John & Colette's Adventures

We took our old kitchen cabinets and hung them down in the basement (drilling into concrete with a plain drill – not fun). The island we raised up 6″ and turned into a bar. I hung up some dry wall, ran some power & hung lights and this week we finally put up a dart board. I think we’re all set.

Of course, I could use a little fridge to put my kegs in…

The Australia photos have been uploaded. You can find the pics here.

Now that I’m on Facebook, I find I update this site less & less. As evidence, I give you the fact that we went down to Australia for over 2 weeks and nary a word of the event could be found on our site!

I’ll be posting pics soon, but in summary the trip was excellent. One week was for work (which ended with some not-so-great financial news – bummer) and one week was just for fun. Of course, Colette HAD to go!

It was great being back down under. We felt like we had returned home in some ways. Everything felt right – I only turned on the windshield wipers once instead of the blinkers as intended. But I did the same thing in the Versa on the way back from Boston so it all balanced out.

More later.

A few before & after pics:

Before

After

New Track Lights

After losing power for 36 hours during the last storm I finally went out and bought a generator. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one with electric start. Oy! I wish I hadn’t waited until the last minute. That electric start would have been nice.

We had about 36 hours of no power on Friday & Saturday. The Northeast got hit with a nice ice storm that of course knocked out power to most people along the coast. I guess there were about 260,000 in Maine without power – even more in NH. We’re feeling lucky we got it back on when we did.

While it was out we painted the rest of the kitchen. Today I hung the Tech Lighting pendant lights. They look super! Colette is busy bringing up Christmas decorations and scattering them about.

We tracked down the not-so-clever frozen Christmas Tree today. It’s been sitting in the Garage for the last 6 hours defrosting. I’m thinking we might not be able to put it in the house until tomorrow. It might have to wait until Tuesday since we have Colette’s christmas party tomorrow night.

Here’s the stove in action!

The contractor’s work on the kitchen is finished! We had the plug for the stove moved a couple weeks ago and the stove slid right back in.

The granite guys were in yesterday to try to fill in a couple small chips in the island (grrr) – their story is that the type of granite we got might flake. We’ll see how it goes. We know we didn’t chip the block.

I painted the trim – which was just as big of a job as I feared. It took forever to do all the molding & doorways. I’ve painted the ceiling and we’re now about to paint the walls. We were going to do it tonight but we’re in the middle of an ice storm (ack!) and we don’t want to get half-way through and lose power. Any excuse NOT to paint is a good excuse.

Poor Kaylee
Kaylee had to go to the doctor’s today and have major dental work. They extracted 4 teeth including one of her canines. Poor kitty! They also said she was missing several other teeth and that she might be older than we were told. Hmmmm. I wonder what she’s been up to.

Hopefully, her mouth will feel better in a few days. Right now she’s still all drugged up and wandering around in the proverbial drunken’ sailor mode.

Argh! We’re so close to being done. The last step was to slide in the (massive) stove and we’d be done.

But, alas, it was not to be. The first problem was the gas line. The plumber didn’t bring the right size elbow to put a 90 degree turn in but he figured he’d just put the valve in the basement and we’ll just run the flex line down to there. That would also mean a valve you could actually get to!

But next we ran into a problem with the 220 line. The plug was just a little too tall to slide under the stove. Fortunately, the rear wheels have a scissor jack so we jacked up the back of the stove a bit to clear the plug.

We pushed & pushed, but the stove wouldn’t slide it that last 1 1/2″.

We then realized the granite counter was placed such that the stove opening was about 1/8″ narrower in the back than in the front! ARGH! So now the granite guys have to come out and shave some of the granite away (hopefully – as opposed to moving the whole piece).

But it’s looking very nice. The carpenter did a great job around the vent hood.

Oh, and the replacement skin for the corner cabinet came in Tuesday night around 7:30pm. They delivered it in a short semi they use to deliver all their cabinets. Pretty funny to see the driver jump out of the cab (after backing into the driveway in the dark) and reach in and pull out a small box. But as the carpenter was going to install it he realized they sent the wrong skin!. It’s too dark! Colette said she didn’t care and no one would notice and just glue the thing in. So we have a corner cabinet with a bit of a tan on the inside.

Colette had a busy weekend. She spent quite a bit of time moving dishes & food into the new cupboards. The new pantry is working out nice. We’re hoping since it’s a lot shallower than the big closet we’ll lose less stuff (we found a very moldy chunk of bread in the old pantry closet – yuck).

I painted the ceiling and hung a towel rod which is actually just an 8″ version of our door pulls so it fits in with the rest of the hardware pretty nicely.

We did discover our carefully measured microwave has 3 screws that make the unit just too wide to fit in the microwave opening. We scratched the trim on the cabinet when we first slid it in. I had to remove the microwave to install the towel rack and put tape over the edges of the trim which helped a little bit. When I put the unit back in, I ended up just removing the screws! I’m sure they’re not important. Fortunately, we’re not having kids so I’m not concerned about stray waves since the microwave is just below waste height!

Colette also baked a few pies and made a yummy pork roast yesterday. Delicious! The stove still isn’t pushed back and hasn’t been leveled yet so the pies are a little wonky but it doesn’t affect the taste!