At Last, a Kitchen.

Food stored in the same room where you cook? What a novel idea!

We finally got some basic necessities in the kitchen, notably running water. Here's the sequence of events over the past couple of weeks:


We get plumbers to run water and drainage lines into the kitchen floor, in the place where the sink is going to be in the peninsula.


We manage to built the sink cabinet and drill holes in sort of the right places, enough to lower the cabinet over the pipes (notice the addition of another cabinet to the left and the dishwasher in place on the right).


We set the sink on the cabinet. Isn't it so pretty and sparkly?


Adam shows off his plumbing skills...complete with a few expletives when it doesn't all fit exactly the first time. Eventually it all fits beautifully.


Adam connects the faucet, and presto! Running water! With only minimal leaks.


With cabinet doors and drawer fronts added...

Nice huh? It'll be nicer when we have handles to actually open the doors and drawers.

Elsewhere:

Cabinets constructed and placed on either side of the stove.


With doors and drawers!


The wall cabinets have been installed, but the doors either (a) require some complicated installation, which we've been procrastinating, or (b) are on backorder. But at least we can start bringing our glasses and dishes into the kitchen from the dining room!


Remember that tall pantry cabinet that fit so perfectly behind the refrigerator? Well, you probably don't unless you've been paying very close attention. Either way, we got the drawers installed and the doors put on. It looks so tiny in this photo, but here:


These drawers pull out and it's actually quite deep. A handy use of a tight space if we do say so ourselves!

What is your dirt doing in the warden's hole?!

So this actually happened a while ago but it took this long for me to be able to operate my hands again.

As you may recall, we hired our cousin Doug to help us with the landscaping. He has his own business and is a machine in terms of getting things done. Generally he is also full of useful information and tips about how to proceed with our landscape work. Then, sometimes he's not.

We wanted to put two new trees into the barren mudscape in front of the house. Any fool knows that this involves digging, and to be macho I decided that I would do ALL of the digging myself. Doug, scheduled to show up Sunday morning with the trees, was all too happy to tell me how big the holes needed to be - roughly 5' in diameter and 3' deep. (any of you who know better can stop reading now and go jump off a cliff).

Saturday was 115 degrees and sub-tropically humid. Reagan, who usually wears a parka into July, was seen in shorts. The sun burned down like a burning sun, facing down. Our neighborhood organization had organized its annual community yard-sale. There was a crowd.

I awoke early and went for a run with our dog who knew better.

Then at 9 I grabbed my brand-new shovel and went to work.

Eight and a half hours later, I had bored two holes into the rock pile that we call a front yard, and I was 5 inches shorter.


me and my hole.


These children had clever parents who told the older child that I was hunting for treasure, and the younger child that dirt tasted good. I didn't see the parents from 11 am to 3 pm. The little viper in the green shirt spent half the day kicking dirt back into the holes as I was trying to dig them.

Somehow, Sunday morning I regained consciousness and Doug arrived with the trees. In a casual sort of way he said, "why are those holes so big?" Sort of like you might say, "hey there friend, why is there so much water coming into this boat?" or "Nice day isn't it, why are you dragging that bicycle under your car."


Here I am filling in one of the holes to the required depth of 9". Notice the pile of rocks that I was too weak to throw at Doug's head.


Here is Doug putting the finishing touches on the "backfill." Thanks for the help Doug. Don't get tired though.


All that is left for me now are the memories.


But in addition to a severe stoop, we got two nice new trees in the deal. The one on the left is a Red Bud and the one on the way right is a Dogwood.


Red Bud


Here I am being held up by a hose.

Shingle bells.

That's not as clever a title as I hoped it'd be. Anyhow, we left off with the front bay of the house needing to be re-shingled (since our painters proved not to be carpenters, which I guess is ok as long as they don't try to be carpenters). We hired carpenter friends from the North Bennett Street School who did a beautiful job putting up the new shingles. It will be a shame to paint them, really.


Here she is, stripped of her old shingles. This green stuff is the original paper beneath the shingles. Also note the pump jacks they built for themselves.

New tar paper! Now she's definitely waterproof.

Here they go, starting bottom up.



It took them a long time to get this bottom portion done because of the curves and corners, but look how beautifully they overlapped the corners and fitted everything together.

The inner corner between the bay and the porch. Each piece had to be custom fit to the curve here.

And done! Also, it smells so good - just standing next to the house you can smell the cedar in the breeze.

If they are brave enough, they will also repair our porch roof.

LIVE THIS SUNDAY AT THE WORCESTER CENTRUM

SEE THE MONSTER TRUCK BATTLE OUR FRONT LAWN!!!

So here is the set-up for a productive weekend:
1. Hire your cousin to regrade your front lawn.
2. Let him rent earth moving equipment.
3. Leave town.

We hired my cousin Doug who runs a landscaping business to go to town on the yard. First step was to regrade the front and back. However, the last time we were a part of a project of this scale with Doug, he broke two bobcats. So rather than stay and fret, we went to Philadelphia for the weekend.

Doug happy, move dirt.

Front lawn begins to resemble my hairline.

This is what I always imagined would happen if we ran afoul of a repo man or something. While we are out of town, somebody shows up in an armored attack vehicle and comes in through the bay window.

Here Doug is removing the remains of the trees we cut down last fall. In order to do this kind of work you are supposed to call Dig Safe before you dig. We did. They came and told us that our water supply ran right under this stump. Then we dug.

Looking pretty great, no? Who wouldn't want to look out their front windows onto a dirt farm. We are hoping to have a Grapes of Wrath party soon.

The dirt removed from the front was deposited into the vast lowlands in the back yard.

Those of you who have been reading this blog from the start will be familiar with our monolith. It showed up the first time we tried to mow the lawn, and has not moved much since. Moving this 2,000 lb. block of granite presented Doug with a great opportunity to bust a piece of expensive equipment so he jumped at the chance.

Build a better mousetrap......


This rock was in place less than an hour before the neighborhood kids showed up to try and kick it over. Bon Chance!

Painting done! (Almost)

The painters finished up with the house this week, except that we have decided that the front bay of the house needs to be re-shingled. So they will have to come back to paint that when it is done. But otherwise it looks great! The colors look good together, and the trim helps to break up the house and bring out the details a bit more. Check it out:

Isn't she cute?

This is the bay that will get re-shingled during the next week or so by our friend Chris Carrot (not his real name).



The porch roof still needs to be repaired and we have to do some other fixings to the porch, so that's why it still looks like crap. But hopefully it won't for too much longer.

Chaos.

Our poor little house is currently in chaos. We had some down time, thus no new updates, but with the warm weather everything has started at once. The house is getting painted, and all of this week and some of last week, the painters have been out scraping it down and patching it up. Here's what it looks like so far:

Of course, the intermittent rain has prolonged the painting of the house, but it should get done by mid-week next week. Hooray! You can see the darker color for the clapboarding below, with the ivory trim, and the lighter yellow above. Reagan actually visually color-matched these colors to what she found in early layers of the paint chips on the house. So we're being somewhat restorative while keeping with the yellow history of the house.
Also note the removal of the shutters...we realize they'd been on the house for a long time, but they're not original, so we took them off.

You can see that they started repairing and replacing some of the shingles. This has been a bit of a problem that Reagan actually lost sleep over. Just in case you're wondering, this is NOT how to replace shingles:


New shingles should not look like the battered, shrunken old shingles - i.e. like they are British and haven't had braces. And they shouldn't be nailed down in the middle of the exposed shingle. Thankfully, the painters are bringing over a carpenter to do a better job next week. Yikes.

In more exciting news, we got our kitchen cabinets delivered! We decided on the beige Ikea cabinets, and they arrived yesterday in a billion pieces. Amazingly, though, we got them organized last night and already have some upper cabinets installed. Also amazing - they fit!

Here they are going in. Also note the newly installed ceiling fan!

The cabinets fit pretty much perfectly across the top of the wall. We were impressed that we managed to get these up in an hour. (An hour past Reagan's bedtime, but still...) We'll put the wall cabinets that go just below these in tonight. Soon...storage! What a great idea for a kitchen!

FANCIER floors!

We have an actual floor in the kitchen! We finished installing the floating cork floor last night. Not only does it look really nice (especially compared to the lovely plywood floor that we had been living with), but it is soft and sounds nice. Since it's a floating floor, it'll still float and move a little bit until we get the baseboard down.

But now, nothing stands in our way of putting in our cabinets! Except for maybe the fact that we haven't ordered any yet.


Underlayment (foam) for the cork. You can see the metal edging strip we put down to frame the cork against the adjoining wood floors.


The cork going in...once we got started, it went pretty quickly. It just took us a while to figure out just how this very simple click-together system worked.


Adam did some very intricate cutting in order to get the panels to fit around the moldings. (Reagan's brain couldn't handle it.)


Halfway done last Sunday.


Lookin' pretty good, no?


After Monday night's work...which was done all by Reagan's self. (Yes, I even got it under the stove.) This just goes to show how easy this stuff is to put down.


After complete installation last night! Fiver likes the new floor, too.

It's especially good for wrestling.

Now we have to get another coat of sealant on it, then we can put the sink back temporarily. Trying to wash a large stock pot in the tiny bathroom sink has been a larger challenge than putting down the floor.