The Old House in Missouri - Chapter 2 - The Kitchen

Time to settle in, unpack, rearrange, decorate and remodel. Remodel? Well yes. It was painfully obvious to my sense of decor that something much more lovely might lie hidden behind that awful wood paneling and those incredibly low and stark white ceilings. But first, the kitchen. We didn’t like where the kitchen doorway into the dining room was. If we moved it, we would have more room in the kitchen. Ah, the kitchen. I will get off track here but what a lovely large old kitchen it was. I did not yet have a cook stove and one had not come with the house. Shortly after moving in, probably within a week, we drove down to Texas to retrieve our belongings from storage as well as to what had been left me by my grandfather.

When we had gotten married my father had mentioned that he still had my great-grandmother’s stove (cook-stove he called it) in storage if I wanted it since I needed a stove. We had gotten it and used it briefly before moving to Oregon. I will never forget that day. It was stored at my dad’s mother-in-law’s house and no one was around to help us. I was pregnant so I could not lift. My husband got that huge heavy stove somehow by himself into the back of his Jeep of all things! I still to this day do not know how he got that stove loaded even though I stood there and watched him do it. I was so glad we had gotten it, it was a Cadillac of stoves. I can’t remember the brand or the model or the year but it was old and beautiful and huge and heavy. It was white porcelain-looking. It had four burners, an oven, and also a storage cabinet below for pots and pans and above that a clear area of space to work upon. It was a beauty and it fit right into our Missouri country kitchen.

Back to the remodeling, we started in the kitchen. There had been linoleum on the kitchen floor but I was convinced there was a wood floor beneath so my husband tore out the linoleum and sure enough there were wood boards though it was not pretty since it had been covered for no telling how many decades but it was rough and rugged and I liked it.

Right before I met my husband, I had visited my aunt and uncle in a small Texas town to where they had retired. They had purchased an old home and had it moved to some land in the country. My aunt had set about then to remodel and redecorate her country dream house. I had fallen in love with it the first minute I saw it. The antiques, dolls, white lace and linens, a country kitchen. I set out to do the same. At some point she and my cousin drove to Missouri to visit us in the country house and through the months and years there she began to send me little country treats. For Christmas one year she had refurbished my mother’s doll, wrapped her in a beautiful box of Christmas wrapping paper and sent her to me. I was so thrilled. She was so old and so beautiful and all fixed up. Another time she sent me handkerchiefs that belonged to my great-grandmother. She began sending me her favorite country recipes like homemade gravy, mayo, pickles, and my favorite, her lemon bread. At other times she sent handmade country greeting cards covered in snippets of material and one year she sent hand-made Christmas stockings for each of my three children with their names embroidered on the stockings. The stocking for my daughter was pink.

Our daughter had been born while we were in Oregon. We had spent only a fall and winter there. It was spring when we made the move across the country to the house in Missouri. We arrived the first week of April. It was muddy and cloudy and still cold. I was pregnant and due to deliver in October. We were not used to cold springs because we were from Texas. In Texas, spring is warm and beautiful (minus tornadoes of course). But cold or not, there was still much to do in the new old house.

The next order of business in the kitchen was the chimney above the stove. It had been plastered over and covered with wallpaper. I was equally convinced that there was more there than met the eye behind it. I wanted it stripped. Finally my husband got to work and this was a messy job. He pulled off all of the wallpaper and plaster to reveal a beautiful old brick chimney that lead, you guessed it, nowhere. But it was brick and it was cool so we just left it as it was. Possibly when the house was built in the early twenties, there had been a wood stove that needed ventilation and then in later years when the house had been remodeled, the chimney had been walled off. My kitchen now had a wood floor and an old brick chimney. We were peeling the layers away little by little to reveal its original, but now-hidden, beauty and more important, character.

Not every house has character but old houses do and this one was no exception. When we purchased the house, we received the abstract papers along with it containing all of the information about it dating back to its humble nineteen-twenties beginnings. We had been told by the realtor that the previous owner was an elderly gentleman who after losing his wife, had developed Alzheimer’s. His name was Vern. We were touched to learn about the owners and some of their history. Living alone with Alzheimer’s, the old gentleman had began to just wander off and his son felt he had no choice but to put him in a nursing home. He had been the school music teacher for years and had then retired. My husband loved the idea that the owner had been a music teacher for he too is a musician. It was sadly obvious that a woman’s touch had not been upon the house in a long while. There were still some scattered pieces of furniture and decor when we moved in and there was nothing of the feminine touch in them. We cleaned everything out of course and set about fixing up with our own things. I had my grandparents furniture including their living room suite and her cherry-wood secretary and dining set. The old house was beginning to feel like home.

After the chimney, it was time to move that doorway that led into the dining room. That was a huge mess. Behind the paneled wall were wallpaper and plaster. Inside the plaster were slats of wood. It all had to be cut away to make a new doorway. The entire house had dust drifting in clouds from the busted plaster. The sound of my husband banging away, removing the thick wall that had once been echoed for hours or days, I can’t recall. He boarded up the old kitchen entrance and built shelves inside of it on the dining room side. I decorated the shelves with old pink curtains in a rose print, draping them around the shelves and lined the shelves with lace. I placed my collection of tea sets on the shelves. The tea sets seemed happy to have a place at least to show themselves off. The rearrangement of the kitchen doorways created a solid wall in the kitchen and gave us more living space in both rooms. In old houses such as this one, the doorways were built into the middle of each room and you walked through one room to get to another. There were no hallways. But an addition to the kitchen allowed us the space to add the doorway to the dining room very near the outer wall instead of it being in the center of the room and taking away precious wall space. The other doorways to each room were also set like this but we left those as they were.

My husband’s next project was extending the kitchen and enlarging it through the old back porch that was on the house. This too was a job but he enjoyed it. He added quite a few square feet as well as room for my washer and dryer and room to have a large old country kitchen table which we purchased used. It was a table with character and a previous life, or lives. It was covered in scratches and even had some names carved in it but it was beautiful old wood in a rust-colored stain and I loved it. Some of my favorite memories of that time (as much as I really dislike cold weather) were winter mornings, being the first one up, coming into the kitchen and I had to light the stove from the pilot, so I would light the big old oven and open it up for a little extra heat to warm the kitchen. Then I would sit at the table and have my tea in the morning’s silence. I communed with that kitchen, it seemed to have stories to tell. The whole house had ten-foot ceilings as did the kitchen. I thought it odd though that the counter was really low, like for a short person, and I am pretty tall but the cabinets stretched all the way to the top of that ten-foot ceiling. They were white with old outdated metal handles but I just left them as they were. I would sit there on the cold mornings imagining a little short woman working away at her little short counter.

It was exciting to me to have ten-foot ceilings in the kitchen and I wanted to take advantage of that extra space so I told my husband I wanted one of those thingies to hang pots and pans from the ceiling. Now keep in mind that we had no money for redecorating. Everything that we used we found laying about somewhere. So in his ingenious, he suspended an old rustic broom handle and attached hooks to it. It fit right in with the old wooden floors and I was able to hang all my pots and pans plus some bunches of herbs.

My love affair with herbs was fairly new at that point. While in Oregon, my husband had taken me to an herb store and I was immediately in love. I didn’t even know what herbs were before that but I was like a kid walking into a candy shop. I didn’t know which herbs were which so I just starting picking out what to get; an ounce of this, a half ounce of that, just whatever I felt drawn to. I had a sack full of names I knew nothing about like St. John’s Wort, Mullien, Calendula and on and on. I bought a big fat herb book and set about learning all that I could about these amazing and mysterious plants that had been known to the rest of mankind for millennium. So I was completely stocked on herbs when we made the move to Missouri. My husband built me a heavy-duty jumbo rustic spice rack from redwood he had gathered in California, I mean Oregon (see they even had me thinking we were from California!) and I filled its shelves with bottles, jars, tinctures and salves and hung it in the old country kitchen. Oh my, such a small thing but I was in love and it was so exciting to me!

The roses and lilacs in the yard also provided an extension to my herbal love, the addition of flowers. There were so many rose bushes that there were too many to count and in the late spring they bloomed beautiful pink roses. I harvested them faithfully carrying in basket after basket, I had at least a bushel. One year I decided to make rose petal jam because I had so many but it takes a lot of petals to make the jam. My husband and his handy work once again came to the rescue because in addition to the petals to preserve, I needed rose oil and I had none. So in order to get the oil out of the roses, we needed what is basically known as a “still.” He rigged a still that looked something akin to some contraction that would normally concoct moonshine yet instead it coerced out the secret hidden oils of the roses, one tiny drip at a time. This was a timely process indeed and not for the impatient.  I finally got enough out to meet the recipe requirements which I was following and after all that and over a bushel of roses, I came out with one tiny jar of jam. It was too pretty, too hard-earned and too special to eat so I just kept it in the jar for decorative purposes on a kitchen shelf.

Working with the roses though led me to even more luxurious discoveries. I had no shortage of dried roses. I had begun drying all kinds of flowers. We had planted a flower garden and it bloomed in full by late summer and early autumn that first year. It was largely zinnias but zinnias are excellent for holding their shape and color.

Drying the flowers was another completely new process to me that I had to learn all about, much by trial and error. First order was to find screens to dry so the flowers can get air beneath them and dry evenly and well enough that they will not mold. There were some old window screens in our garage so we hauled them in and I filled them with flowers. In my inexperience, I did not know however that the pollens from the drying flowers would keep us sick with allergies for the months that I had them in the house. It’s all fine and dandy when you see the dried bunches of flowers and herbs hanging in the kitchens in the fancy spreads in magazine like Country Living but in real life, it doesn’t work. We were sick with allergies for months. I finally put two and two together and removed the drying process from the house to the cellar and we all felt much better and the flowers dried better as well as they were then completely in the dark. They need to be in the dark to fully keep their color while drying. The more sunlight, the less color they will hold.

After drying the flowers, I began looking for more ways to use them. I had since bought another big wonderful herb book and there were recipes and ideas for bath products and skin care. I loved this! I was in heaven once again. I had taught skin care for five years, I had been a professional model, and this was something I hated giving up. Finding myself transformed from a runway glam girl to a stay-at-home country herbal mom was never anything I could have ever imagined. As I have said our budget was tight, there was no money for makeup or fancy products. My husband didn’t care for them anyway as he is a real naturalist. Giving them up had been hard but after a while, I never even noticed because I was too busy with two new babies and all of our money went for diapers,  formula, and pet food (we had two dachshunds and numerous stray cats). So once I stumbled into the idea of making bath and skin care products, I was happy to give it a try. I also used the dried flowers in crafts and decorating. Once you get them fully dried, if using for decorating, the allergy thing isn’t really an issue any more after all the pollens have gone. To help with this and to keep them from flaking or falling apart, I would spray them with hair spray after they were dried, a rare commodity that I hardly used, so a can lasted a long time. I also sprayed my sketches with it but that’s another story. I will talk more on the specific crafts, bath items and recipes in the coming chapters.

We went two months without a refrigerator using only a cooler. To purchase anything larger than a loaf of bread required a trip elsewhere. We were located smack dab in between Des Moines, Iowa, and Kansas City, Missouri; an hour and a half drive to either. We found a used appliance store in Des Moines so that is where we headed. I wanted an old-timey fridge for the kitchen and we found one. It was probably a fifties model, the shorter, rounded kind. It was white so it matched Grandmother’s cook-stove and the cabinets. We did not have a truck to haul it in, only our car. Now my husband, as I have said, is very handy and ingenious. He did what I don’t think anyone else on the planet would have done. He removed the trunk lid on the car, stood it up in the trunk and loaded the refrigerator in the trunk. His then fourteen-year-old-daughter had come to visit a while and was in the back seat of the car. She was so teen-agedly embarrassed, that she stayed lying down in the seat the entire drive home. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies out appliance shopping. We laughed about that incident for years but it worked and he got us our old-timey refrigerator and it was a perfect fit in my country kitchen.

The kitchen in that house became my haven for most all of my work was centered within its homey walls with its peeling early twentieth-century wall paper, its recently unearthed red brick chimney and the old farmhouse table that was happy to share its memories with us. My great-grandmother’s rocking chair sat in the cozy corner next to her cook-stove and I spent endless hours there season after season, loving every minute of it. Well, mostly.

Continue to Chapter 3

copyright Cheryl Bruedigam 2016