soon.

The kitchen renovation is going to start very soon.

Last night, we moved the dining room table into the office to serve as a holding area for kitchen stuff (and to get it out of the way). The dining room is now empty, and all of the kitchen appliances will be moving in there soon. We'll keep the fridge and the microwave plugged in, but everything else will be dark - no stove, no laundry, no dishwasher.

Yesterday we went to Costco and stocked up on paper plates and cups, plus all sorts of frozen pre-made foods we'll be able to microwave for dinner. That and the Wegmans prepared food section will see us through the next couple of months, I suspect.

Tonight, we'll start packing away the nonessentials - champagne flutes, salad spinners, etc. We'll continue the packing slowly through the rest of this week, keeping everything functional as long as we can. We may even rip out some of the floor before we lose the stove and dishwasher; we'll get as much done with a functional kitchen as we can.

The plan, as it stands right now:

• Demo everything
• New joists and subfloor
• Frame in powder room and coat closet
• Reroute HVAC vents as necessary
• Reroute plumbing
• Electrical - the entire kitchen will be rewired (by an electrician, specifically) from the main box instead of the creepy old auxiliary one it's running off of now
• Drywall
• Paint
• Concrete board and tile entire floor in both kitchen and powder room
• Install fixtures in powder room, finally get to pee downstairs again
• Cabinets - must be ordered by the 25th in order to take advantage of a sale, but they will live in the garage til we're ready for them
• Countertops and sink
• Re-install appliances
• Finishing details like switchplates and maybe a backsplash and knobs and things
• Eat real food again

a plan of sorts

So I had a fairly incredible weekend -- the con report is up over at the Anapurna Girls blog, if you're interested in the small business side of my life. While I was gone, Don mostly sat around and watched movies instead of doing schoolwork. He did take a few minutes out to do some mapping out upstairs, though, and has figured out where various walls and fixtures are going to go. In the spirit of fair play, he even measured out my bathroom idea. Alas for fair play and my ideas, it doesn't work; the bathroom isn't long enough. Oh well. He did come up with a solution to make the shower less cave-like; once the measuring was done he found six or eight extra inches to put in there, to make it wider. We'll use those inches as a little bench with shelves over it, which will keep everything out of the shower proper and leave lots of extra room. I'm mostly resigned to it now, and the extra space does help. And there's always the fact that we're not staying in this house forever to reassure me.

In any case, Don discovered that the only wall that he can put up right now is the one in between the master bedroom and the middle bedroom; the rest are all too long and cross over into the part of the subfloor that isn't finished. So this weekend he and his dad will put up that wall, and we'll start moving our stuff over to the front side of the house.

i'm back and my clothes are clean

Count Don among the multitudes offended that I haven't been posting here. "Why haven't you AP'ed?" he asked me in an aggrieved tone a few days ago. He knows the answer very well, of course: this happened, sending me winging off to Washington for two weeks, and then this was released, causing much household excitement, and of course this is coming up, meaning I've got a lot of stuff to do. "You could do it yourself, you know," I said. "You know the passwords."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't want to blog," he said. "I want to be blogged about."

Well then. In the interest of maintaining his Internet celebrity status, allow me to give you the big, huge, incredibly exciting update:


We have a washer and dryer. And they work! When I got back from Washington, Don met me at the airport with flowers, took me out to dinner, and then whisked me out the next morning for a full day of shopping with no complaining on his part (I know, he's awesome). In addition to ogling jewelry and watches we would never buy, trying on strange clothing items, and buying some long-awaited new shoes for him, we also managed to (finally!) agree on and purchase a washer and dryer. Don and his dad had actually finished with all of the necessary plumbing before I left, although I didn't expect him to be willing to buy anything yet. But lo, Sears was having a sale, and they had the models I wanted, and there we were. So, rather than spending three hundred dollars each (!) on platforms to raise the machines up to the level we liked, Don spent the week before the delivery building a serviceable platform that cost nothing, as we had all the appropriate lumber around from working on the floors. We will eventually replace it with something sleek and fabulous (and maybe with storage) when we re-do the mudroom, but for now it -- and the temporary plywood floor, and the bare walls -- will do.

We've decided to open the mudroom up and make it part of the kitchen, giving us better flow and a little more space. This means that mudroom renovations, for now, went just to the point of getting the laundry facilities in place and functional, and all the rest will wait until we undertake the big kitchen renovation. The machines were delivered last weekend, and I've spent the last week washing anything and everything made of fabric in the house, up to and including the cat.

Okay, maybe not the cat.

two weekends of progress in a row?!

This weekend was eventful all around. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Don's family for some fantastic food at Roy's. Saturday, Don was supposed to go to a fraternity golf tournament and I planned to go downtown to the Baltimore Book Festival, but weather forced us to find other, more indoor plans. I had a draft to work on for work for most of the day, but we were able to steal some time to head out and go shopping, because Don starts his new job today and was in desperate need of some pants. Sunday was our work on the house day. Don's dad showed up bright and early -- 8 AM -- and the two of them got an astonishing amount of work done upstairs before they called it quits at around two. They removed the wall which separates the master bedroom and the master bathroom and replaced it with a header, which means that we can rebuild the wall a few inches over, giving us room for the shower in the master bath. Then they got started ripping up the floor in the master bedroom. They finished tearing up the floor in both the bedroom and the bathroom, and will move on to the master closet and the middle bedroom and parts of the landing next time.

From what I understand, the current plan -- such as it is -- is to tear up the floors all the way back to the chimney, in the middle of the house, and then go ahead and level the joists and put in a subfloor in that area (long-time readers will remember the process from when we did it on the main floor -- but never you fear, newcomers, the pictures they are a-coming anyway). Then we'll move our bedroom from its current spot in the back guest bedroom into the master, and the office from the dining room to the living room underneath the master, and the same process will apply to the back half of the house. And then the floor will be done.

That said, however, I have been promised that before they get too involved in the upstairs work, they'll finally install a new water line to the laundry room and slap down a temporary subfloor in there (we're not finishing the space for real until we renovate the kitchen), which will mean, glory of glories, that I can FINALLY buy a washer and dryer and do laundry in my own home. Hallelujah! Tentative plans have that work being done this upcoming weekend, although as usual there are no guarantees. That doesn't stop me from drooling over appliance websites all week, though.

the shape of things

Even though the demolition's not done yet, we are finally able to start seeing the actual shape of the things we've been talking about and planning for. The picture above is what used to be the summer kitchen closet, off of the master bedroom. It's going to be the master bathroom when we're through, and now that all the stuff is out of there it's a lot easier to see how that's going to happen. The big upstairs landing is just outside the door to the left of this picture, and we're going to steal space from it for a walk-in shower. A bathtub will go under the eave (hopefully), and toilet and double sinks should fit in there somewhere. We haven't made the final placement decisions yet, but it's going to be a lot easier to do that now.