We're Cooking!

Excuse the brief blogging hiatus.  I've been too busy COOKING in my KITCHEN with my STOVE.

Yes, that is a pasta pot.  Yes, there is pasta cooking away in there.  Yes, we were totally overzealous with our first home-cooked meal after ten nights of eating raw things and takeout and forgot that we still had to wash the dishes in the bathtub.  

Whatever.  It was delicious.  Other notable things about the above photo: 

1.  The microwave is also properly installed and works like a charm.  The color of the microwave is ever so slightly less white than the cabinets, which makes me cringe, but it is what it is.  It's not worth $350 for a new over-the-range microwave right now.  Our plan is to replace the appliances as they go kaput and/or in advance of selling our house down the road.  People keep saying "don't make things nice to sell the house, make things nice for yourselves."  In general, I agree with this philosophy (as evidence, please refer to the current kitchen renovation project).  Because the appliances still work like a charm, however, they are doing what they need to do and I'm fine with them as is.  I'll get over the ugly. 

2.  We have clearly had a visit from the electrician.  The microwave and stove work, the outlets are in the wall, and the under-cabinet lighting is installed.  We decided to go with xenon lights because they have a nice natural-ish light quality to them but don't burn your brain like LEDs.  Also, XENON sounds like a superhero and we could all use more superhero stuff in our lives. 

3.  We now have drawer pulls!  My weekend to-do list includes dustbuster-ing the insides of all the cabinets and drawers, wiping them down, and putting all my kitchen stuff away.  Our guest room (which is currently full of kitchen stuff) will be a guest room again by the end of the weekend!  Our dining room which has been hosting many, many cardboard boxes for quite some time, will be mostly a dining room by the end of the weekend as well.  There are still some boxes left but not so many that we can't put the table back in it's proper home.  

More evidence that the electrician has paid us a visit -
garbage disposal switch on the right and outlet on the left.
The bottom of the dishwasher is still very ... exposed ...

There are still a few more odd things about the kitchen:

This blue bottle (with no cap on it) has been in the kitchen since the day the crew arrived.  I have no idea what it is.  Windex?  Poison?  Blue gatorade?  Could be anything.  

Someone wiped their dirty man fingers on my wall.  

And the last, most annoying thing is that all the electrical outlets and switch plates are off-white.  This wouldn't be a problem if we weren't going to tile the wall with white subway tile.   

Le sigh.  If the electrician is going to come back, I think I will have him switch the visible stuff out for white outlets and switch plates.  If not, I'll either live with it or we will put on our rubber shoes and hold our breath and switch them out ourselves.  

There are also no countertops.  And no sink.  And no backsplash tile.  And the walls need repainting.  And the floor needs major steam cleaning.  But we're trying not to think about that and just gaze lovingly at our working stove, microwave, and superhero under-cabinet lighting.  

Aahhh...

The Honeymoon Is Over

I haven't posted in a few days because there has been nothing to report except general frustration.  After an initial spurt of work on Monday and Tuesday of last week (demolition! electrical! plumbing! cabinet installation!) and half a day of work on Wednesday, no one showed up on Thursday or Friday.  Tony put everyone on other jobs, which apparently were more disastrous and attention-grabbing than ours, and that was that.

I know this is what contractors do.  I know I shouldn't take it personally.  BUT.  When we scheduled this work a month ago, I told Tony that we wanted to make sure as much work as possible got completed during Drew's spring break week so he could be available for answering questions and letting people in.  Tony agreed.  So much for that plan.

I sent Tony a strongly worded email yesterday, which simultaneously praised the crew for their fine workmanship so far and told Tony to arrange their schedules so our kitchen is complete in a reasonable timeframe pleaseandthankyou.  He called Drew for a man-to-man discussion later in the day (why didn't he call me? I have a guess...).  Tony didn't really say anything helpful to Drew.  It was a mighty fine strongly worded email and I'm pretty bummed that it didn't have any effect at all.

Yesterday, John came in to install the remaining two upper cabinets and put knobs on all the doors.  Today, the countertop folks are doing a template for the granite counters.  I had to take the morning off work to let them in and answer questions, which is the exact reason that we asked for all this to get completed last week.

We were supposed to get our stove back today too and our very friendly plumber came by to hook it up this morning.  He couldn't hook up the stove, however, because the microwave wasn't in above the range.  Apparently there has to be "something metal" above the stove because the cabinets are "combustible."  I'm going to gloss right over the part where the cabinets are combustible because, although I know they won't burst into flames spontaneously, that's what it sounds like.

Combustible cabinets. With knobs!

All that's changed here are the knobs.  And the dishwasher, which seems to have
fewer parts than before.  Curiouser and curiouser...

The electrician is at a job in Bourne (way down on the Cape) for the next two days and can't come back until Thursday to put the microwave in.  This means we won't have a stove (or a microwave, for that matter) until Thursday or Friday, but the plumber did say he would try to get the stove back in working order before the weekend.  I begged him to try very hard so that I don't have to eat takeout/packaged salads/pre-cooked chicken any longer.  He agreed that sounded like a pretty rough situation and reiterated his promise to try to make it before the weekend.  The plumber seems like a decent guy and I think the pregnant-woman-begging-for-a-stove thing made an impression on him.  Let's all hope together that it did.

So that's where we are.  Sort of pissed and still eating creatively.  I'll have more to report on Thursday - until then, please eat some home-cooked food on my behalf!

This (Crooked) Old House, a.k.a. Why We're Glad We Hired the Pros

Today John the Jobsite Manager returned and, all by himself, hung most of the cabinets before noon.  It wasn't quite as simple as it sounds (although that doesn't sound even close to simple to me...) because our floor is crooked.  Apparently, there is a FOUR INCH difference between one side of the stove wall to the next, and everything was pretty topsy-turvy for awhile.  But look! 

John the Jobsite Manager to the rescue!  You can't even tell.  Totally level.  We thought we were hiring professional installation guys because we wanted to be careful with our fancy schmancy cabinets and didn't want them falling off the walls.  Now we know that we hired the pros because even nice cabinets need a lot of help to look good in an old, crooked house like ours.  

The dishwasher and stove are in place but not functional, which meant we went out to eat tonight (SCORE!) because we used up our only no-cook/few dishes dinner idea last night.  The white skim coat/teal walls thing is also starting to grow on me - it sort of looks like clouds in a sky, no?  Hmm....

Tomorrow John will be back to finish hanging the upper cabinets and to ... do more stuff.  If he did all of this before noon today (including fixing the crookedness) I think he'll be here for twenty minutes if all he has to do is hang the two remaining upper cabinets.  I'm sure there's plenty left for him to do.  

In other news, we hit a little bump in the road with the countertop folks.  Apparently everyone is installing their kitchen cabinets this week and the guys who go around and make templates for the granite countertops are quite busy.  They can't fit us in until NEXT WEDNESDAY, which is not so long, but then you have to factor in the making-the-countertop and installing-the-countertop parts of the process.  This leaves us without countertops until, I don't know, our child goes to kindergarten or something.  That's not true, I realize, but it's a pretty long process.  Bummer.  So apparently Tony P. is going to "sit on" the countertop guys and see if they'll come over sooner.  I think he might have more success if he offered them cake or something but if sitting on them does the trick, who am I to interfere?  

Wall Repair + Hauling

There were two main parts to today's work - wall repair and hauling away all the junk from the old kitchen.  After a lovely Patriot's Day off from work, I had to return to the office today while Drew stayed home to write his dissertation and hang out with the workers.  He apparently learned some pretty key lessons involving doing your morning business (ahem) before the workers arrive instead of doing it while they are five feet away.  I was just glad I was dressed when they arrived.  It's the small things, folks.

First, wall repair.  The crew made the previously large holes in our kitchen walls even bigger (no documentary evidence exists of this frightening time in our kitchen's day).  Then they got to work putting up new wallboard (or whatever you call it) and skim coating the whole mess.  Although we'll have to re-paint most everything in the business parts of the kitchen, this really feels like progress!  The rest of the kitchen still looks great, so our painting wasn't a total waste.

The hole in the middle of the wall is for an electrical outlet.  The hole on the right is for the garbage disposal switch.

The hole up top is for the microwave.  No word from the electrician on whether that was already a dedicated circuit but also no word on a change order, so I assume we're fine (famous last words? we'll see...).  The two wires sticking out of the wall are for under-cabinet lighting and the three holes below that are for electrical outlets.  The bottom hole is for the stove's electrical outlet.

Big lesson here - we would NEVER have been able to do this within the appropriate timeline (i.e., today) and without messing something up.  This would have taken us a whole weekend at least and there isn't a weekend coming for a few days.  We would have forfeited Tuesday through Friday of professional work, probably made the crew mad, and totally ruined everything.  This is the part where I sheepishly thank Tony for thinking I was too much of a girl to repair my own wallboard BECAUSE I TOTALLY AM.

The same two guys (brothers) who fixed up our walls were also the guys with the big truck to haul our junk away.  Mind you, we did not pay for anyone to haul away our junk, but this is another place where Tony decided to "help us out."  Thanks Tony!

We wanted to donate the old kitchen cabinets to ReStore, a great organization that sells used construction materials and household goods and then gives all the profits to Habitat for Humanity.  When we were taking out the bottom cabinets, they got pretty banged up either because we had to dismantle them to get them off of the wall or because they were too flimsy to begin with.  We planned to put small parts of the lower cabinets in the trash each week (to avoid angering our already-grouchy garbage man) and donate the uppers.  Our guest room has been full of upper cabinets for over a week now, ready for donation.

I called the ReStore today to see if they picked up cabinets or if we had to drop them off.  Do you know what the guy told me?  "I don't think I'm interested in just upper cabinets."  He was sort of snooty about it, which pissed me off, but he had a point.  Who wants to buy a set of just upper cabinets?  I think their goal is to sell complete kitchens, not parts of kitchens, which makes a great deal of sense.

It sure was a good thing that there were nice men with a large truck at my house!  Such serendipity!  Drew helped the guys haul the stuff to the truck and, on the way, some guys working on a nearby building took our sink and all the knobs off of the cabinets.  In the harsh light of day those were honestly the only parts of the old kitchen that were *really* suitable for donation, so it all came out okay I guess.

And now?  Our guest room/future nursery is void of cabinets, as is the back porch.  BLISS.  That was one huge step that was going to be a PITA to solve, let me tell you.

Tomorrow, John the Jobsite Manager comes back to start installing cabinets.  We can't paint for 3-5 days, so I think we'll end up having to do some fancy taping around the installed cabinets, but that's okay.

More tomorrow!

It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

The crew from Home Depot filtered in and out over the course of the day on Patriot's Day to begin phase 1 of the "installation," which involved making A LOT of holes in our walls and taking every formerly functional thing out of the kitchen (sink, dishwasher, stove).  It's totally fine and I totally expected this, but ohmagah the kitchen is such a mess.  Some close-ups for your viewing pleasure:

The sink used to be in this corner.  Those are "true 2x4s" in the wall, which apparently you haven't been able to buy for a very long while.  Also notice the total lack of insulation.  They moved the garbage disposal switch to the right of the sink, which will be much more useful than where it was before, halfway across the room.  

Close-up of the "true 2x4s."  We were told to be impressed, so we are.  

You can't tell from this photo, but you can see through the floor into the basement. 

Huzzah for structurally sound living spaces! 

This is the wall where the stove goes.  Peeling off one of the many layers of wallboard revealed...

More yellow paint (a different color this time), green paint, AND fake painted bricks!  

Fancy people call it trompe l'oeil, but around here, we call it crappy painting skills.  

Then came the part where the gas line was capped off (lower right corner) and the stove's electrical supply was gone (many exposed wires hanging out of the wall) and the stove was in the middle of the floor and I got a wee bit panicky about how the heck we are going to eat this week.  Hotplate?  New raw food diet?  Take-out?

Here is the "finished product" for the day -

Those shiny new blue boxes mean the electrical system will now be up to code in the kitchen.  The wires hanging out of the wall are for under-cabinet lighting, which will be hard-wired and not plugged into the wall and snaking through the cabinets like our previous (ghetto fabulous) under-cabinet lighting.

Nope, the stove is still not connected.  But it is in the right location, which is encouraging.

But look what else they did!  They took our beautiful new cabinets out of the boxes and set the up in the dining room.  They're SO NICE.

It was super hot all day, but not even open windows and plenty of gatorade could stem the intense sweaty man smell that now permeates the house.  Tomorrow the plaster guy is coming to "help me out" (Translation: They saw through our naive claims that we could repair the holes in the wall and are going to fix it for us so we don't screw everything up).

We are going to cap off a day full of healthy choices and go eat ice cream for dinner.  I'll be back tomorrow with an update!

Painting the Kitchen

All right folks, the big moment is here(ish).  This is the part where we get to put our Humpty Dumpty kitchen back together again.  It's not exactly a "moment" as much as a (likely) several-week span of having strange men in our house, but whatever.

To refresh your memory, here is the state of our kitchen:

Our neighbor knew we were re-doing our kitchen and came by the other day.  She stepped into the kitchen and cautiously asked Drew, "So, do you guys like it like this?"  She apparently thought we were going to leave it in this state.

NO, WE DON'T LIKE IT LIKE THIS.

The first tiny step in getting our kitchen back in order was to paint the walls.  As of yesterday (Sunday) morning, we hadn't picked a paint color yet and the work was slated to begin at 8 a.m. this morning (Monday).  For a girl who takes eons to choose paint colors, this was a little anxiety-producing.  I was thinking some sort of gray would be nice, maybe a shade between the bathroom and the bedroom, but that made me worried it would look a little sterile - white cabinets, white backsplash, gray/black/white granite, and gray walls didn't seem to do the trick in a house with colorfully painted rooms.  We're also leaving the ugly brown tile in place, and a gray-white-black color scheme would probably highlight the brown.  Not ideal.

We were wandering through the Copley Mall this week on our way to dinner and passed by a Starbucks.  (Bear with me here - inspiration strikes in strange places if you let it).  The Starbucks had these delicious teal walls covered in white subway tile.  Hmm.  Teal.  I filed the color away in my mind as a possibility.

We got up bright and early and headed into central J.P. to our favorite hardware store.  I was full of vim and vigor and ready to choose the perfect paint color, but the darn place opens at 11:00 a.m. on Sundays.  It's run by a bunch of twenty- and thirty-something dudes that have apparently given themselves hangover recovery time on Sunday mornings.  Fine.  I guess if you're going to sell saw blades to weekend warriors, you've got to be on top of your game.  Deflated, we decided the only reasonable thing to do with the hour and a half before the hardware store opened was ... go to brunch.

We got to the hardware store right when it opened and went straight to the paint wall.  So many choices.  We found a teal that looked remarkably like the teal in the Starbucks.  It's called "Oregon Teal" and is mysteriously absent from the Benjamin Moore website, so I can't post a color sample.

We bought an entire gallon of no-VOC Oregon Teal paint in eggshell finish, reeeeaaallly hoping it would look good when we put it on the walls.  Fingers crossed.  That stuff is expensive.  And not returnable.

In yet another bid for the Best Husband Ever Award (even though he's already won that several times over), Drew painted all the trim and all the walls all by himself.  What a champ.

Look at all that lovely white trim!  The paint is still drying, which is why it's a little splotchy looking.  

It still looks like a crack den, but now it looks like a *high class* crack den.  Improvement! 

This is what it looked like all dry this morning.  You can see a corner of the brown tile, which I think looks just fine.  The teal warms things up a little and, even if the tile doesn't look intentional, it doesn't look crazy ugly either.  Good enough!

We have all red dishes and things, which will go on the open shelves, so I put a bowl on the white table for funsies to see how it would look against the teal.  The flash is a little intense, but you get the idea.  I think it'll look great!

This morning, four smelly men have begun work in the house.  Two of them look exactly the same, which is confusing.  They were supposed to come at 8:00 but they showed up at 7:45 when no one was decent enough to answer the door.  I love punctual people, but I also love being fully dressed when strange men come in the house.  You win some, you lose some, I guess.  I'm sure things will either look worse or better as the day rolls on.

Updates to come!

Demolition!

So, we've settled on a bid, scheduled an installation date, and have a dining room full of brand new cabinets.  Everything is ready to go, which means it's time for us to get down to business and rip out the existing cabinets.  Here's a few before shots, just in case you've forgotten what the kitchen looked like when we moved in:

Dining room through the door on the right

Bathroom and bedrooms to the door on the left,
pantry through the door Drew is standing in.

Glorious white-beige-cream-gray palace, prepare to be downgraded significantly.

Drew had Good Friday off from work, so I asked him to pretty please chip off the backsplash tile so we could get the cabinets out of the kitchen during the weekend.  First, I got this photo in a text while I was at work:

Perez: Note that we continue to SAVE THE DATE, even as we demolish our kitchen. 

Huzzah!  The tile is coming down and he emptied out the cabinets and there are no holes in the wall!  Then he sent me this photo:

Well, the tile is down but what is that giant hole above the stove?  Why did all the wallboard come down?  What is going on?  I was confident that Drew had applied the same impeccable tile-chipping technique from the previous wall and that something must have been different about the tile on the other wall, potentially due to being near a heat source, but it got me all nervous about the part where we decided to save money by fixing the walls up ourselves.  Then I had to go bill more hours and tried not to think about it.  No sense getting fired over a few holes in the kitchen wall, right?

But oh my, you are a large hole.  And that wall is a really big mess.

And then I got this photo:

At some point, the kitchen was apparently painted the color of urine.
The horrible creamy walls just look better and better. 

Gaah!  It's great that he removed the cabinets but I'm such a worrywart that I wanted to be there for the cabinet removal to help and/or call 911.  I assumed he was okay since he had the presence of mind to take a photo and text it to me, but it still made me nervous.  Luckily, the end of the day was near and I could go home and inspect the damage to my kitchen and husband.  Upon coming home, I found several silver linings to my previous concerns.  First, Drew was totally fine.  Other than cut up hands from handling tile shards, there were no injuries.  Second, he'd cleaned up the mess in the kitchen.  Third, he was doing the dishes.

Best husband award! 

Saturday morning, we woke up full of vim and vigor, ready to tackle the other wall of cabinets.  The tile-chipping, cabinet removal, and clean up had taken Drew about three hours by himself.  We were hopeful that the other wall wouldn't take too long, but we knew that removing base cabinets (one of which had a gas line threaded through it) and a microwave could add some complexity to the day.

Cute butt award!

The cabinets were attached to the wall with 3-6 long screws.  Some of the screws came out easily using our power drill and some took some more muscle (Drew's, not mine).  The first cabinet we tried to remove was mysteriously attached to the cabinet to its left.  We could see no screws.  Sticking a 5-in-1 in the crack between the cabinets indicated a lack of adhesive.  There was just no clue about how the darn thing was still on the wall.  He decided to try and unscrew the center cabinet, the one above the microwave, to see if that would come out.  Then everything was super wiggly and I got very nervous that the entire wall of cabinets, plus the microwave, would come crashing down.  There was a fair amount of cursing before Drew decided to yank the cabinet around a bit while I "held up the microwave" (as if I were actually strong enough to do that) and see if it would pop free.  At the time, it was the most reasoned decision we could come up with.  So he yanked and wiggled and the cabinet came off the wall!  Better yet, the microwave and center cabinet didn't come crashing down!

Note the footstool and set of antique history books that served as a "just in case it falls off the wall" back up.
WHO'S A PRO? (Answer: Neither of us).  

More urine-colored walls.  And more holes.  Hmm.  It turns out that the crazy person who installed the cabinets screwed them together with visible screws (which we removed initially) and super secret screws underneath the door hinges.  Talk about annoying.  If there had been no visible screws, we would have obviously thought to look under the hinges.  But there were screws all over the place, so who knew there were ALSO super secret screws?  Harumpf.  Lucky that screws rip right out of cheap particleboard if you pull hard enough.

We also got the inside scoop on what was between the microwave and the upper cabinet.

Very long anchor screws.  Some mouse poop.  A 2x4 with our favorite "decorative" tile on it.  The microwave and center cabinet popped right off and we were two thirds of the way there.

I really hope that blue electrical box contains a dedicated circuit!  

The corner cabinet was pretty tough to get off - there was more cursing and yanking than ever before - but the antique books did their job and we were finally done with the upper cabinets.

Removing an errant screw left in the wall. 

Taking the stock of the crazy quilt that is our kitchen wall, it seems like the stove used to be about 18-20 inches to the right.  Clues include that weird unpainted rectangle to the right of the stove, the odd location of the microwave plug, and the location of the gas line.  Maybe this means that moving the stove 18" to the right will be easy as pie!  Maybe not.  We'll see.

Then we set about removing the base cabinets near the stove.  The left cabinet was tucked behind the baseboard and window sill, so we had to remove the right cabinet and then scoot the stove over to get the left one out.

Removing the right cabinet was slightly complicated by the presence of the gas line, which had been installed after the cabinet was already in.  After some questionable attempts to cut the cabinet away from the gas line with a hacksaw, I took a screwdriver and a hammer to the cheap particleboard frame and it came right away.  I'm a nervous nellie about a lot of things, but hacksaw + gas line is near the top of the list.

Ta da! No gas leak!

Anyway, it all worked out nicely and now our kitchen looks like a crack den.  The whole thing took about 3 hours, which left us plenty of time to enjoy the day.

At least this is what I imagine a crack den would look like...

We decided to leave the base cabinets in place on the other side of the kitchen so that we could continue to use the sink and dishwasher up until the last possible moment.  Doing dishes in the bathtub can wait.

Drew gets the best husband award a million times over because he really did most of this himself.  Although I did step in at a few key moments, I mostly stood around in my slippers and snapped photos and got anxious about things falling down.  This is partly because Drew said that this was kind of a one person job and I would just be in the way (probably true) and also partly because I'm pregnant and not very useful for things like yanking cabinets off of walls.

At least I helped with the cursing.

More updates to come!

The Installation Bid(s)

It's been quiet here on QUESTING:boston because I haven't really thought any of the stuff we've had going on was worth a blog post.  It turns out that lots has been going on and I should have been blogging all along, so I'll break it up into a few parts for you.

The first step in all of this was getting an installation bid from John, who works with the Home Depot.  He came over one morning and measured things and looked at things and then gave me an estimate.  Home Depot is great because they break out each item separately - it will cost $X to install your sink, $Y to hook your dishwasher back up, and $Z to tile your backsplash.  This is handy for people like us who are trying to cut costs because we can choose what to pay the pros for and what to do ourselves.  The original bid was about $6000.  I knew we could negotiate a lot of that down by doing certain things ourselves, but it was still a shocking number.

Then the cabinets arrived, which was very exciting because it meant we were well on the way towards our new kitchen but stressful because we hadn't settled on an installation bid yet and our dining room looked like this:

You'd like to get together for dinner? Great! We'll be right over.

I contacted John to let him know we had received the cabinets and wanted to negotiate the bid a start date and ... no response.   JOHN.  Let's GO.  My dining room looks like a warehouse.

After a few days, I emailed Jose, who told me "John is no longer with the company."  Super.  Meanwhile, it was already late March and we had ordered the cabinets waaaayyy back in January.

Jose did what Jose does and fixed the problem.  He sent Tony over to do another bid and to discuss an installation timeline.  Tony showed up at my front door and I knew he was the man for the job.  He looked just like my Italian grandfather (except with white hair) and told me he wasn't leaving until he'd given me a bid I was happy with.  Swoon.

He went through the kitchen and did a much, much more thorough job than John did. (Perhaps this is why John is no longer with the company? We'll never know.)  Tony noticed lots of existing code violations in our kitchen, especially with the electrical system, which sent my heart into my stomach.  Electricity is one of those things I'm just not willing to DIY (except in very limited situations, mostly involving light fixtures) because you can fry yourself pretty easily and there are lots of crazy codes (see below) that I feel compelled to follow.  As a result, electricians strike me as a shifty bunch, as do auto mechanics, plumbers, and some dentists, precisely because we can't get from point A to point B without their services.  If you have feces all over your bathroom floor or need a root canal or your power goes out or your car breaks, you're usually willing to pay what it takes to fix the problem so they've got you by the proverbial balls.  But I digress.

It turns out that you have to have an electrical outlet every four feet (My friend Natalie astutely pointed out that this sounds less like a safety law and more like a solid victory for the electrician's lobby) and an over-the-range microwave has to have a dedicated circuit.  We have to move our outlets around, which is not a huge expense, so the kitchen is up to code.  Fine.  The microwave is another story.  There may already be a dedicated circuit, which would be the best-case scenario (dare I hope?).  If there's not a dedicated circuit though, we're in real trouble.  The previous owners installed a humongous central air conditioner and, while I'm sure I'll be singing their praises about that this summer, they maxed out something or another with the electrical system, which means we would have to do something complicated and expensive in order to keep the microwave over the stove.  Can you tell I wasn't paying much attention when Tony was telling me about that part?  It's because I was getting a little panicky.  Forgive me.

If there's not a dedicated circuit already, my current plan is to get a countertop microwave and do something else in that space.  Spice rack?  Pot rack?  Something else that can get covered in grease?  This is all TBD and will likely be the subject of much whining in the not-too-distant-future.  I know you're excited.  I sure am.

True to his word, Tony didn't leave until we'd settled on a bid.  We saved a bundle cutting out the demolition/hauling, tiling the backsplash, and installing our super cool open shelving.  After a few tweaks, the final bid was $4700.  It's still more than I was hoping to spend, but all those code violations added up.  Tony was also very sweet and slashed many installation costs, either because he felt bad that John had left us in the lurch or he felt a family connection with me too.  I'd like to think it was the latter.  Either way, we're all set for installation to begin on April 16.  Woot woot!

Coming right up: DEMOLITION.  More pictures too, I promise!