Retro Renovation

On Thursday we looked at Catherine’s 1948 Ohio kitchen and bathroom. She wants decorating ideas that will bring these firmly into the modern era and to complement her growing collection of Drexel and Heywood Wakefield furniture — along with her young family’s needs. With this post, I will start with the kitchen.
This house was built [...]

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Larry in Vermont writes:
My wife and I bought this house last year and it has a really old kitchen in it. It has a sink that says Electric sink in chrome letters. The material on the wall looks like metal but it is not metal. It is like particle board underneath with a [...]

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Popped on craigslist yesterday morning. Any readers want to snap them up? This is a beautiful set!
Reply to: sale-723332930@craigslist.org

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Hi Pam, just had a new estimate on painting my pink kitchen cabinets and the guy is concerned about the hinges. I guess they are worn down and there is a lot of play in some of them so they are hitting each other a bit and he’s worried about the new paint [...]

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Well, these are smoking hot. A few months ago I spoke to a guy in Texas who had a whole barnfull of new-old-stock steel cabinet pieces for sale. The pieces have finally made their way to ebay. There look to be both Republic and GE pieces — great “cabinettes” - in a variety of [...]

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Nancy is a new reader from Carlisle, Mass, who wants to restore her gorgeous pink GE steel cabinets. Drool drool. I really wanted pink, but my husband (and the decorating gods) won out and we have aqua. Here is Nancy’s question:
Hi Pam, I love your site. I’m just beginning to explore so I [...]

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Speaking of Sleeping Bee Alice, she sent along this comment and photo recently:
I wanted to pass along this graphic that is the bane of my kitchen decorating planning… I love this dishwasher and want one!!
Sorry, Alice, the only solution I know of…is to build an existing dishwasher in this way. Either jimmy something using pantry [...]

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Hey, look, another mention of the words “retro renovation” - this time in a clist ad. Cincinnati area - asking a whopping $10,000 for this kitchen. Nice. But if they get that price - it’ll be a new record as far as I know.
Original GE 1950’s era complete turquoise metal kitchen cabinet group. Mint condition! [...]

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I’ve been emailing with Massachusetts Ellen for a while, about her quest to re-create her parent’s 1955 kitchen. If anyone knows of Crosley cabinets for Ellen - please comment here!
My parents had a 1955 Crosley kitchen. It was the state of the art kitchen - actually the set from the 1955 Crosley Bendix dealers’ [...]

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Forum reader U.K. Alison asked if someone could help her ship vintage steel cabinets overseas, so I made sure she knew about English Rose cabinets first. I keep losing this information — and keep having to ask Scathing Jane for it — so I thought I better post it for infinity and beyond. Thanks, Scathing [...]

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