s it. They used to call it the work triangle. There were certain ratios for how far apart the three should be. These ratios are argued over endlessly. The ratios were right in the first place, so any discussion would be moot, but that never stopped anyone, especially since social media was invented. These ratios are like discussing (yelling at AM radio hosts) whether the Patriots need linebackers more than wide receivers in the draft. You can talk about the topic endlessly, and never have to come to any conclusions, because Belichick always picks six defensive ends and a punt returner anyway.

The origins of the kitchen work triangle are piquant to me. You can trace it back through all the attempts to modify it with newer, bad ideas, to Lillian Moller Gilbreth. That’s right, sane kitchen design was born in Maine. It took the rest of the country to screw it up. Old Lily Gilbreth was married to maybe the greatest man that Maine ever produced, and she was no slouch herself. I listen to people like the Gilbreths. You should too.

So all we need is a sink place and a stove spot and a fridge locale. The people who lived in our house before us only got three of those things in the wrong place. Off to the drawing board.

[To be continued. If you’d like to support Sippican Cottage, tell your internet friends about us, and/or subscribe to our intermittent email blast. Thanks!]