Or in this case, the cabinetry, the one thing on which we had based all color and design choices…
Fell out from under us.
Turns out there are some real problems that did not turn up, which we found out at the last moment, quality issues that are a no-go, hidden costs, and various other things we wish we’d known back when.
So on the very day we were set to order cabinets, we have to go looking for a replacement that will fit in with our other choices, some of which are pieces we already have in-house.
This involved, shall we say, a cost overrun, aka, some Alkaseltzer moments. We decided, well, this is once in a lifetime—let’s just do it.
It still looks like a good choice this morning, after a two hour session ordering stuff and figuring out costs. That much we can say. We do love the alternative. But—aagh. As I sit here with no cabinets, a stove that is trully a free-range range (it’s frequently not where it was yesterday, as we work on the floor) and a fridge that is finally in fairly permanent position—no sink, no water, no drain in the kitchen—we hadda do something. It will take 4 to 6 weeks to get the cabinetry in. WE HOPE to make it by Christmas. Right now we only have paths through all the sacks and boxes in the living room…
Ugh. I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I hope it turns out well and you love the result.
Wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth! You need a functional kitchen, stat! or at least before the holidays are in full swing. Not sure how I feel about the peripatetic stove.
Tell Jane to keep the Pookinator away from the kitchen drain — this is not the time for him to go spelunking!
Oh dear, oh dear! We’re getting ready ourselves to do our collapsing bathroom over (any day now but our contractor’s parent died, so we don’t know exactly when) and I just found a series of bad reviews on the tile we have long planned to use, with many saying that most of the sheets of mosaic tile in a box have chips on the tiles. I think we need to reconsider too… And at the moment I just want to go put my head in the sand.
You’re well past the point of no return: I agree, you just need to bite the bullet and order what works that looks good.
The free-range range, hahaha, thanks for the chuckle for the roaming stove. “Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play.” Well, I dunno about any gracile herding animals, but it does sound perambulatory. A nomadic oven? Hmm….
I do not expect to get anything done on dental work before or during this holiday season, or eye care either. So things are just rocking along, status quo, neither up nor down. Though I wish my teeth were in good order, well, at least this way, I will be able to fix and eat holiday meals as I want, and we’ll see if and when things develop next year.
There’s a leak in my bathroom near where (of all things) the A/C unit (and maybe the drip pan) are, but this will wait until during the week to bring up (it’s baack!) with the apt. mgmt.
I am really, really hoping a delivery of a new office chair will indeed be delivered safely to MY door, rather than (as happens occasionally here) to the apt. mgr’s offices for pickup. Friends are overdue to bring over a delivery from, ahem, a week ago. :-/ I am still not used to this kind of weirdness. — But after some while being greatly irked by it, I think I’ve finally reached the point where I’ve found the funny, wacky side of it.
I’ve been working off and on, on drafts of a font idea. What I’d sketched out by hand just wasn’t quite making it into the digital version, or wasn’t working out. So I now have three rough drafts going, not sure which will win. I know the look I want. Maybe the other two will end up being productive. I’m not sure yet. So it’s an adventure. I don’t yet have the third draft doing what I really want from the hand drawings, but it will likely be the closest. It’s letting me explore some fiddly ideas on the look of font “stems” and “terminals / finials” and serifs, and I do know the look I want to get. The idea sidetracked me a few weeks ago and won’t go away, though I keep setting it aside after each new bout. So I guess creative life is like that. I do think I’m learning _something_, though not entirely sure what at times, LOL.
Neither of the big font design programs I use have been upgraded in, now over three years, despite that the single company is working on them (one hopes). — But one of the vector drawing programs I’ve tried has had another upgrade, so I’m going to try it again. (I am stlll loathe to buy Adobe Illustrator, due to their subscription-only policy lately. But my frustration and resistance may be driving me to try that again.) So we’ll see. — I’m weird; I prefer vector drawing for some things, over paint/photo programs. But I miss just being able to sit down and draw or pain on my computer, which is a basic skill/need for me. I think I may be (at last) ready to get back into that seriously, or at least dip my toe in and start toward diving in. — I miss it, and my eyesight is interfering with it, but dang it, I need to be able to do some of this to feel creatively whole again.
CJ and Jane, I hope you’ll be very happy with whatever you pick for the cabinets. You do have good taste, and you’re practical. What you’d gotten already sounds like it will look beautiful and work great. (I’m envious of the counter space, storage space, and desk. I am still not used to this aspect of my new apartment’s kitchen / utility room)
I’ve now been in my new apt. 7 months. I still have the dang storage space too. But well, I’m very glad about the apartment. It’s a better solution for me, now and for the foreseeable future.
Always estimate to take twice the time and pay twice the estimate 🙂
Can’t you get Atkins frozen meals? You can plug a microwave in anywhere to nuke them.
I like your “free-range range” — it isn’t every household that has that kind of a range rover.
Your adventures in kitchen remodeling recall the month+ I spent living in my “office” bedroom. Had a blocked sewer line at a T junction they couldn’t get the snake to turn the corner to reach. They tried pressurizing the pipes, and a rubber hosed section in my bathroom blew out and flooded into my bedroom, ruining my bedroom carpet which had to come up, revealing the concrete slab beneath. My bed was stacked against the wall. I dashed off to Walmart and got an inflatable mattress and a sleeping bag, and slept on my office bedroom floor. The duplex had a really weird drain system. I couldn’t use any sinks — kitchen or bathroom, but I could use toilets, shower and tub. Couldn’t use the dish washer, washed dishes and brushed my teeth in the bathtub. It took over a month for the insurance payout that allowed plumbing to finally get fixed and my bedroom to be recarpeted and things to get back to normal. Thank goodness for frozen foods and microwaves.
Glug. Our particular bane is dust. There’s been so much plaster ‘mudding’ and sanding that it escapes everywhere. We cough. We will be so glad when paint goes on and nails that stuff down.
And we had a very nice surprise last night: our cabinet advisor found another discount to give us.
I think we surprised the daylights out of her. The usual is that people come in to consult and it takes forever, and dithering, and picking things out and changing their minds and arguing. We walked into her area [Lowe’s] well after 5 pm on the day we’d found out about our other choice being a no-go; we stalked about flipping samples and finally finding one we were looking for. We got her card, and in the morning, after contacting Scott, we called her for an appointment and said we’d be ordering on the spot: she told us 8:15 on Friday morning. One hit, bang! and the whole kitchen calculated and ordered, all in one go, since we already have the appliances, the sink, the plumbing fixture. We also lucked out tremendously in one respect: there was a peculiar ‘sale,’ on that brand, the nature of which was—get this—customization was free. That meant every place we’d foreseen compromising to ‘make do’ in the fit, we just ordered it to fit. We could NOT have afforded that otherwise. There was a cost discount, etc, which also eased the pain. We still have the countertop to go, but we figure by the time the cabinets come in, there may well be a sale on the countertop.
Oh, well done! You may well be happier with the new cabinets than the other ones; the universe works in weird ways. Did they give you a time estimate on the cabinets coming in and being ready for installation? Toes crossed they got all the measurements correct and nothing needs to be bodged once you have the cabinets in hand. Several years back, I replaced some of our old louvered windows and paid for installation. Good thing, too; the largest window, which replaced 2 adjoining smaller windows but was necessary for fire code, was a trifle too big to fit in the opening, despite having the pros do the measuring. It took them careful hand shaving and wiggling to put it in place.
Hot dog! Hah, they had a guaranteed sale; they could likely afford to give that as a discount.
I hope the new cabinets will look great. That’s good news.
Hooray for sale prices. And free customization. I looked into getting replacement cabinets for our kitchen at one point, but the price made the old cabinets look a lot nicer.
Side Note: I had found Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce at the grocery store, one trip prior. I’d been out of it since before my move. Now I’m not a big chili-head. I’m fairly sensitive to it, despite being Texan and despite that my mom and great-grandmother loved hot-spicy food such as peppers.
So I had a package of chicken and added too much of the chili sauce to baste it as it cooked. Hmm. I didn’t remove the foil soon enough during baking, so there was too much liquid left. OK, so I took out the chicken and this was fine, and I saved the sauce. I fixed a cup of rice and mixed in the sauce, thinking this would blunt the spicy hot flavor enough for me.
Hahah, well, not quite. The chicken is fine because I did not first marinade it. (Why don’t I marinade? I don’t know.) I tried the rice. Whew! Aa-ii-ee. It was not super bad. (CJ and Jane and some others, you’d probably like it just fine.) But it was too strong for me. OK, so I added a can of condensed milk, as I have it on hand. That should’ve done a lot to help it. A cup of rice before cooking, a pot-full of rice after cooking, plus perhaps a cup to a cup and a half (guessing) of the sauce after cooking the chicken with sauce. Then the can of condensed milk. — Well, it surprisingly still has plenty of kick to it for me, but now it’s more in the tolerable range. I had lemon pudding after. (I don’t know what the carb and fat content of a serving of one piece of chicken, an 8 oz. bowl of rice with that sort of sauce, and then a snack-pack cup of pudding amounts to. I have.a feeling it’s way more than I should have in a single serving. Ah, well.)
Heh, the rice is only very faintly pinkish coral light red, and it was brown rice to begin with. The chili sauce must be well diluted in all that, so it’s mostly the rice and the milk, with the invisible, silent kick from the chili…and I know that chili sauce is ordinarily fairly mild. It’s good for chicken or beef, nice for BBQ, for instance.
Haha, I thought you all might get a laugh from the misstep. I hadn’t thought it was that much, but nw I’m guessing I must have used about twice as much sauce as I intended, maybe even four or six ounces (overboard). — I haven’t bothered to look, but I think one of the snack-pack pudding cups is around four ounces also. I’ll check next time I have one.
Heh, last night’s meal was Cole slaw to offset that, with a sprinkling of chow mien noodles for extra crunch, because that felt right, and ranch dressing. (I got the fat free because, dang the store lighting is set somewhere between “mood lighting” and “dive bar” and “cave spelunking.” You know, just above “dive bar” and “monster on a spaceship” lights-out. Heh.
Other Side Note: I’ve seen one review saying Blade Runner 2049 is really good. I will, however, be waiting until I can get it on iTunes or similar. But the clips I saw of scenery look gorgeous, and the 80’s movie is one of my favorites, so I’m looking forward to when I can see it.
(I’m hooked on The Orville, besides.)
Last night, I was so frustrated by current events, I considered writing an op-ed essay and posting it to my (languishing) blog, not updated in ages.
Today, I was reminded of a cool human interest story, two boys’ response back when my grandmother was in a wheelchair. It was so good, I wrote that down just now.
I haven’t yet written the op-ed essay, and I think there could be more than one piece there.
The piece I just wrote was positive, something I have felt has been sorely lacking lately, except a few places, such as here. (I’ve also been checking John Scalzi’s blog lately. He likes hosting other authors for discussions of ideas, and likes fan comments, within reason.)
I am considering starting back with blog posts, but I don’t yet know how regular it will be. I want to have a few things lined up to post before I do, though.
Those two boys were dressed punk style, junior high / middle school age, likely friends or relatives. I am sure they’d be totally surprised that I still remember how great they were to my grandmother and me that day, in just a few minutes. They’d be in their 20’s now, I think. I hope wherever they are, life will be extra good to them today. They were extra special for no reason other than just to be nice to us. They might not even remember it. So two boys, being all pinked out, hanging out at the mall that day, deserve a shout out for being good kids, between six and ten years ago at.a local mall, to two total strangers.
Way better than most of the news lately.
I did thank them quite a bit. I wish I’d asked their favorite band or song. 🙂