Quiet

No one is coming over today to work on the kitchen. Which is exciting because we can have a quiet, dust-free day. But annoying because we still don't have a stove, several light fixtures are missing, and we still turn the lights on and off by unscrewing the bulbs.

Rick gets together with some guys a couple of times each month. They were over Saturday morning and moved our refrigerator into place, so it looks all official now.


That floor vent in front of it is going to be moved. It's always been annoying there, and should've been installed elsewhere in the first place. (This is where the wall ovens used to be, by the way.)

Rick had done the electrical outlet for the refrigerator himself. As to why we were left to do this stuff ourselves instead of having the contractor do it (let alone that no one's coming to work on the kitchen this week), it's a long story involving various disparate elements such as someone quitting and a float trip.

They had left a mess when they stopped work last week. Piles of crud that needed to be swept, a large pile of junk in the kitchen, and the garage was a shambles.





Saed came over to work with Rick to get it all tidied up to the point that we can get the lawn mower out, get to the work bench, etc.



Then they (Rick and Saed) started ripping up the rest of the kitchen floor in preparation to installing the new laminate. I hadn't met Saed before. Really nice guy, very sharp. Doesn't speak much English. He wants to get a job so he can learn English better, since then he'd be around people speaking the language all day; but he can't find a job because he doesn't speak English well. Quite a catch-22. Sometimes we're talking, communicating just fine, and suddenly you realize that the conversation has turned a different direction and you have no idea where it went.

Anyway, the point is, taking up the floor was noisy and dusty. And was going on all weekend. And isn't over yet. We have (right to left) cheap peel-and-stick over vinyl-stuck-to-luon which is thoroughly glued and stapled to the subfloor.



The big pieces are up out of the main areas



but there are still staples and blobs of glued down luon all over, and the laundry room still needs to be done. But no one is working on anything today, which means we can finally catch up on important things like sleeping on the couch



since that's been impossible with all these Scary Guys banging around the place.