Making Memories

Future conversation in our house:

"Remember when we were re-doing the kitchen, so we made a fire on the back porch and cooked stuff over the fire?"





It occurred to me that a clever homeschooler would've planned this remodel to coincide with some sort of study -- maybe a unit study of Little House on the Prairie or Birch Bark House, complete with frontier cooking experiences (Ma Ingalls didn't need these fancypants appliances or electricity, by golly!). Or integrate it with most history studies, since most of history has featured cooking over fires. Or discuss how various contemporary cultures prepare food. Or at least put together a unit on the history of cooking.

Also, there;s a Junior Girl Scout badge we'll be able to earn if we keep this up -- Annabeth seems to be earning Outdoor Cook fairly effortlessly this week.

We have a ceiling

After 3 days of work we have an 8 foot ceiling going all the way across our kitchen.



Which doesn't seem like a particularly huge accomplishment, but that's how construction goes. We've been involved in building a house before, and it seemed like day after day after day of not much happening, then all of a sudden the finishing work started and woosh all sorts of exciting things going on.

Also, although the house hasn't seemed overly dusty (other than the carpets), I swear I've breathed in a ton of dust.

The cats have been having a bonding experience under the bed while all of this is going on.

More pictures of joists, studs, and wiring

Another gripping day of construction here.

The old fluorescent tubes are gone, leaching their toxic waste into some landfill somewhere (not a fan of fluorescent lighting here), and some new cans are up.



The workers wisely left them unwired overnight, apparently realizing that most homeowners will say "sure, looks good," and then wake up in the middle of the night wondering why they hadn't asked for that one to be placed over there instead.


Some pendant lights will also be hung. And outlets wired in. I'm going to have actual outlets where I can plug in a mixer or blender or whatever -- it boggles my mind. Convenience! What a concept!

Also, part of a wall ripped out and reframed for the refrigerator, which is being backed into our amazingly large laundry room.



Our laundry room is as large as some bedrooms, so it seemed clever to use some of it towards a more workable kitchen.

I think today involves more wiring. I'm hoping this will not involve large showers of sparks or the need for the power to the computer (or entire house) turned off for long periods of time. Yesterday was exciting that way, but enough is enough.

In the meantime, we continue to grill our meals on the back porch, and use a toaster oven and microwave we carried down into the basement. The basement also has an old refrigerator we put there when we moved in, into which we transferred all of our "normal" food. Clean up is in any sink. We've been using paper plates with abandon, believe it or not (add disposable plates and glasses to the list of things I don't like and normally try to avoid, but I'm trying to pretend I don't notice them when I eat). If the gorgeous weather holds we'll continue to eat outside.

Curiosity

There are big billowy pieces of plastic in the doorways.



Why?



I bet there's something really good in there. I wish I could figure out how to get in and see it.



...

Actually, I think he mostly wants to be fed in the kitchen, because that's the proper place for the food. NOT the hallway, thank you -- that's obviously not "real" food. The real food is in the kitchen in the dish on the blue mat next to the counter.

State of the kitchen at the end of day 1:

Very, very empty.



Also, interesting open areas up high that the cats are just dying to explore.



Special bonus -- we just had our A/C unit checked, and Mr. A/C Guy says the 5-year-old coil is leaking. Good times.

Her gaze swept the room a final time ...

They've been here an hour, and nearly all the cabinets are gone.




(Plastic to keep the dust down in the rest of the house.)

Also, you wouldn't believe the dust bunnies that were under the old cabinets, behind the kick plate. At least an inch thick, and totally filled the floor area. Ick. About 30 years of dust and grossness had built up there.

Final Countdown

The Big Kitchen Remodel will start in less than 24 hours, and I'm sitting here breakfasting on a concoction which we shall simply call "random things in the pantry and fridge thrown together and now I don't have to worry about moving them out of the kitchen", fighting an urge to spend the next 2 hours looking at sock patterns on Ravelry since that sounds vastly more appealing than moving everything out of the kitchen and laundry room.

Let's take a look at some of the kitchen features to which we shall be bidding adieu.

(Yes, I have crud all over every single counter top while I'm moving stuff out. It's a mess. But it isn't like the clutter is taking away from the inherent beauty of the kitchen, because it was a dumpy room to begin with.)

Double wall ovens, original to the house. The top one doesn't heat correctly, the bottom one's door doesn't work correctly.



Hmm, that picture turned out blurry, so you can just barely see the lines drawn on the wall above them. That marks where the new wall will be. Because this house was designed back in the day of small refrigerators, so when a contemporary refrigerator was brought in, it became almost impossible to get in through the back door.



To the left of the ovens is the pantry, featuring HEAVY sliding doors that fall off their track. Also, as with all doors of this type, you can never really see what's in the middle of the closet.




The smooth top burners. If you know me, you've heard how I feel about these. If you haven't had this conversation with me, if involves the letters L, O, A, T, H, and E. The previous owners installed this and were mighty proud of it. I consider this proof that they were whackadoodle.

Also, if you are tempted to leave a comment such as, "hey, I have one of those and I love it," please realize that my opinion of your mental faculties will instantly plunge. Just so you know. (And I know some of you will find that an irresistible challenge, and now feel compelled to comment that you like them whether you do or don't. Hah. You're not fooling me. I KNOW you're not that dumb as to really like them.) (Ami, I"m looking at you.)



Loud dishwasher in which the protective plastic coating is coming off the prongs so that it leaves little brown spots on all the dishes:




Also, check out where it's installed -- that cabinet to the left is utterly useless with this set up.

And this gives you a shot, too, of a decent upgrade -- someone had all of the cabinets professionally painted. The originals look like this:



(These cabinets are in the wet bar. This house has not one, but two wet bars. Wild parties? Fear of being more than 5 feet from a sink? Who knows. They're both ugly, but they'll have to wait their turn for demolition.)

The paint certainly brightened up the kitchen, but unfortunately it chips.



Cheap kitchen sink, approximately 6.5 inches deep. Complete with cheap kitchen faucet that has some sort of crud permanently crusted on:



And, finally, the entire work area is topped with a dropped ceiling, bringing the ceiling height down to 7 foot. The lighting? Fluorescent tubes ensconced in flimsy plastic panels. The only task lighting is over the stove top. That hood, by the way, doesn't vent to the outside, in spite of the fact that it's on an outside wall. Weird.



That wood piece in the upper right corner of that photo is where Rick and the contractor knocked a hole in the wall to see if there were any weird wiring issues they'd have to deal with. There aren't. They blocked it back up so the cat didn't spend her life trying to figure out how to get up there in the ceiling.

On the other side of the room we have the kitchen desk



which we never use because we have a computer desk in the family room. Also, this desk has no task lighting, making it even more inconvenient. Check out the shelf above it -- cheap board held up with cheap metal brackets. I'm betting that was installed by the same people who picked out the smooth top range top. Idiots.

So, back to work clearing stuff out. Also, I need to mow the lawn, and I promised to take the kids to the pool since it's the only warm day this week. I also said I'd take them to the library, but that will wait until the weather is crummy and we're trying to escape the racket of remodeling. Which should be sometime tomorrow morning.

And the Rest of the Weekend

A simplified version of Pachelbel's Canon in D:



which was followed by Lichner's A Short Story from the Suzuki piano book number 2.

Dussek's Sonatina Op. 20, No. 1:



followed by Melody Bober's Dance of the Autumn Leaves.

I didn't video the performances because I figured they were too tired from the long weekend to play their best. Actually, though, each did amazingly well with their respective first number -- I guess the adrenaline of being on stage woke them up. And the second pieces faltered a little, but the mistakes were undoubtably more obvious to someone who has heard this stuff played every day for the past 2 months and was sitting there thinking "hmm, I don't think that has the correct phrasing".

Later a friend came over, and as darkness fell a tent was pitched in our backyard



for a camping adventure. Thalia decided not to be a part of this, citing a desire for sleep. And, indeed, it's now 7:20am, I started to hear voices and see movement out in the tent 20 minutes ago



and Thalia is still sound asleep upstairs.