Out with the old, in with the new

Our brand new appliances were delivered into the garage yesterday! Travis stayed home to supervise their delivery.

In shopping for these appliances, our cabinet maker referred us to a specialty "Appliance and Decorative Plumbing" supplier, Standards of Excellence. Up until now, it never occurred to me to shop for appliances at any place besides the big-box electronics stores: your Best Buy or Fry's. Consider me educated and completely sold on the idea of the specialty appliance store. The store itself is actually just a showroom of different lines of appliances installed in mini-kitchens so you get to shop with your eyes. They order in the models you want so, as long as they have relationships with a particular manufacturer, they can get an item in. There's no worrying about an item being in stock -- everything is, given some lead time. The salespeople are actually knowledgeable about the appliances they sell instead of being some pimply teenager. I learned that Whirlpool actually owns the KitchenAid brand. It happens that we ended up ordering mostly KitchenAid appliances with a Whirlpool dishwasher. Since their lines are related, the styling is similar enough that I think they'll pass for being part of a set once they're installed. They had competitive prices to ones I found online but they had the advantage of 1) being a brick-and-mortar which is still a boon for large purchases, 2) will haul away my old appliances as part of the delivery, 3) and since they were local, could be flexible about the delivery date giving us the ability to reschedule later if our kitchen wasn't quite ready in time.

As I pulled into our street anticipating my new appliances, the buyer Travis found for the old O'Keefe & Merritt who was in the driveway picking up our old stove. It was a touch bittersweet to see the thing go despite my feeling like I was playing Russian Roulette every time I went to light it. The stove was part of the reason I fell in love with this house in the first place and has suck steadily by us for the last year, enduring power outages without breaking a sweat -- it doesn't depend on an electric starter. So here I bid my final farewell to:

Special Delivery!

My cabinets arrived this morning (7am !!) and they are beautiful. The kitchen is starting to look like a kitchen again and not a tiny 50's style kitchen but one where you can really work. I don't even really mind having hauled myself up at 6am this morning (on a day I'm off work) so I could move the cars out of the driveway and empty out the fridge (which had been hanging out in the remnants of our kitchen up till now and today had to be banished out to the garage.)

When they were delivered, the cabinets covered any horizontal space available which was the entire garage and most of my living room floor as well. Since we'd ordered drawers almost everywhere, it took about 1.5 times the footprint un-put-together.

By the end of the day, all the cabinets were installed and they had gotten started on installing all of my handles. This is definitely why I so enjoy the finish-work phase of the project. All of the visual elements are going in and you can see change in leaps and bounds everyday which is just a lot more mentally satisfying.

Two views of the same set of cabinets. If you were looking at these head-on, from left to right, you would have the oven/microwave cabinet at the far left and the cooktop going into the depression around the middle of the run. At the far right, is the small peninsula with a canter-levered countertop where we're planning some kitchen seating.

The window-side run of cabinets. If you were looking at these head-on, off in the dark-mysteriousness to the left would be a slot for our wine fridge, then my adorable double-bowl (evenly sized please) farmhouse sink, a dishwasher to its right, and finally a refrigerator cubby to cap off the run.

And here's that run from another angle.

Our cabinet maker suggested doing these decorative arches over the windows instead of plain shelves and I'm really happy we went with that idea. It really pulls together this run of wall cabinets and adds a lot of visual impact to the windows.

Finally, our giant behemoth of a pantry cabinet -- the real reason we went with a custom cabinet maker to begin with. To avoid a dead corner and fully use the space at the end of the window run and turning to the garage wal, we had this angled, full height wall unit made (section without handles). It came out spectacularly with roomy, reach-friendly shelves inside.

The worst time ever to get sick...

...is when your house is in the middle of a remodel. I'm sure a lot of people contend it's when you're on vacation. It's not. When you're on vacation, you're in a nice cushy hotel and get to curl up in the cushy hotel bed watching bad TV all day. You can send your minions travel companions to get you food on account of *cough cough*, "I'm so pitiful being sick on vacation." Now think about your options when your house is in the middle of being torn apart.

Monday night, I was sniffly and congested to the point that Travis was about to tear his hair out before he offered me begged me to take some nasal spray. Tuesday, I started filling icky in the afternoon and ended up coming home early to curl up on the couch with trashy TV. I was now faced with a dilemma: Should I try to tough out Wednesday at work or stay home*? Note the asterisk. I wouldn't just be "staying home". I would be "staying home with an asterisk". The asterisk of course being that I'd risk having to deal with strange people traipsing through my house banging on walls and kicking up dust and generally making me feel all the more uncomfortable, especially when I'd have to brave my way out of the room to eat something around lunch time. Those who know me would know that I obviously opted to go to work on account of having a stranger-phobia. And I stuffed myself into my sweatshirt and curled up at my desk doing my best to not fall asleep and keep the sniffly-congested-ness down. And I was miserable. But those were my only options! Being sick on vacation's sounding pretty good now isn't it.

(Note: I'm not the only person who opts to go to work though I may be the only one to do it for being socially-maladjusted. I have a coworker who told me today that when faced with the exact same choice, she chose to go to work too because the banging at home wasn't going to be any better.)

In case you're worried, I'm feeling much better today. I can breathe through my nose and everything.

The one thing that did help my mood in the middle of all this was that my sacrifice of braving work was not all for naught. We got actual windows yesterday! Never would I have imagined myself so excited at having windows.

The drywall has also been put back up and the seams have been taped and received their first coat of mud. We're supposed to get a second coat of mud today. I'm not sure how many coats are planned. And I also expect some texture to be put up.

I must admit I'm pretty impressed that our walls are back up already. I can't wait to see what next week brings.

If you put talcum powder in a balloon and blew it up, you'd get my house

Every horizontal surface in my house looks like that table -- covered in a thin layer of dust. It's in crevices, underneath furniture, in bookshelves. My obsessive compulsive side wants to run around the house with a vacuum at all times. My more rational side says it would be a waste of time. So far, the rational side is winning but I can feel the dust rooting for the OCD side and grating me down. I'm afraid to walk anywhere in the house for fear of tracking the dust into the rooms we've been trying to protect (office and bedroom) on account they have doors we can close. I think the dust is sneaking in on its own anyway.

This is also my least favorite phase of the remodel -- right after the demolition when the framing/rough-in work has to happen. There's actually a lot going on - electrical wires being run, plumbing being moved or installed. However, a lot of it happens under the house or in the walls and it's hard to notice or appreciate the changes which gives the feeling that nothing's happening. So far, all the framing changes have been made including framing out the new window openings in the front of the house. However, due to the holidays, our windows are running a little late and are due to arrive tomorrow which means the holes had to be temporarily boarded up making our house look like ghetto-not-fabulous.

The electrician has started to pull wires for all the switches, outlets, and appliance hookups that we need. You don't really realize how much wiring needs to go into a kitchen until you're doing a remodel. All appliances these days need an electrical hookup so that alone makes refrigerator, dishwasher, garbage disposal, microwave, oven, cooktop, and hood vent. Then you want plenty of counter top outlets for the smaller kitchen appliances. Now add in some lighting, 2- and 3-way switches and there are wires all over the place.

Our front, I had planted some bulbs about a month ago. They forgot to look at a calendar and decided to start popping out of the ground in the middle of December. With all the framing work for the new windows going on at the front of the house, they unsurprisingly got trampled. Bulbs - this is why we wait until spring to come out of the ground. I hope you've learned and lesson and do better next year. *Sigh*

And so it begins

The contractors arrived around 8 this morning and started demolition. At the end of the day, our old kitchen was stripped bare and they had started on some framing work for the new entry between the living room and kitchen (far end of first picture). I'm looking forward to when I don't have to see that ugly wallpaper anymore.

Pixie was a trooper. We both spied on her on a web cam we set up in the office. Her mood was somewhere between alert that there were strange noises in the house and bored that she was confined. As long as she's not obsessively destroying the room, I'm pleased.

We had one snafu where I came home to a blasting heater. It turns out they loosened the wire to the thermostat and in an effort to turn the heater back on, set the garage thermostat to 95. In the dead of winter, there's not chance in hell our garage will hit 95. It was 63 out there when, in desperation, I hit the kill switch on the furnace. Luckily, Travis sorted out what was wrong and our house is settling back into regularly scheduled temperatures.

Pixie is displeased

We've had to make a variety of changes as we're getting ready to start the kitchen remodel. The obvious change is that we won't be able to use our kitchen anymore and anything we would like to keep from the kitchen needed to be cleared out before the demolition work started. This means most of our kitchen items are boxed up and currently taking over a corner of the office.

The rest of our kitchen items were deemed important enough to avoid the fate of being boxed up and ended up in a corner of the living room. With a bookshelf, a wine fridge, and a newly purchased cart, we have a makeshift "kitchen" -- a word I have to use extremely loosely seeing as our only cooking elements now are the microwave and toaster oven. I suppose we can also rely on the outdoor grill but it's January in California which means incessant rain and though our temperatures don't qualify as cold (when compared to say New York), it's not exactly Hawaii outside either.

All this change by itself has been a bit rough on Pixie. If you've never owned a dog, then suffice it to say that dogs, like all other animals, can't deal with change. (Want proof? Read this.) They're built on routine and things that deviate from that routine worry them. So while I was packing up our boxes, Pixie elected to climb in my lap in an effort either to seek comfort or stop me from putting the kitchen into packages -- I'm still not sure which. All she accomplished was making both my feet fall asleep such that when I stood up, I couldn't feel either of my feet and almost fell over.

The change that's had the most profound impact on Pixie's life however is that we're having to lock her in the office when we're gone. Normally, she gets the run of the house when we're not home and a doggie-door from the living room into the backyard to do her business. However, she's something of a skittish dog, not a big fan of strangers, and thoroughly anti-stranger in her own home. With the impending arrival of many strangers who have to come and go through our property, we decided it was in everyone's best interest if she were a bit more confined.

So in preparation, we've moved one of her beds into the office with a bowl of water and a pee pad. Over these last few weeks, we've both been home for the holidays so whenever we ran errands, we've put her in the office to practice her new routine. She is displeased to say the least. It took about one practice run for her to decide she no longer wants to go into the office (along with a lot of whining and crying once she's inside). And another one for her to do this.

At least it was in my remodel plans already to replace that door and molding.