We Are Six Weeks Into Our Kitchen Renovation

You may have read a blog entry I did a few weeks back in which I talked about the start of our kitchen renovation (which also includes some reconfiguration, a new mudroom, and the replacement of our deck).

I recently found this news piece about a man in Thailand who built his dream house in six weeks for $9,000. It made me want to go to Thailand, but primarily to punch the man in the nose.

Anyway, back to Randlett Park. After a lengthy period of time in which it appeared nothing was happening, things are happening. Slowly, but they’re happening.

• We have a door from our attached garage to the house. (Why attach a garage if you can’t walk into the house through it?)

• Our upstairs bathtub works again, once the previous stack pipe they found was re-routed.
• Our “sunroom” (which was added at some point by someone who was 1) unlicensed; 2) drunk or 3) perhaps both), which now gives off a “don’t f*** with me vibe” from the outside, will eventually have windows, real walls and the like.

• Our family is intact, which I am calling a victory.

There were also a handful of surprises, the most expensive of which was this: the platform/cabinet/steps, all made of wood, were simply built over existing concrete steps:

$1,000 later, we had this lovely pile of concrete:

Here’s a few additional updates:

• Ordering in is up maybe 75 percent. In unrelated news, my pants appear to have shrunk. Also, use of paper plates is up to essentially 100 percent, despite earlier promises to not do that.
• Cooking bacon in a toaster oven will set off your smoke detectors. In fact, cooking anything other than toast in said toaster oven will do just that.
• That said, we have had the occasional “real” breakfast with an electric griddle (which has only set off the circuit breaker a few few times)

• The family of raccoons in 350 Waltham are definitely making themselves known. Loudly, and sort of creepily at night. I’ve stopped venturing out to grill because 1) well, I don’t have a deck any more and 2) I don’t like having 5 sets of eyes staring at me as I’m trying to sear things. I have also learned our construction team is surprisingly sensitive to the raccoons—the City has come to set traps, and one kindhearted worker tossed a sandwich up to the trapped vermin (OK, baby vermin) and then, when the sandwich didn’t reach the trap, got a ladder out and moved it closer to the trap. I don’t believe I was charged for this time.
• If you’re hanging any laundry to dry, do it on Saturday or Sunday or it will be caked in construction dust.
• I may have a case of miner’s lung. Unrelated.

There is some upside. We don’t have to host Christmas, Chanukah or Thanksgiving. I am becoming a pro at washing dishes by hand (a lost art). And sometime in January/February/March, we will have an amazing new kitchen. Or I will have moved and started a new life somewhere else.