A Year in Review (knitting, fandom and RL edition)

This has been one of those years that wasn’t specifically awful and wasn’t specifically wonderful either. There were some good high points, some nasty low points and the end of the year hasn’t been what I wanted. Overall, I’m hoping that the memories of the high points will overwhelm the memories of the low points.

Kitchen update – there is actual progress

Apparently setting a deadline has been remarkably effective for our contractor because he has now been here three days in a row, for most of the day each time, and actually achieved things.

The big achievement is the new sub floor. That was two days of hellish hammering and I completely sympathise with the contractor for leaving mid-afternoon yesterday after hammering nails every 4 square inches, 2 inches at seams, across the entire surface of my large kitchen-dining room from early in the morning. I’m not sure how he could move this morning.

The new sub floor was needed and it was something the contractor had been resisting due to the work involved but, when he started prepping the existing floor boards, he acknowledged why we were insisting. The guy who built the house obviously used the crappy, cheap bits of whatever he had lying around at the end of the build. The floor had a ton of knot holes, it was terribly splintered and there were lots of deep, splintery gouges that can’t all have been from taking up the original ceramic flooring, which was on sub floor that was also taken up. Our new vinyl laminate flooring is not hard boards, it’s flexible so it would have ended up with pits and dints very quickly.

Anyway, two days later we have new sub floor and the flooring will go down after he finishes a couple of other jobs. Today he got the dishwasher in place and installed and the end panel for the counter it is under secured. He also got the stove top secured to the counter and sealed properly. Next job is the ducting for the range hood, I think.

I’m just so happy to see progress! Work is still filled with pain and frustration (I’m trying to turn bad source data into sensible data warehouse data) but at least I’m not also dealing with kitchen frustrations and tantrums when I get home.

My computer is even continuing to behave. Things are looking up. Why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop now?

Epic kitchen renovation – an update

I’m not quite sure how to explain just how badly things went this week, kitchen-wise.

In my last update (August 5th – wow that was a long time ago) we had finally got counter tops installed. It was exciting and we seriously thought we’d have kitchen appliances installed shortly. It all looked so hopeful and we started to speculate that the kitchen reno was nearly over.

How foolish were we?

Epic kitchen renovation – getting somewhere finally

It appears that our kitchen is starting to come together. Most of the cabinets are in place and attached to walls. They even have doors and drawer fronts (but the handles have not been put on yet, d’oh). The replacements for the broken ones should be here tomorrow so our contractor can get them constructed tomorrow and have the carpenter in on Monday to install them, put up crown moulding and do other important stuff.

We remain hopeful that there will be counter-top by the middle of the week.

When all that has been done, the sink, dishwasher, cook-top, wall-oven and range hood/microwave can be installed. There is a tiny possibility that we’ll have usable appliances and a sink by the end of next week.

Then there is still flooring to put down, under-cabinet lighting to install, lighting rail and toe kicks to put in and tiles to choose and put up. So it won’t be done or anything, but we may be able to use some of it and that would make me so happy.

This is week 9 of the epic kitchen refit, thus it is two months since our kitchen was taken out. Since then, we’ve been using a two-ring stove-top, a toaster oven and a small, low-power microwave as our kitchen facilities. Due to the way the house is wired, the only place we can plug those in is the kitchen. This means that we have to carry a table, heat-proof mats and whatever appliances we need into the kitchen each time we want to prepare a meal and carry them out again before any workmen arrive. Our sink (for washing up, washing veggies, filling kettles etc.) is downstairs in the laundry room so every meal involves multiple trips up and down the stairs carrying stuff. We also only have one small counter in the craft room to do all of our preparation on. Basically, it’s hard work creating a meal and what we can do has to be pretty basic due to the lack of facilities.

Even BBQ isn’t exactly easy because of the lack of prep facilities, the location of the sink and the need to clamber over stuff to get to the back deck.

We’re feeling pretty proud that over the last two months we have ordered pizza twice and gone out for four meals. That’s it. We’ve given up on cooking six meals out of around 60. Most of our meals out have even been fairly healthy! There’s another couple of weeks of this and I’m already planning for sushi take-out on Saturday, but I think we’re going to get through it.

The good thing is that we’re finally getting a picture of what it’s going to look like and it’s going to look gorgeous. Can’t wait to play with the lovely new appliances that were the big reason we’ve done all this.

ETA: So excited, the counter top arrived early so I arrived home from work to find counters! In my kitchen! It looks really gorgeous 🙂