Views of the Family Room/Bathroom

The cabinets at the base of the "media center" have an enormously expensive metal grill in rubbed brass over them, backed with very cheap speaker cloth (in "cocoa"). This is to help the remote controls communicate with their machines. See also the window seat, which is long and wide enough for an adult to sleep on (and, yes, the purple cushion fits beautifully, we just haven't installed it yet to prevent dust contamination). Also a photo here of the guest bathroom, still in progress, but now with a glass door on the shower.

Views of the Guest Bedroom

Views of the guest bedroom, now painted in Kelly Moore's Swiss Coffee white and Benjamin Moore's English Hyacinth purple. Also views into the hallway outside the bedroom where our family room storage has been relocated.

Empty, Echoing Anticipation

We spent the whole day - again - packing up the kitchen. It's amazing what we found. Even Hubby thought it was a sad reflection of the consumerist society. It's not quite that we buy things we don't need and never use; it's that we buy things, use them, then they get lost in the cupboard and so we buy them again.

Deep Thought found six cans of cocoa powder, all still in date.

This is in contrast to the pasta and canned soup that we had to throw out because it was six months or more past its sell by date. And, let's face it, those are the kind of items that have sell by dates years in the future. You can tell how long they had been lost in the pantry. Fortunately our new cabinets are scheduled to have lovely roll-out shelves, making the missing-in-action soup a thing of the past.

Many, many boxes have gone over to the storage unit. Hubby is reflecting on the slight ache in his back and the large pile of black bags lurking next to the garbage cans. We have five boxes of food and eating equipment in the dining room, together with the slow cooker, toaster, kettle and two large wine refrigerators still in their boxes and up on pallets. Cosy.

Pack Up Your Troubles

We are busily packing the kitchen away today. Hubby is on his second trip to the storage unit with boxes and boxes of stuff. Deep Thought has been delegated to sort out the food cupboard, so she is delving into the back of the cupboard, checking sell-by dates, asking "why did you ever buy this?" and putting food into two boxes: Keep and Store. I am heroically going through our three junk drawers - down to the last one now, and I haven't yet filled up one box....which makes you wonder quite what was in there.

Like moving house, doing a remodel makes you go through all your Stuff and Sort It All Out. This is a good thing, and cheaper than moving house for the same process. It should also have the beneficial result that, once the remodel is over, and we have acquired multiple new storage areas, we will not be filling them up instantly with junk we never use.

The weather yesterday was rainy, as it is today. No visible activity in the Carboard Box, but I imagine that there was a bit of indoor work going on, as the plumber was around.

The kitchen demolition begins on Monday.

It's an exhausting business

It truly is an exhausting business, this remodelling lark. At the start of Saturday, Deep Thought, Little Starlet and I spent 45 minutes at the local storage place doing our paperwork and trying to work out how the rolling door on our unit works.

Then we spent a good chunk of the day in the garage, pulling out stuff to Freecycle or sell, packing stuff in boxes and junking other things that we've been hoarding for far too long. I managed to Freecycle our old dining table and eight dining chairs (which had seen a lot of life - we brought them from Scotland in 1998, so they've moved continent and through several houses, plus enjoyed the attentions of many small sticky hands). I also got rid of my old bike - not ridden for 10 years - and more IKEA furniture. Though in Hubby's opinion, nothing compares to finding someone willing to take the bridge away.


On Sunday some friends came over to help us move our surplus gear into storage. Hubby had a truck that was far too big, but our 10x15 storage unit was just right. Our house is no longer quite so chaotic as it was, and my headache has gone away.