Additon Day 145

Ok, so starting with the good news…

The cabinets all have handles and every single drawer has its interior lights! A big “whoop whoop” to Jeff for the lighting–this was not easy and involved a lot of holding his body in cramped positions and arm wrestling with too-long cords and working with tiny nails. Pictures of those lit drawer beauties will be forthcoming once they have power…(ok I’m spilling into the bad news already!)

Other good news: the countertops are in and they are even better than I’d hoped. The barn door to the basement is installed and works well. The floors are sanded and stained (although they are not blended to match the old floors!), the range hood is installed, the gas is ready at the range, the faucets are operational. We also (kind of) have the instant hot water working (insert many complaints about the plumbers, here). 

Ok so now for the bad news, which is that we are out of patience. The reserves have simply dried up, and this is not a renewable resource.

Today we meet with the architect and the contractor to prioritize the remaining work with the goal of finally being able to use the kitchen. At last count, we have been using the basement as a kitchen for 5 months (23 weeks).  You can see why we’re out of patience. The day of Endless Project Reckoning has arrived, and I have adopted the catchphrase often uttered by my old boss at the John Wayne Cancer Institute (sadly, later fired–still she was memorable), who, when pressed to the absolute limit, would throw up her hands and declare: “Miss Maida, I’m making a list, and I’m taking names.” 

So I have a made a list, and I sure have the names ready. The list is 44 items long, and it’s time to simply demand that at least the high priority ones get done…on specified dates.

The other bad (or good, depending on your perspective) is that we’re reducing the scope of the project. We’ve decided to hire someone else to handle covering the duct work (we’ll live with it exposed for now, maybe cover it with plywood and paint it, use it for art or a message board, until we can come up with something better, that if built in wood will be done by a carpenter, not a general contractor). We’ve also decided to just use Lowe’s to do the fence. I must say there’s been a large advantage to that taking so long, which is that we’ve decided to invest in a fence that will need zero maintenance (previously we were looking at cedar). Yes, vinyl! Vinyl, where have you been all these months? Did you know it comes in great colors? And you can get posts with solar lights built into them? This is very exciting and I can’t wait to give our hard-earned money to someone other than my contractor is build it! So in fairness: thank you, contractors, for dragging your heals! If you hadn’t we may never have discovered this cool fencing product.