Tuesday, February 2, 2016

The Legend of Belmont - part two: the brass ring

The St. Charles set at the Belmont house included the coveted wall-oven unit, and a variety of other desirable pieces in very excellent condition.  Not quite enough to do our kitchen alone, but if we combined the set with what we already had, it would be plenty.

We negotiated an acceptable offer for the cabinets, and declined the sellers' offer of having their contractor remove them - after our previous disastrous experience with that notion - and made arrangements to return to remove them ourselves.

The sellers took us on a tour of the rest of the house, which they were going to be demolishing, and re-building on the site.  We pointed out some incredibly neat items, as we oooh-ed and ahhh-ed our way around in the dark (both power and water were already off).

They offered to let us remove and purchase anything else in the house we wanted, when we came back to remove the cabinets.  Yes... anything we wanted.



The next two weeks were spent frantically making arrangements for truck rentals, hotels, and begging family to come along on this adventure for a weekend of long drives and hard labor.
We left on a Friday afternoon, caravaning the 200 miles from home to Belmont with a rented cargo van and large SUV full of tools, empty boxes, and padding materials.

We started the salvage Saturday morning - S and his dad removing the cabinets from the kitchen (time-lapse video after the jump), D and her parents scrounging goodies from the rest of the house.