Hole-y crap

OK. This will probably be the last post for today. I just wanted to provide a little kitchen update.
The workers came Thursday and cut a bunch of holes in the walls for electrical stuff.

Including a hole to upgrade the electrical for my new double oven. Sweet.

George likes the house holes.

They also cut a big hole in the ceiling where the vent pipe used to be. The new setup has a hood instead of a vent pipe, so it looks like they will be moving that whole deal over about a foot to center it over the cook top.

They worked today (yep, on a Saturday) on cutting more, bigger holes in my house. I don't have pictures of those.

They told me cabinet installation should start Monday.

Wow.

I can't wait to see that.

So far all I have seen of my cabinets is a sliver where I opened a box to take a peek. There are about 25 boxes.

Yep. They look like cabinets from what I can tell.

Pizza, hold the ... um, shampoo, please.

By the way, I didn't make a salad in the loo last night.
But I did wash some veggies in the sink to put on a pizza I made on the barbecue. I did the prep work on a corner of the dinner table that I cleared for that purpose.
The rest of the table is covered in stuff.
Anyway, the pizza came out great.
I've made it before, and it is so fast and easy and yummy.
I did simplify it as much as possible this time though.
No fancying up the marinara sauce, keeping ingredients to a minimum, using pre-shredded cheese.
But it was still great.
Anyway, I have stuff just spread out everywhere in the house.
Just getting a cup of coffee requires going into three rooms.
I am getting used to it though.
Maybe I will skip that Home Depot portable sink. It's kinda fun improvising.

I am a 12-year-old boy trapped in a woman's body

OK. That headline sounds really wrong.

Mostly it just means that shit like the slogan on this truck just cracks me up.

Every time I see one of these trucks on the road, I chuckle.

I know. It's so juvenile.

Would you want to eat a salad made in the loo?

Not much to report on the kitchen today.

They didn't come to work on it yesterday and when they came today it was just to check out electrical stuff so they could shop for the right stuff.

I guess that is progress.

They said they will be back tomorrow.

They also said they will be cutting holes in the walls.

Fun.

So I am now trying to do meals that are not all takeout. Though today was lunch out and takeout at my desk at work for dinner.

Tomorrow night I probably will grill.

I took a look at the lettuce and salad stuff in my fridge, but I could not bring myself to make a salad in the bathroom.

Friends tell me I will get over that after a week or so of takeout.

I just keep thinking about that episode of "Seinfeld" where Kramer had a garbage disposal put in his bathtub.

Elaine: "This food was in the shower with you?"
Kramer: "Mmm hmm... I prepared it as I bathed."

My "duh" moment for the week

Me: Wow. That is a weird looking tool. What does that do?

Foreman: That's our boombox, Lady.

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Yeah, they must have thought "Gee, what a dumb broad. She doesn't even know what a boombox looks like."

I admit it, I haven't used a boombox in years much less bought one. I am an iPod girl now.

Now THAT is a power tool

Yesterday the workers came to remove the tile floor from my kitchen.

They couldn't do it Monday because they needed a special tool to break up the stubborn tile.

Turns out that while most of the work done in the 1989 remodel was pretty slipshod, the tiles were the one thing that was built to withstand a bomb.

So they came in yesterday morning with this tool that looked fairly scary and sounded even more frightening.

It was like they took a jackhammer to my kitchen floor.

Anyway, now the floor is gone.

It is 10:40 a.m. and there is no sign of the crew yet.

I forgot to ask them yesterday what the plan was for today, so I have no idea if they are even planning to work this morning.

Again, they did a great job cleaning up before they left yesterday.

George couldn't help himself and had to go inspect the work.

He is a nosy little bastard.

I

But does she have middle-child syndrome?

Meet Aspen.
She is the middle child of my three furry babies.
Aspen came to me when she was barely old enough to be taken from her mother. But the mother cat's owners were ready to be done with kittens and were going to take them all to a pet store.
So I took her.
That was about 1994, I think.
I was convinced that Lucy was lonely after I moved out on my own and she no longer had my roommates cats to play (fight) with anymore.
I was wrong.
Turns out Lucy was perfectly content to be the only furry baby in the house.After some initial scrapes, Aspen became tolerable to Lucy.
Aspen is an odd little thing.
She loves to have attention, but hates to have her head rubbed.
She is a licker. Give her a chance and she will lick a raw spot on your arm.
She has the roughest sandpaper tongue of any cat I have ever had.
She has a cute little black beauty mark on her face, just like Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford.
She got her name because I went to Aspen the weekend after I brought her home and I just liked how it sounded.
She can't jump from even the smallest height without grunting a high-pitched little grunt.
She hisses at the mere thought of George.
She is the only cat I have ever had to actually have a CAT-scan. Other than that, she has had fewer health problems than Lucy and George.
She spends most of her time in a box on top of the linen cabinet.

Buh-bye kitchen

Well, it is gone. Ugly as it was, I miss it.

The workers showed up yesterday, and within 2 hours my kitchen was gutted.

Here is a photographic tour of my kitchen from Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon.


At left, the kitchen as it looked before the packing up and demo.








Here is my what my kitchen looked like Sunday afternoon as I was trying to pack up its contents.

At first I had no idea where to start.

Then I just jumped in with both feet and started packing boxes and bags.

It is amazing how much stuff there is in a kitchen.

More amazing to me was that I actually use most of it.

I was thinking there would be a ton of stuff to go to the thrift store or in a yard sale. But there really isn't.

Rather than throw stuff away or give stuff away at this point, I packed it all up and will make those decisions as I bring things back in to the new kitchen.



More from Sunday's marathon packing session.

I got the whole thing packed up in about 4 hours.

I had to stop after a couple hours because I was so overheated.

I had been working with no air conditioning and just had the windows open, but it got to be too much.

So I cranked up the a/c, cooled off then got back to work.

Most of the stuff ended up in the spare room/office.

I can get at what I need, but it is still a pain.



Luckily I had some help from George.

He was very good at making sure I didn't miss anything in any of the drawers of cabinets.


















I think he made a point to go into any open cabinet he could.

It was like a dream come true after years of being shooed away from cabinet doors left open for more than 10 seconds.




















This is from Monday.

Demo was well under way at this point.








More cabinets, gone.

The crew was kind enough to move my fridge, with all the stuff still inside, into my living room.

So now I make coffee in the spare room and go to the living room to get the milk for it.









More demo from another angle.















This is my favorite shot.

I had gone out to the ceramics studio to calm my nerves and get out the way of the workers.

When I pulled up in front of my house, the kitchen sink was on the lawn.

My guess is that baby will find its way into salvage someplace.

I hope so. It's a perfectly usuable sink, just not part of the new design.






No more oven, no more stove.



Good thing I have a barbecue, huh?










No more sink, no more dishwasher.


Paper plates for everyone!












They took things apart so carefully since they are basically just swapping out the old pieces with new pieces and not doing any construction work.

So the tile was removed from the bar counter, then the roughtop came out.

The whole area is surrounded with a large plastic sheet to keep the dust away from the living room as much as possible.


And, by the middle of the day Monday, the kitchen is gone.

The guys did a really good job of cleaning up as much as possible.

They came today to remove the floor.

They had to bring a special tool. It was quite scary looking.

I took a picture of that and will post it later.

So, there really is no turning back now.

Before it was about contracts and orders and plans.

Now it is about not having a kitchen.