M Visits

M visited for a few days this week. Hurrah!

Kitchen Demo

We had fun tearing down the walls, doing karate kicks and boxing down the drywall. Next you can see the kitchen with no walls! The floor is parquet glued to vinyl glued to mdf screwed down to subfloor. What a bear. P took a circular saw to it finally and we got most of it out.

Demo sure is a dirty business. The worst night so far has been taking the upper framing down along with some ceiling drywall. There was a lot of horrible insulation to clean up.

Here I am nestling with the girls this morning in our makeshift living quarters downstairs. Colby looks jealous and cranky; there's no room for him on my lap. Notice he's resting his tail on my shoulder, though.

Before Renovation Pictures

The purpose of our renovation is to convert the closed kitchen to an open plan including the kitchen, dining and living rooms.

Here are pictures of the whole area (and three of the people) that will be affected.

New Kitchen Materials

Prep sink

Main sink

Maple with light stain cabinets--upper and lower cabinets on perimeter


Cherry with Salem Maple Stain for island, pantry, ref cabinet and crown molding

Kahrs Cherry Charleston floor throughout kitchen, dining, living room, hallway and stairs

Birch Bay Vacation

We took a few days off last week and drove North to Blaine, WA on Birch Bay. The condo was wonderful, probably the nicest Vacation Internationale place we've ever stayed. It was rainy the whole time so we didn't do much. There wasn't anything to do there really; seems like a much better place for the summer. We went beach combing though which was loads of fun.

Brave N

N and I took a trip to the emergency room this morning. About 3:30, she fell out of bed and then hit her bedside table, scraping her chin and getting a small cut above her eyelid. There was hardly any blood and we didn't know if the cut would require stitches. I decided to go ahead and take her in to the emergency room to get checked out. N was very scared at first about going to the hospital because she thought I'd be leaving her there alone; she was shaking like a leaf. There were no other patients there so we walked right in. Well, I walked right in carrying Mammoth N.

A fun admitting nurse helped N feel at ease right away and we walked right in to a room with all eyes on us. N is so cute, everyone wanted to say hello but she was still scared and shy. One of the nurses had a cool bubble pen and blew bubbles that the doctor then caught on all five digits of one hand. They were kind of weird bubbles, very thick and hard to pop.

The doctor then examined the cut and decided he couldn't glue it because it was too close to the eye. He decided he would put a topical anesthetic on the cut and we read books for twenty minutes or so while we waited for it to work. We read a good book called Zen Shorts that had a panda bear named Stillwater.

The ointment didn't work well on the whole cut but N only felt two stitches out of four and it looked like it didn't sting too much. She was super brave throughout the whole hospital ordeal, didn't cry or even whimper. The nurses and doctor were wonderful except one of them thought she was a boy. N made out with several stickers, crayons and a nifty hospital bracelet.

Renovation Begins

Today we begin our kitchen/great room renovation. We'll remove the cabinet on the North wall to make room for a bigger window.