Okay one last picture of the kitchen. This is the only picture I happened to take of the old kitchen showing the upper cabinets. They went all the way to the ceiling, so it wasn't easy to capture them standing in the kitchen itself.
This photo was probably taken within hours of owning the house because we started tearing things apart that same day. Notice the plaster falling off the ceiling from an old leak, the pea green industrial carpeting (which ended up preserving the old oak floors beautifully), the 60's style linoleum (which preserved the old fir floors beautifully), the plastic partition that was hung in the threshold (those were in every threshold)....wow, it takes me back. We had so much work ahead of us at this point and were pretty much naive on how hard that work was going to be!
Here's the after, taken a few days ago. What we did....replaced entire living room plaster ceiling with new drywall (this wasn't a choice), added new crown moulding to both kitchen and living room, exposed original oak floors in living room and fir floors in kitchen, decided to forgo the plastic partition, new kitchen cabinets, spackled lots and lots of cracks in the original plaster, used lots and lots of paint....and needed patience, patience and more patience.