We are almost done! This week, they are refinishing the hardwoods. Most all of our house is hardwod floors, much to the chagrin of the Rainbow vacume saleswoman who gave us a demo one night - but that’s a different blog post. We have gone from a seperate livining room, dining room, kitchen arrangement to an open floor plan. Now i can sit on the couch and yell for my wife, who will be in the kitchen cooking and cleaning, to bring me a beer and I will be able to ACTUALLY WATCH HER FLIP ME THE BIRD instead of imagining thats whats happening in the other room. This new floor plan is great.
The pictures were taken around 6:00 in the evening. As you can see, there is a lot of light in the room. Between the picture window in the front, the skylights, and the french doors in the back - a lot of light gets into that place. It’s kinda nice.
The floors should be finished by the end of the week and we can put furniture on it Tuesday. I have some trim work that needs to happen but then we will be finished. I would have done the trim work this past weekend but we just ran out of time.
If you remember, I blogged a bit ago about my Aunt in VA. who had started walking around her neighborhood in VA packing heat You will be happy to know her husband grew concerned when he discovered that occasionally, instead of strapping the firearm to her leg, she would place it in a little red wagon and pull it behind her. This was a function of the fact that it’s a big gun and a tiny aunt. Regardless, this week she sent me an email:
I thought you might be interested to hear that I am no longer carrying
that revolver that is half as long as my leg! B_ got me a Taurus Ultra-Lite
38 special. It weighs only about 17 ozs. So I am no longer scaring the
neighbors! I have also enrolled in a class on gun safety, which you have to
have to get a concealed weapons permit. I can carry it in my little “fanny
pack” and no one is the wiser! It makes B_ feel so much better! Now that
Spring is here, there is a lot more traffic on this little road and some of
them act like I have no business to be walking on the road. I just feel like
saying - Hey, I live on this road, What is your excuse?
So if you find yourself zooming around Blackburg VA and you encounter a determined woman with one hand in her fanny pack and a pissed off look on her face, you might want to consider slowing down…
Simon and I, two true wine connoisseurs I might add, were discussing various wines. (the drinking kind, not the student kind) We were wondering if you could get wine in a can. As you may expect, Google supplied us with the answer. Yes, yes you can get wine in a can
It’s an Australian wine, naturally. We couldn’t decide if after popping the top, the inability to reseal the wine, forcing you to finish it, was an advantage or a disadvantage.
Why yes, as a matter of fact I *am* still posting about my new kitchen and range…
I have been cooking in my new kitchen using my new range for about a week now and it’s wonderful! While we didn’t take down any walls in the kitchen, we made a few changes in the cabinet design. The result is that the kitchen seems HUGE! Kim, me, and the dog can all be in the kitchen and not get in each others way.
The cabinet design changes have allowed us to rearrange things so that it makes it easier to cook as well. For example, there is now a shelf over the range which is also an exhaust for the oven. We can keep plates here which will warm them as we cook. The cabinets to the left and right of the range hood hold spices, vinegars, and oils. Easy access while cooking. The drawer to the left of the range holds stirring utensils, pot holders, and various other things you need close at hand.
It’s not completely done. We need to figure out some sort of backsplash behind the counters and above the range hood. For the left side of the kitchen (which you can’t see in the picture) I’m thinking about running tin down the wall from the counter to the bottom of the cabinets. Then I will fill it with kitchen magnets. We will see what Kim thinks of the idea. The rest of the kitchen will be some sort of colorful tile. We haven’t decided yet.
There are some things we are getting used to that we didn’t have to get used to in the old kitchen. Everything’s deeper. The sinks are deeper and the dishwasher is lower. This means we have to bend over more than we used to. That’s a little annoying. We also left out a cabinet for the sheet pans. We are making due with the cabinet over the fridge but we are still looking for a good home for them. i am still getting used to cooking over gas. I had a gas range in the first apartment I lived in, but the next two houses had electric. In fact, it was my last range - the GE Space Saver - that finally made me redo the kitchen. It took forever to get hot and only had one large burner out or four. it was a pretty large annoyance.
Now I have 1 simmer burner, 3 hot burners, and 2 burners that are equivalent to cooking over a jet engine.
Friday night, pan fried chicken is on the menu. I am shopping around for a wok. Soon, we will be stirfrying!
Here is a shapshot of our Sunday morning. My son enjoys pulling a stool up to the range and cooking. In this case, he is scrambling eggs. My wife is watching because, basically, he is playing with fire. The dog, as usual, is laying in the middle of everything. My daughter is not in the picture. While she is only 10 she has started practicing to be a teenager and she doesn’t like to have her picture taken…well, by me anyway.
This is in contrast to the afternoon where my wife and I really did look like poor parents indeed. My wife took the dog and the children on a walk. Right after they left, I decided to run over to the hardware store and buy a bottle of grout sealer. I made this decision about 3 minutes after they had left. It seems that about 3 and a half minutes later, my son Noah decided he was cold and he didn’t want to go on a walk so he came back home. I left the door unlocked when I left so he easily let himself in and went downstairs to play with his leggo.
Shortly after that, J_, the next door neighbor came over for some reason that escapes me at the moment. She knocked on the door and Noah answers. He was happy to tell J_ that yes, in fact he was here by himself. She asked him how he felt about it and he responded that it was fine, as if my wife and I were never home at all.
She nodded and slowly started back down the driveway, stopping and starting, trying to figure out what to do. She said she thought she knew us pretty well and we didn’t strike her as the type of parents who would leave their 7 year old home alone. We have a few voice mails from here where she called, started to say something, then stopped. She later told us she just couldn’t come up with a polite way of saying “Why the hell did you leave your 7 year old home alone”, “What kind of brain dead parents do that?”
I was only gone for about 10 minutes and when I was driving up, J_ was coming back to our house to to invite my son back to her house to play till we could get back.
So I assure you, we aren’t bad parents, just unorganized. It’s also nice to see our neighbors look out for us and don’t immediatly call Social Services.
It’s blue, it’s heavy. and it’s here. They installed it late this afternoon which precluded me from fixing dinner on it. This actually worked out well as I had to wash the grates and the shelves on the inside then heat it up to 450 degrees for an hour to burn off all the stuff they use when putting it together. The house smelled pretty high.
Alas, tomorrow, I have to go to work instead of simply cooking all day. This weekend I need to install the hood vent, the dishwasher and roll the refrigerator back in place.
Here’s a quick peek at the kitchen while I test posting to my blog from flickr. The range arrives tomorrow. I will do a few little details when I’m not getting my cooking on and post pictures on Monday.
Hurry up and wait. I’m not saying I was expecting to roll along with no problems. In fact, I was wondering what our problems would be. Fortunately, they aren’t the structural limitation, mold and wood rot kind. They are simply the scheduling kind. Here is our kitchen as it’s been all week. See that big white space in the corner? That is where a cabinet goes. Somewhere between the order being placed by Home Depot and the order being accepted at Kraftmaid, that cabinet got lost. When the cabinets were checked after arriving at our house, we checked them against the packing slip, not the original order so we didn’t realize one was missing till they went up on the wall. It’s really no big deal, the cabinet will be in one day next week and the installers will come out and finish up. The really annoying part is the 36″ empty space under the exhaust pipe hanging from the ceiling. That empty space is going to be filled with my oven, which is here, waiting to be installed. I can’t install it till the tile goes down. The tile can’t go down till the end of March because the guy who can lay it isn’t free till then. I want him to do it because he put down the backer board and he know where the waves are in the floor. The tile we bought is 4″ by 24″. To keep them from rocking back and fourth, then breaking, the mortar will have to be built up in places.
It could be worse, but it’s taking longer than I hoped before I can start cooking again.
Hurry up and wait. I’m not saying I was expecting to roll along with no problems. In fact, I was wondering what our problems would be. Fortunately, they aren’t the structural limitation, mold and wood rot kind. They are simply the scheduling kind. Here is our kitchen as it’s been all week. See that big white space in the corner? That is where a cabinet goes. Somewhere between the order being placed by Home Depot and the order being accepted at Kraftmaid, that cabinet got lost. When the cabinets were checked after arriving at our house, we checked them against the packing slip, not the original order so we didn’t realize one was missing till they went up on the wall. It’s really no big deal, the cabinet will be in one day next week and the installers will come out and finish up. The really annoying part is the 36″ empty space under the exhaust pipe hanging from the ceiling. That empty space is going to be filled with my oven, which is here, waiting to be installed. I can’t install it till the tile goes down. The tile can’t go down till the end of March because the guy who can lay it isn’t free till then. I want him to do it because he put down the backer board and he know where the waves are in the floor. The tile we bought is 4″ by 24″. To keep them from rocking back and fourth, then breaking, the mortar will have to be built up in places.