Kitchen Update: November 12

The kitchen renovation is plodding forward. I don’t want to say the end is in sight, but I’m willing to go so far as to say the concept of “the end” doesn’t seem that ridiculous anymore. Denisa has gotten really good at making meals with a hotplate and an instantpot, though the biggest pain right now is just the dearth of horizontal surfaces to do any prep work on. We’ve got a slew of cabinets, but they’re all missing tops. We took our kitchen table out of the house now as well, since an island will be replacing it. So we end up doing a lot of balancing acts and moving stuff around to make things work. (Honestly. You don’t realize just how much you use horizontal surfaces until you don’t have them any more.)

Where are we with everything in the renovation?

• The outside of the house is complete! The windows are in, the clapboards are up, the trim’s installed, and it’s all painted. I even went by yesterday and reattached the cable for our internet again. (Don’t want that getting stepped on or cut somehow. If we lose internet in all of this, I think the family will go all Lord of the Flies.) That’s great to have done, since it’s getting cold, and we didn’t have much of a window left to get the paint on. (Paint doesn’t like cold temperatures, you know.)
• The walls of the bulk of the kitchen are ready. We completely swapped out the back wall, of course, but we also ended up having to build a new wall along one side of the kitchen, since when we ripped down the old siding we discovered one of the main support beams had a four foot chunk missing. (There was a door right next to it, and a wall on the other side. It seemed a safe assumption the beam had enough support to keep things fine, except the wall was in the wrong place, and the door hadn’t been framed properly, so it wasn’t really supporting anything. Yikes.)
• The biggest hangup at the moment is the electrical. The electrician who had been scheduled to come last Wednesday rescheduled to this coming Monday, and then rescheduled to “never.” Apparently a much bigger job came in, and he couldn’t pass it up. I get it. We’re a small job he was going to squeeze in. Even if we vowed never to use him again, he’d still be better off keeping a larger job happy. However, this leaves us without an electrician. Not sure how we’re going to fix that. Electricians are few and far between at the moment.
• Once the electrical work is done, then the insulation can go in. (We discovered on Wednesday that getting the sort of insulation we wanted was (naturally) more complicated than usual. We ended up having to pay more for something that could be delivered sooner. Waiting at this point isn’t really an option I want to explore. Though maybe I’ll have to, because of the electrical work?)
• Once the insulation is up, the drywall can go up.
• Once the drywall is up, the cabinets can go in.
• Once the cabinets are in, the sink can get hooked up. (Assuming we can get a plumber. We’re also in need of a heating person to come move some of the baseboard heating around . . .) We can also put some plywood down then to use for makeshift counters until the granite comes . . . eventually.

We also need to finish off the ceilings, and redo the floor. And take down another wall, and build some window seats. And swap out two more doors. And frame out and build a mudroom. And get around to renovating the downstairs bathroom. Do you see why I say the end isn’t really in sight? I thought writing it down might make me feel better, but . . . not really. We bought flooring though. That has to count for something, right?

Any and all good thoughts would be appreciated.

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