30 minutes to 7 Days

I willingly and publicly admit I have a real Jones for watching HGTV.  Love it or Leave it, Kitchen Crashers, those sexy brothers that sell and renovate - the whole lot of them.  It's like real estate candy. Amazing spaces get planned out,  on staggeringly small budgets in exactly 30 time elapsed minutes.  

I'm no fool.  I realize that amazing renovations do not really happen in 30 minutes.  EVERYONE knows that they need an entire week to build a new house on Extreme Makers - -so clearly the real time is somewhere between 30 minutes and seven days (hardy har har har).  I do spend some relatively large chunks of  time completely stone cold  baffled by how the folks on those shows can do an entire down-to-the-stud house renovation for less than $5000.  The only logical explanation is that in TV land things are just a whole lot cheaper.  Like 1959-roll-back-prices cheaper.  I think we will have spent $5000 for the privilege of simply thinking about renovating our kitchen.  Just thinking is expensive in SF.  I wanna move to TV land in 1959.

HGTV also doesn't spend much time highlighting the consequences of construction in your home while you remain in your home.   During CMR Phase I we moved out - - kind of hard to live in the house when it's suspended on steel beams while big diggers dig big holes underneath said suspended home.  I came over every few days to be amazed by what was going on.  Following my awe and wonderment, I would brush the dust off my shoes, hop back in the car, occasionally stop and grab a starbucks and then return to our comfy clean and plaster dust free little rental digs.  The dust and dirt stayed behind.  Honestly?  Right now, I'm feeling so, so, so, so very nostalgic for those days.

Living with dust, not to mention a new daily routine with two teenagers, that currently requires going outside the physical house to fetch the milk for cereal - - makes me a tad uneasy.  I know this about myself and I thank my lucky stars that George the Elder knows this about me too.  I change things often in my life, but those first few weeks of  new house, or a new country or a new morning routine - - are not when I would be considered "most adaptable."  I get a little cranky.  I can be not-so-nice to husbands, short with children, and down right nasty to drivers who get in my G.D way.  Just saying.   I nearly burst into tears last night twice lamenting my sad, sad lot of plastic doors and refrigerators currently on the back porch, no lights in most of the upstairs rooms, and some other minor thorns in my paws.  And while George the Elder may be secretly thinking "quit your whining little Miss-gonna -get-a-new-kitchen brat" - he just pats me on the knee and tells me that all will be well in a week when this all starts to feel more "normal."  He's sweet, but  I struggle with accepting it will be "well" - especially in light of having to remove my contact lens last night while George the Elder illuminates the bathroom with a flashlight.  Hell, last night I dreamed that local SF zoo animals had somehow escaped their confines and were gathering in my backyard.  Oh, and these various zoo creatures?  They. were.  ON.  FIRE.   Hmmm,  a gorilla, a bear, a lion, and what might just have been a tapir or a Bhutanese takin, were all gathering about my back door like an angry mob growling and aflame.  Growling and aflame. 

These are some things that I need to get used to:

Body Bag Doors:

These are my plastic body-bag doors.  They don't show these on HGTV.   They don't show them for good reason.   Every time that zipper goes up and down I get the willies.  It's a morgue sound if there every was one...

Kitchen/Laundry:

These are shots of my temporary kitchen-in-the-laundry-room dealy.  It's a tight set-up.  Counter space is  - - none.  To try to achieve a zen state, I try to imagine myself preparing a delicious meal in a darling Un Petite Apartment in Paris - - that would be romantic, wouldn't it?  It is a little challenging when the dryer is running and the smell of boy-socks threaten to overtake the room  - "all will be well", yes?

Exterior Refrigeration:

Remember the photo from yesterday that showed the fridge in the wrong place in the kitchen?  That very same fridge was "supposed" to be eventually moved downstairs to the garage to sustain us through the long cold dark months of kitchen renovation. (Can you hear the sad sappy music in the background???).  Except, tragically, we realized that there was no way on this god's green earth that that fridge was going down any stairs to any basement at any time.  Hence, it is now sitting on the back porch.  On the other side of the very plaster dusty kitchen-old.

I have a great photo of George the Elder last night in the dark getting something out of our exterior fridge that I still need to post up here.  OK he wasn't honestly getting anything out of the fridge at that time, but I coerced him open it just to get his photo taken cause it's just kinda weird (and oddly red-necky) that we have a frickin' old side-by-side on our back porch.  When we attempted to plug in our porch-sitting-fridge it ended up blowing a fuse and had to be plugged in through the kitchen window.  Classic.

General Dust:

There are no actual up close microscopic photos of the dust.  When you look at all the photos, simply imagine that everything is covered with a fine silt-like dust.  That will suffice.  Dust is the devil's snow - - and it's blizzarding here at my house!

And last the photos of the action for morning Day 4:

All the plaster got swept up and carted out to the back porch.  Now we have invisi-walls!

Exposed wiring needs to be addressed - - sadly, this was one of those unanticipated consequences ...when they turn the electricity off to deal with the kitchen wiring - - it affects the power in our bedroom and bathroom.  Hence the need for a flashlight to remove contacts!

Ceiling all gone too!  Guy on ladder is wielding a big sharp saw.  Time to take down some ancillary wood.

View from the Fridge... heh heh heh.

See the "newer" looking wood post?  This will hold up the ceiling while we work through one of the first "issues" - - sounds like we're going to need to put a little steel beam in our kitchen-new.  Update tomorrow.

Kitchen-old is now a pile of  kitchen pieces!  

I'm off to bed now.  May my zoo animals be less smoldering and ablaze....