Undoubtedly the biggest project undertaken in the interior of the Beardsley-Cartwright House was converting the summer kitchen into a four-season room with a bath. Summer kitchens were common in 1880’s houses in Minneapolis, customarily being built onto the back of the house. They were unheated spaces where root vegetables, grains, and other foods could be stored. In the summer, cooking and canning could be done there without heating up the house proper.
The summer kitchen of the Beardsley-Cartwright House originally had five doors: two doors to the exterior (one in back, one on the side), a door to the kitchen, a door to the cellar, and a door in the loft leading to the upstairs hallway and to the servants’ quarters on the third floor. A privy was built into the northwest corner by the back door. There was an outlet for a cook stove on the kitchen chimney.
In 1996 the summer kitchen was made over into an insulated room with a shower/bath on the north side and two banks of windows. The exterior configuration was left intact, with the same roof and dimensions.
At the same time, the basement was cleaned and whitewashed and the floor painted.
