What We Ate: a seasonal reminder of dinner at our house.

It's not as fun as it looks.  It was hot and messy and dusty and gross.  So when it was done we went on vacation.

So the deal was, we (and by we, I mean mostly my spouse) would do the demolition down to the studs. He'd rip up the floor, take down the cabinets, tear out the drywall and pull out the old electrical. Then, because he's got skills, he'd redo the electrical, swap the gas line for the stove from the south wall to the north wall and move the plumbing.  Then C could come in and put everything in - floors, walls, ceiling, cabinets, counters and some custom shelving. We'd save some money and have that lovely feeling of accomplishment but a professional would be handling the part of the project that we'd have to live with long term.  This seemed like a perfect hybrid of DYI enthusiasm and we're-old-enough-to-know-better-pragmatism.  A little side note: we both work in human service fields so at the end of the day, we come home with nothing but stories (good and bad) consequently, we both enjoy projects that  produce  something - a knitted sock, a working overhead l...

For the first 6 months (okay, let's be real, we've been talking about this for years), we spent a lot of time wondering do we want dark floors or light? cupboards or shelves? stainless or porcelain?  We wandered the aisles of Menards taking pictures of: Cupboards Possible finishes More possible finishes shelves Floors We were doing fine. Really we were. We picked all the things out and sent pictures of them to C so that he could tell us if they would work. Truthfully we sent these pictures in March of 2017 and then sort of forgot about them. It turns out that if you wait more than a year to start a project with supplies you've already choosen, you might not be able to get said supplies. A year passed.  We started again. C now gets cabinets from a local-ish supplier. Great! C says we should get our floors at the local flooring store. No problem! C says we have to pick out a sink before the cabinets are ordered. Easy peasy. Also the l...

I suppose it's a little extreme looking for a therapist so early but I should mention we already had a contractor (I think I'll call him C) - one who had worked with us before and whom we really like and trust. It was in the middle of a conversation with C that we discovered that we have some DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT SPACE. To be fair, we've known this our whole marriage. It tends to come up when we move (which we've done 7 times in our married life), or when we just move furniture (which we've done a whole lot more than 7 times) or when we think about taking out a wall (which we've done far more times than we should of especially since we rarely have a plan for what to do with the remaining hole. This is why there is a hole in the office wall, no doors on the closets in our bedroom, and a large hole in the wall between two closets on the first floor. All I can say is that it always seemed like a good idea at the time.) We just see space differently and after 20 ...

While I might have thought that it all started with the purchase of our house, it turns out that maybe a kitchen renovation was predestined. I fancy myself an independent thinker who marches to the beat of her own drum, but I have noticed there is a pretty predictable pattern that (white-educated-upwardly-mobile-suburban) women of a certain age have followed.  First there is education (college - maybe grad school). Then work and marriage - often followed by babies. Sometimes items 2, 3, and 4 come in a different order. No matter.  Then there is the marathon. It comes from the moment in life when we're feeling competent at work, our children (or sometimes dogs) are sleeping through the night, we've got the adulting thing down pretty well and we're looking for a challenge. Enter the get-in-shape-prove-to-the-world-we-can-do-amazing-things challenge. It might not be a full marathon. It could be a half marathon, a relay marathon, maybe a Ragnar . Sometimes it's a Dirty ...

when we bought the house 14 years ago. The kitchen was among the first things we thought we'd fix - right away. I mean you can see why, right? Those metal counter top edges (circa 1950 something) might have been shiny and slick 60 years ago but 14 years ago they were grimy, bent, and the perfect place for coffee grounds and grease to reside leaving a jagged brown line between the metal and the Formica. (Don't worry - we never used the stove. We DID replace that right away.) The cabinets - and let me tell you, the pictures don't do them justice - have an orange glow to them that complements the "cream colored walls" (read: never gonna be clean again walls). The undersides of the cabinets are painted with flat white paint and have a lip that collects grease and steam like nobody's business. The floor must have been replaced at some point and perhaps the vinyl was always off white but now it's the perfect shade of no-matter-how-hard-you-scrub-t...