Restoring a Vintage Kitchen

When you purchase a vintage home, you will find that the kitchen is not up to today's standards for family living. In many instances, you may find that the entire house will need to have restoration work. When preservationists restore vintage homes, they usually keep the facade and the main living areas in the style of the home. The kitchen, however, is usually redesigned to meet the needs of their family.

Vintage not only means the restoration of pre-World War I homes but also bungalows from the 1950s and ranch style homes from the 1970s. The design and purchase of a home is a personal choice and the styles from various decades appeal to many people.

When kitchens became a separate room in the family home, there were work areas. Everything in the kitchen was freestanding including the stove, the refrigerator, and the sink. The kitchen table was the work area and the appliances were all one color, white. Some had cast-iron stoves. Floors were wood or linoleum.

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s did see changes in color in kitchen appliances but some of the colors got old pretty quickly. It was difficult for everyone to live with avocado green and gold for twenty years.

When planning a kitchen redesign for a vintage home, you want it to feel warm and inviting and homey. You also want the hardware to have a period feel. The availability of period materials has grown. You can find period pieces in antique stores and well designed reproduction hardware and appliances in home shopping stores. Architectural salvage companies go through buildings and homes to be torn down and salvage materials for re-use.

The look and feel of a kitchen is determined by its cabinets. If you want to keep an historic feel to your kitchen, check with architectural salvage companies for wood and metal cabinets. You can mix these cabinets with freestanding antique or reproduction pieces. You can also add other vintage pieces such as an antique dresser or other items such as plate racks and open shelves. When refinishing your salvage cabinet finds, you should make sure that you strip, buff, and lacquer the metal cabinets to prevent them from rusting. Old painted wood cabinets have a tendency to warp when striped. You should do them one at a time.

You can use stone countertops in a vintage kitchen redesign. The stone should be honed to a soft finish. Vermont soapstone is a popular choice.

Flooring in a vintage kitchen redesign can be linoleum or wood. You may be able to find unused rolls of linoleum from early decades at an architectural salvage store. Many of today's designs also complement the vintage kitchen. Linoleum companies are reproducing early patterns.

Many vintage kitchens, especially pre-war, used pressed metal in the ceiling. You can check for these at an architectural salvage store. An alternative is to use a heavy Anaglyptic paper. This is a cream colored paper embossed in a variety of period patterns. It costs less to install than pressed metal and when it is painted, achieves a similar look.

Since the mid-1980s, it has become easier to find authentic looking vintage stoves and refrigerators. Most old stoves are white but you can find some colors such as cream, green, or cobalt blue. Hoods used for venting were not used 100 years ago. In this case, you can have one built of the same wood as an overhead cabinet.

It is not difficult to find antique hardware. In a vintage kitchen, you may want to choose antique brass, satin nickel, or blackened finish. You can find reproductions to fit just about any vintage period at your local hardware or home shopping store.

A kitchen redesign for a vintage kitchen can make your home warm and family friendly. It just takes a little time to find the right pieces.

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