Yesterday, while working on packing stuff in the old kitchen, my focus was on clearing the wood cook stove.  It was completely hidden away by stuff we put there, just to get them out of the way until we could get them to the storage shed or, for our own stuff, create a space for it.

The old kitchen is an add on to the original log house.  I had thought my dad had added it on after buying the farm from a relative, but I’m told the original builders had built it.  Another log building that we used as a chicken coop was the “summer kitchen.”  That’s where a stove was set up and the cooking and canning would happen, to keep the house from getting too hot.  As I understand it, this stove is from the summer kitchen.  Which means this stove hasn’t moved in about 3 generations.  Maybe four.

Until the new part of the house was built in the early 70’s, and we got running water and an electric stove, this was our kitchen.  Even after the new one was built, when the power went out, we would go back to using the old kitchen for cooking and some of the heating (the wood burning furnace needed electricity to operate the fans the blew hot air).

It’s a good thing we have no plans to use the stove.

I’m just going to post a couple of pictures for now; I found a lot of weird stuff on, in and around it!  Here is how things looked after I moved away that big stuff we had leaned in front of it.

The chair, we’d put in to make room in the dining room, since we didn’t need the 8 or so that were there.  The vehicle bike rack is ours.  We kept it, even after selling off our bikes before a move, because we’d intended to get bikes again.

There’s a vacuum cleaner you can see on the left, with its head in the centre bottom of the photo.  That used to be ours!  And before that, it belonged to my in-laws.  They gave it to us during one of our moves back to the province, and when we left it again, it ended up on the farm.

The fire extinguisher box on top of the warming shelves turns out to have a fire extinguisher in it!  We’ll have to take it out and check its condition.  If it’s good, we’ll just need to recharge it and we’ll have an extra. :-)  We already have another modern one in our kitchen, though I suppose it’s due to be recharged, too.

You can also see just a bit of an umbrella sticking out.  That’s ours, too!  My husband bought it for the girls the second time we moved back to the West coast.  It’s painted silk with scenes of Winnie the Pooh (book style, not Disney style) on it.  There was a second, smaller one, too.  The girls were 3 and 6 at the time.  They are now 22 and 25.  So excited to find that!  I hope we find the second one somewhere, too.

I’ll post pictures of some of the other stuff I found later.  For now, this is what it looked like when I stopped for the day.

Yeah, I found another vacuum cleaner. :-D

The tin on top of the warming shelves was one of the things I found IN the warming shelves.

It’s full of nails.

The oven door is broken.  I found a piece of hinge on top of the stove, and I think the second hinge is broken inside the oven door frame itself.

I wonder why one corner  of the stove top is leaning down like that?

Amazingly, there are still ashes in the fire and ash boxes.

Eventually, I plan to give it a good cleaning, polish it up and find some way to put the oven door back, though I doubt it can be repaired.  If there is a baking rack for the oven, I haven’t seen it – though I might not even recognize it for what it is, if I did.  I remember my mother baking, but have no memory of a rack in the oven.  The only memory I have of looking inside the oven was when my mom was canning and had jars in a water bath, the container of which pretty much filled the entire oven.

For now, I am done with the oven area.  I will next focus on emptying the shelves in the west side of the room and made some decisions about which, if any, I will keep.  I think I might keep one, just because it’s been handy to stand on to reach the breaker panel.

I am NOT looking forward to working in that nook beside the oven.  It’s going to be a tight fit to get into and move around in there, and it’s quite the disaster. :-(

The Re-Farmer