Colonial Kitchen Room Box

The colonial kitchen started with this:

The colonial fireplace by Aztec Imports. It's a nice piece, but the bricks were just too brown, so I decided to be brave and change the color. I dabbed on some raw sienna and another brown shade with a stipple brush. I forget what the other color was, I think it may have been iron oxide. Then I used a blend of off white and a creamy light brown color and applied that lightly with a smaller stipple brush, rubbing it in with my finger till I got the look I wanted.

Here's the room. The setting is North America around the time of the Revolution.

The walls are sheathed in wooden panels and whitewashed, as is the ceiling. Wooden paneling helped block out the drafts, and whitewashing made the room much brighter. Candlelight was pretty dim, and the housewife needed all the light she could get. By the way, oil lamps were often more commonly used than candles, but generally that meant a cup of oil with a wick in it, which doesn't show up all that well in a miniature setting, so I chose to use candles.

The black baseboards are another authentic touch.

The floor in front of the fireplace is brick. The bricks were made of stripwood, with beveled edges. 

There are piles of ashes in the fireplace. They look better in real life than they do in the picture. I really struggled with those ashes, too. I wound up making the piles out of Paperclay. 

Of the 2 openings on the right, the upper one is the oven. Oven doors were originally made of wood, later they were replaced by removable metal doors or by hinged metal doors.

The lower opening was used as a warming oven.

A blue bucket bench is in the foreground. People were forever dragging about buckets of water. Every time you needed water for cooking or washing you had to go out to a spring, well, creek or river to get some.

After making this bench I was chagrined to find I had 2 more that I made a couple of years ago sitting in boxes on a shelf behind some other items. Oh well.... it's ok. I wanted the furniture in this room to look fairly new, and  I'd aged the other benches. 

I spray painted the cupboard hutch green. The original finish was oak or pine.

I took apart an unpainted table that was a bit too long, cut it back and glued it together to make one just the right size. The towel rack is one I made. 

The slat back chairs were originally white. They used to make them in dark walnut, but now they don't, so I had to apply many layers of paint to get them the shade of brown I wanted.

I have one more picture of the fireplace that shows the basket of firewood.