Walls, and Our First Hiccup

Finally, someone made a mistake! It was easily corrected two days later, but still. It's like the first dent in a brand new car - the pressure's off. We're normal. We had a problem.

Here it is, pictorially:


See it? That texture? It was applied to all the walls in the kitchen and extended into the family room in places, where it shared a space with our other, far less textured walls and screamed, "Look at me! I'm not the same!"

So our contractor, who really is wonderful, came over to take a look, shook his head sadly, and said of the plasterer, "You'd think he'd have noticed that it didn't match, wouldn't you?"

The next morning two guys showed up with buckets and scrapers, and within about three hours the walls were smooth again. By the end of the day, the kitchen had a coat of paint. It's hard to reproduce the color in a photo, but it's a nice grayish brown with a little green that shows up in sunlight. My daughter-in-law chose it and it looks good.



Next up, the new floor, still in cartons here but soon to make its appearance. Once the floor's in, the contractor says, things will go pretty fast. They should have the cabinets in before the weekend. (Unless we have another hiccup. What? It could happen.)

Look at me! I'm cat-blogging!

But only because Amelie agreed to sleep on the cushions on the rec-room sectional all afternoon, which is something she rarely does. She usually prefers the roof or the balcony to any indoor location.

Pictures of progress

The holes in the walls created by demolition have been repaired.








We have a new ceiling, complete with cans for light fixtures.









The old wallpaper is gone, and the wall has been extended to make room for a pantry-sized cabinet.




All the rough electrical and plumbing is complete, inspected, and approved.

See that pipe at the bottom of the wall? That's the gas line for the new stove.



We've chosen our flooring - 3/4" solid maple. Now we just have to finalize our decisions on paint, tile, under-cabinet lighting, and carpet (for the rest of the house, which will be installed as soon as the kitchen is complete.)




Today the plasterer is applying texture to the formerly papered walls and the ceiling, and then they'll be painted (so, I guess I'd better concentrate on those paint chips shown above...) The flooring will be delivered on Thursday, and will be installed at the end of this weekend, or the beginning of next. Cabinets are to be installed late next week.

I thought this would be harder

The remodel, I mean. Except for needing to pour copious amounts of money into the thing, it's going very smoothly. Here's what we've done so far:




We packed up everything in the kitchen and stored it in other parts of the house. Here you see the living room with the kitchen table and three of our thirty-some boxes of kitchen stuff.

This is my favorite shot of the empty kitchen.

We made a makeshift kitchen in the rec room downstairs, where I cook sitting in a secretary's chair because leaning over to table-height to chop and stir would most likely leave me crippled.






Meanwhile, upstairs, a crew demolished the old kitchen










and we filled the garage with new appliances and cabinets.






Already, the rough electrical and plumbing are done, the walls are patched, and we've passed our first inspection. Today I'm listening to a lot of thumping and banging as the plasterers put in my new ceiling. I keep thinking, Where's the drama? And then I think, Excellent, we have none. So far, so good.

A Brief History of (our) Cats

Before we had Roxy, we were cat people. We brought a cat with us from the Midwest when we moved to California, and there has been only one catless period in our lives since, during the three years when we lived in a house too close to the Angeles National Forest to keep our cats from becoming dinner for coyotes.

I know there are people who really, really don't like cats - usually because they're either allergic to them (and who can love an animal that makes your eyes swell and your sinuses clog?), or they don't understand them. For the cat haters out there, here's the key to understanding: cats aren't sneaky, they're a unique combination of predator and prey. There aren't a lot of animals in that class, but imagine the caution that drives a prey animal (think deer) and the grace and precision of a predator (think wolf). Roll those personalities together, wrap them in silky fur, decorate them with a throaty purr, and you've got a cat.

Then there are people who don't like cats because they catch birds. I really don't know what to say to that. My cats have all been in-and-out cats. They've caught some birds, some mice, some rats, some lizards, some grasshoppers, and the occasional moth in their time. It's in their nature and it doesn't bother me, because, as my mother (and probably yours) used to say: I didn't make the world. I just live in it.

So. Here's our list so far:

Alice came with us from Iowa. She was white with big splotches of pastel orange. She was absolutely trusting - when she had her (only) litter, during a cold Iowa winter, she stacked them (so new they were still blind and trembly) on my stomach one night to keep them warm.

Alice was succeeded by Susie and Sheila. Susie sported orange and black polka dots on a field of white. She was our dumbest cat ever, a little nut who liked to nibble on your fingers or your buttons or your shirt or whatever she could get her mouth on. We tried to get her to stop by gently rapping her on the head but she would just put her ears back and go on chewing. Sheila was a gray tabby with a white belly who didn't need anyone to pet her; she'd wriggle the length of her body under any convenient hand over and over again, petting herself.

For a very short time - measured in months, I think - Susie and Sheila shared the house with a half-wild silvery-gray tabby named Max. He learned to tolerate us and even seemed to enjoy being petted on occasion, but when we bought a new house, the change proved too much for him. On moving day, as we brought the cats in, Max streaked out the back door and down the driveway to the street where he turned left and trotted away, never to be seen again.

Next came Daisy and Gizmo. Daisy was an extravagantly pretty calico with half-a-black-mustache splashed on her face. She had a bad habit of napping in cars parked on our street with their windows down. One day she disappeared, and we always suspected that she accidentally hitched a ride to a new life in one of those cars. Gizmo was a tortoiseshell, black with swirls and flecks of brown and white. She liked to flop down on her side and sleep in the sun. When Eldest Daughter put up a picture of a sleeping Giz in her college dorm room, her friends nicknamed her the roadkill cat.

Eventually Giz went to her reward and was replaced by a giant brown tabby named Ratty. He got the name because he was such a sad, ratty-looking thing when we first brought him home; he grew to be a big, lazy lap-cat who purred like an engine and drooled when he was petted. He liked to sleep inside Middle Kid's shirt - with MK still in it - both heads poking out the neck so they looked like some kind of weird two-headed monster.

Ratty was joined by a companion cat, Cleo, an eleven-year-old black female who had briefly shared an apartment with ED. Cleo was sweet as she could be, but she had such terrible breath that Tom built a cathouse (I know, I know) for her on the deck. (And yes, Phoebe, we took her to the vet. He said her teeth had so much plaque that the only way to clean them would be to anesthetize her, and at her age, it was too risky.) Cleo and Ratty liked to bat at each other through the french doors that separate the deck from the rest of the house. When Cleo died at the ripe old age of fourteen, Ratty sat by the door for days, waiting for her to come back.

After Ratty we took in two kittens - Mia, a brown tabby, and Amelie, a gray-brown tabby with a white belly and legs. Mia never lost her kitten voice and, at seven, still mews as though she were two months old. MK borrowed her one day and never gave her back, so now she lives in Irvine and imagines she's at home there. Amelie is shy and skittish. The only person who can get her to come reliably is Youngest Daughter, although I've found that if I pour food in her bowl she'll hear me from wherever she is in the world, and will be waiting at the door when I go to look for her. It's poor, nervous Amelie who's had to learn to deal with Roxy; she's done it, but she still lets us know it wasn't her choice.

I have no idea who our next cat will be. If I could, I'd take one of my dear-departeds back. But the world doesn't work that way, (see above), so all I can say for sure is that there will be another cat, and it will be as individual as its predecessors.

Maybe I should make it a point to open EVERY cupboard once in a while

because this guy was in the cupboard above the stove which was occupied by the hood vent. The vent itself never fit right and got knocked out of place at some point in the past, so this poor guy must have gotten into the attic and then flew down into that cupboard and got stuck. We never heard or smelled anything, so we have no idea how long he'd been there.

Yeah. Yikes. What might we find under the sink?

Who knew remodeling one room would affect all the others?

Before you remodel, you have to get ready to remodel. During the summer we did the shopping part - shopping for contractors, appliances, cabinets, floor coverings, light fixtures, countertops, and even paint. Now the big items are about to be delivered, and we've had to make room for them. We started with the garage.

Our garage was a mess. (Parts of it are still a mess, but that's neither here nor there.) We aren't tidy-garage-type-people. We tell our kids we're going to stay in this house until we die of old age because to sell it, we'd have to empty the garage. We haven't parked a car inside the garage in at least three years - and that was only after an incomprehensible fit of tidying which we got over before we had room for the second car.

Sadly, with the coming remodel, we have to make room not only for a refrigerator, a range, a dishwasher, a sink, and a garbage disposer; we also have to make room for a terrifying number of pre-made cabinets, along with their attendant doors and trim pieces. We started at the beginning of August by donating some furniture to a rummage sale to benefit a family in our town. We stalled after that, but three weeks ago my husband got inspired by the calendar. After days of sorting and lifting and shifting and moving, countless trips to the curb with junk, plus more trips to Goodwill with usable junk, he has made space for most (we hope) of what will start being delivered tomorrow. So that's good.

Inside, I began work on the problems of emptying the kitchen and creating a cookable space somewhere else. The makeshift kitchen will be in our rec room downstairs. In order to achieve that, I had to reclaim Youngest Daughter's craft table, which meant I had to sort through the craft cabinets to make space for the supplies she keeps on her craft table. After days of sorting and discarding, and some necessary furniture rearranging, it's done. I've got a table to put my hot plate, coffee pot, and toaster oven on.

To cook, of course, we'll need water. We could use the bathrooms, but none of them has a sink that will easily admit a pot to be filled and my back isn't crazy about the idea of using a bathtub for routine cooking chores, so my husband moved a utility sink from the garage into the laundry room. (Of course, I had to make room in the laundry room for the sink...you see how this goes, right?)

Now, to empty the kitchen. First problem - get that big shelving unit out of the breakfast room. (Why it was there is a whole 'nother discussion, and you really don't want to know anyway.) The only place the shelf will fit is in the family room, and then only if we move YD's computer station to her bedroom. This means we have to move the student desk out of her bedroom, which requires days of emptying and sorting and (as usual) throwing stuff away. Last weekend we got the old desk out and the new desk in, and by yesterday we had the books back on the shelves and the pictures back on the walls in her room.

Also yesterday I got the shelving unit emptied, moved, and refilled in the family room. The breakfast room suddenly looks huge, which is a comfort. Now all I have to do is put the contents of the kitchen into boxes and move them to my husband's office to be stored until the kitchen is done. To make room in his office, we had to move the weight bench to the deck. To make room for the weight bench, we finally got rid of the last bulky Playskool toys. They'd been outside forever, so I had to scrub them first - a process which involved several close encounters with wildlife of the black-widow-spider variety. But it's done, the toys have been donated, and the weight bench is sitting under the macadamia tree.

I bought ten packing boxes at Staples, having told my husband with breezy (and misplaced) confidence, that I thought thirty would do it in the end. Assembled the first box, opened the first cabinet, filled the box with the contents of the first shelf (after throwing a bunch of stuff away), and thought, Oh, shit.

So. If I hadn't already spent so much money on appliances and cabinets, I'd be rethinking my position on remodeling. Seriously.