Kitchens, counters, and procrastination

I have counters in the kitchen. YAY!!!! You can scroll down to see pictures. The sink will be hooked up tomorrow and then we will be cookin’. Literally. It’s sad that I am alone with no one to admire the counters with me. Its like opening a really great present all by yourself. I love the colors of my kitchen. Once we change the overhead lighting after Wes gets back, it will look even better. The only thing that I would change now that everything is installed it that I would have black backsplash instead. I know that sounds weird, but I think it would have made it look really sharp. That is something I can change in the future.

Other than the kitchen, I feel that I am moving really slowly on the rest of the house. Maybe I am expecting too much, but maybe I am just getting lazy in this unstructured and non-regulated world of mine. I have to make a list for everyday, or I don’t get a thing done. Today I had no list and accomplished very little…either that or since I didn’t write it down, I have no record of my accomplishments.

Before and After - Flower bed

BEFORE
This is what my flower bed looked like a couple weeks ago.

AFTER
Here are the results of a couple exhausting days.

The house of broken cars

Over lunch with Katie, I was telling her about my day yesterday and she said I should be keeping a journal so I decided to share more of the house adventures with you all.

7:00 am Monday
Get up because someone will be coming to cut tiles between 7:30 –8.

8:00 am
Start painting the new wall where the soffit was before they put the cabinets in.

9:00 am
Tile guy shows up. I am now cleaning up my flower bed up because I have decided to deliver my compost soil and mulch myself. The garden center wanted 100$ to do it and I would like to use most of that money to buy plants. I figure it should cost 20$ to rent a truck from the Uhaul and 30$ in mileage and gas. Whoohoo.. 50$ to spend on pretty plants.

10:30 am
Tile guy leaves????

12:00 pm
At garden center realizing that I have too much soil and that I will be making 4 trips instead of 2. Hmm that will definitely cut into my gas budget and make my day really long.

5:00 pm
soooo tired.... I unloaded 4 pickup loads of compost and mulch one shovel at a time and I am exhausted. I probably only managed to save about 20$ off the delivery charge, but I also saved myself a lot of work by being able to shovel the stuff more or less where I wanted it. If they had delivered it, they would have dumped it in the yard and I would have had to haul it to the flower beds. The electrician is still at the house doing random electrical jobs. I am asked to approve his work. He has not put in a switch for the dishwasher, just wired it. He also has not put in the outlet into the wall. This outlet was the main purpose of the job and the contractor forgot about it. Now the electrician has to go back to the hardware store to get more supplies. I head off to return the truck, expecting the will be almost done by the time I get back.

6:30 pm
I had this plan of coming home after I returned the rental truck and giving Max a bath because he had been playing in smelly compost all day and then shower because I had been playing in smelly compost all day. No electrician……

7:30 pm
I have given up on the electrician and decided that they are not coming back. Of course, when I go upstairs to shower, the electrician comes back and throws a monkey wrench in my plan. Apparently he ran into a curb and screwed up his van very badly. It kept over heating and that is what took so long.


8:30 pm
Job is done. I am exhausted and just want them gone. I approve the job even though there is a small part of my brain saying that something is wrong, but I am not mentally capable of figuring it out. The electrician asks to borrow my phone to call the contractor for a ride. No one has a phone in the group. Apparently the contractor came down the drive way and then turned around for reasons only known to himself. When I called him, the first thing I said was “The guys are waiting for a ride.” Now they are waiting out front for the contractor to come pick them up and are leaving the van out front. Just like the island of broken toys on Rudolph, somehow we became the house of sick people and broken cars. Every truck that has come along with this job has broken down and I won’t go into the ailments of all the workers.


9:00 pm
Well, hopefully they are all gone and I can shower and go to bed now.

I spoke too soon. Just as I was about the head upstairs, the door bell rang. The contractor never came back to pick them up, even though I called him and told him that they were waiting for a ride. They waited outside for a half an hour before they asked to use my phone again to call him. He wouldn't come back to get them. They had to leave driving a van whose radiator won't hold water. They won't get far and none of them have a cell phone. Uggh! I feel so bad for them that I almost offered to drive them home myself, but at least the van is gone.

9:30 pm
Showered, but Max is still stinky. Finally putting my tired self to sleep.

__________________________________________
8:00 am Tuesday
Up and at em. Hmmm… hair is interesting since I went to bed with it wet.

8:30 am
Had caffeine. Brain beginning to function. Still no contractor.
I now realize what was nagging me about the outlet. It is too low and below the level of the counter. I will not try explain what is wrong in any detail, but I feel that this is definitely something that the contractor should have been attentive to and given some direction to the electrician about. The outlet can’t stay there. Ugghh!!!

11:20 am
I head off to lunch with Katie. Still no contractor.

1:00 pm
Back from lunch and contractor and company finally show up. So much for his early start. He thinks he will get everything done today. Not likely…

5:00 pm
Work is commencing but at a slower rate than the contractor expected but about equal with what I expected. I have made them a to do list and adopted the hovering technique. One of the guys points out that the out let the electrician installed for the microwave is in the wrong place. Again, another thing that the contractor should have known. So half the work the electrician did yesterday will have to be redone. Now I am just shaking my head.

7:00 pm
They have left with promises of coming back early. But they haven’t really left because they are still standing in the driveway talking… probably about me and I am sure it is not fluffy nice stuff either.

Anyone want to place a bet on whether they will show up before noon tomorrow…

Woman vs Machine

Today has been a busy day. The garden had to be tilled and I was the only one to do it. So I headed up to the local hardware store to rent a tiller. It wouldn’t fit in my car even though they said it would, so the one of the men there brought it over to the house. He didn’t show me how to start it though. It looked like it started just like a lawnmower, but I hadn’t started a lawn mower since the last time I was in Norfolk, over 2 years ago. I thought I would call my brothers to ask. They are always trying to give me advice on topics way outside their realm of experience and here was an opportunity for them to shine. Of course they didn’t answer their phones, so I turned to google. Google: more dependable than siblings.

Tiller is running… time to begin. Now before I began, I had visions of some episode that you would find in America’s funniest videos. However, I managed pretty well, not elegant but well. Controlling a tiller though takes your full body and is very difficult. I am so tired now. I can only imagine how sore I will be in a couple days. Anyone looking for a day of boot camp should try tilling. Tomorrow, I think I am going to rent a truck to get some organic matter and mulch for my garden. That is, if I can move.

I thought that I would take a nice relaxing bath tonight. However, I came home from the grocery store to find the contractor and crew hard at work on my kitchen. I had given up on them for the day. They didn’t leave until 8:30. Then I realized that I had to paint part of the kitchen where they had done some repair work before they put the last two cabinets in tomorrow. So I spent my bath time wrapped up in a bunny suit painting. Uggh! Now, I am going to touch up, fold some laundry and go to bed.

Oh yeah, they delivered my household goods from CA last week. I made them unpack most of it, which means they take it out of the box and throw it in a pile. My house looks like a bomb went off. All of the linens and clothes have to be washed because they smell bad from being in storage all year. Needless to say, I have been putting the washer through its paces.

Still no stove though. I have been asking them to hook it up for a week now. I would like to cook indoors, but apparently that is too much to ask.

More Kitchen Pictures

First cabinets going in.

More Cabinets.

And we are getting a wall.

Side view.

Full view.

Our big wall cabinets don't fit because we didn't take into consideration the tiles that weren't supposed to be under the cabinets. We are probably going to have to lose the soffit, but it wasn't the right size anyway.

Progress: Jobs, Publications and House.

Jobs
I still don’t have a job, but I have a few jobs in my sights, which is more than I had a couple weeks ago. I have been invited back by a company that I interviewed with before to apply for a new position despite the fact that it is advertised as an engineering position. Hmm… I am also going to apply for some federal biology jobs, which means I have to wade through the arduous federal application process. Unfortunately with these jobs, they will get back to you anytime from 2 months to a year, so they might be a back up plan.

Publications
The two publications that were submitted have now been accepted. I couldn’t have done it with out my co-authors, so thank to them. It is such a good feeling to have 3 out of 4 done. Now I have to get busy on that last paper. I feel like I should go back to the literature and do some more research, which is now my current hang up.

House
The major project in house now is the kitchen. Here is a before picture.

I still have a lot of painting to do, doors and window and doorframes, but that is on hold now. They have ripped everything out of the kitchen now, including the sink :( so I am doing dishes in the bathroom, or I will be when I get around to it. There is starting to be a large pile waiting for me. They have managed to get most of the tile laid and grouted. They were here until 10 pm Friday night doing the grout. I was pretty impressed, but they haven’t been back since so my admiration is dieing a slow death. I primed the kitchen late Thursday night and painted it red Friday morning. I think the red turned out a little darker than I wanted, so I am glad that we decided to go with the lighter red shade even though I liked the red wine color better.





During the painting process Max ran by a kitchen door and managed to get red paint on himself. It looked like he was bleeding. They were delivering the kitchen cabinets at the time so I asked the delivery guys, “What did you do to my dog? He’s bleeding.” They were scared for a minute and denied doing anything until I told them it was just paint. Then they thought it was pretty funny. I had to give max a bath and he was pink for a while. I know what kind of costume Max will be wearing for Halloween. Willow did not escape unscathed either. I was painting the rails out front and she came out and stuck her head between the rails creating two nice racing stripes on the side of her head.



Our cabinets are natural Cherry and some of the patterns in the wood of the ones I have opened are really pretty. Here is a sample



Garden
So I have managed to get the front flowerbed shaped and most of the roots removed. I need to get a tiller and fluff up the soil before I amend it with compost. That could be quite the adventure. However, that is on hold for now until I get some job applications out. In the mean time, I have covered the front with copious amounts of cardboard. With all the moving, I have plenty of it around. I did this not only for weed control, but to keep Max from tracking mud into the house.

Birthday
Today is my birthday. The lead up to the birthday has been great! Lots of nice presents. However, the actual day has started in the traditional style. My computer has crashed and I have had to yell at the contractor already. Ugghh! Hopefully Carmony will come along the afternoon and rescue the day.