It's been four weeks and what do we have?

Let's play a game. Look at the two pictures and see if you can tell what is different between them. The clutter on the counter doesn't count.







Look closely.

Ready? You may have picked out the microwave above the stove. Matt, Dana and I hung it Thursday evening.

Anything else? "En-n-nt" (That's a buzzer sound, in case you can't tell) Time's up! There isn't anything else that you can see. It's a trick question. For about a week we had a beautiful kitchen as you can see in the first photo BUT no water and no electricity. The electricity was finished on Friday. The water was connected on Thursday but we had sediment blocking the flow until Saturday. Now, it all works. I cooked dinner with the stove and microwave and we are running our inaugural batch of dishes in the dishwasher as I type this. It doesn't seem real in some ways. I know Janessa asked about being able to cook on a real stove again. I have to admit that it was a bit of an adjustment to use more than one burner at the same time. And the water was hot in less that five minutes!

So this is the new kitchen. We still need to attach handles to the doors and drawers and finish the floor under the fridge and freezer. The appliance garage had to be reordered. We need to move back in. It certainly makes the kitchen much bigger. More room for bodies.

I have been warned that it won't stop with the kitchen. The rest of the house will look shabby and need to be redone. I hope not for a while. Now you all need to come visit so you can see the end result. The best part? I can put the roaster up in a cupboard and leave it there.

New Kitchen Part 3

We are beginning our 3rd week of chaos. Actually, semi-chaos. The gritty, dust-all-over-the-house, trip-over-extension-cords part is mostly over. There is still dust in odd corners and still an extension cord plugged into the freezer, but we are making progress.

We smoothed over the new wallboard with mud. Then we sanded it all down. The plastic sheeting kept the dust localized.
Then we textured all the new stuff. I finally
got the hang of it towards the end.
That was Monday, last week.


Tuesday - We took the rough edges off the texturing, primed it and painted the ceiling and the walls. We got finished about 1 am. FYI - the kitchen walls are NOT white. They are "moonlight white", a very, very, very, very light yellow.


We did find time to celebrate Dana's
birthday on Tuesday. For the first time ever, she had enough chocolate and pizza to last a lo-o-o-ng time. We were reduced to lighting one lone match and sticking it in her cake since the candles are buried in a box somewhere.







Wednesday - The cabinet guy came in and installed
cabinets. I came home from school that afternoon and the kitchen was no longer a great, big emptiness. Matt even got to help set the shelves. The cabinet guy's name is Rick. He spends his winters here, doing cabinet installations. He lives in Alaska the rest of the time. Has a 4500 sq ft custom-built log home, spent his early years working on the oil line and building homes in his off-hours, and never stops talking. A very nice gentleman, and very helpful as we make this transition to a new kitchen.








So now we have cabinets. Very beautiful cabinets. They are cleaned out and the shelves are in most of them. They have no handles yet, but we'll take care of that. And I can begin moving stuff back in. The only problem is . . . I don't know where to put things. The whole layout is different.


Monday, they installed the countertop. It all fits together, the paint, the cabinets, the countertop, and the floor tile.



We ordered the stove, microwave/vent, and the dishwasher last night and they will be delivered Friday. Then we get to assemble it all. Lots of details to take care of, but we're on the downhill side of events. Wow!