Back In The Saddle

Writing is hard.

Especially when you’ve been unwillingly forced to stop doing it for almost two months and have forgotten all the little things you used to do to make the words come so quickly and easily before. It used to be that I would sit down at my computer for about an hour and craft a silly story or an insightful and charming tale of my youth for the world to read and enjoy without breaking a sweat. But now I find myself sitting here begging the words to come forth from the ether they reside within and fill my screen with humorous banter that will bring back the throngs of adoring fans I used to command, and nothing comes out. It’s not as if nothing exciting or funny has happened to me in the last two months, quite the opposite really. I just seem to have forgotten how to write it in a funny way.

I know; sucks to be me.

Anywaste, since this is my first day back, and also since I’m STILL living under plastic sheets with all my worldly possessions contained within cardboard boxes and plastic crates while my kitchen, my own personal white whale, is still in shambles, I think I’ll go easy on myself and simply post some pictures of the renovations with a little descriptive text. If you’re all real nice to me (as in; leave a comment about how much you missed me) then maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you about some of my exploits over the last two months. Otherwise, I’ll just pretend I never left and just keep pounding away here until I become one of the elite Bloggers who are ‘discovered’ in the wild, tagged as ‘relevant’, offered a book deal, given a ‘real’ writing job and then revealed as a hack or has-been and promptly deleted from the collective consciousness of the human race.

It’s all part of my master plan entitled, “Taking Over The World While Baking The Perfect Shortcake In Twelve Easy Steps”.

Picture #1
Here is the kitchen in all its glory before the work began. Notice the utter lack of usable counter space, the complete absence of drawers for silverware, the short and stunted upper cabinets and the dishwasher that lived underneath the sink making the sink too shallow to wash pots and the dishwasher too small for large dishes! If you were to stand in the center of the kitchen you could, without moving your feet or stretching too far, reach the fridge and stove at the same time. Lest we forget, the stove was too small for there to be two pots on it at the same time, and the fridge could only open so far before it slammed into the stupid, little half-wall you see in the foreground. And before you ask, let me tell you that no, we did not paint the walls that horrid red color. Although had I thought about it before hand I might have realized that it wasn’t paint on the walls but actually blood that poured out from the eyes of the former residents as they gazed in horror at their horrible, tiny, crappy kitchen.

Picture #2
Here you can see the kitchen after the second day of demolition work. You can clearly see that brick of the original building’s exterior walls were exposed when the sheetrock was removed. You can also see the rotting sub-floor that had been lying in wait underneath the crappy tiles of the original kitchen for a hapless fool like me to come along and expose it for all the world to see. On the left, right behind the ladder, you can see the original doorframe for the second bedroom. That doorway used to be next to the kitchen, just to the left of the stupid, little half-wall you saw in the last picture, but because we were expanding the kitchen outwards by six feet the doorway had to move. Of course, at the time we failed to realize that the one and only phone line in the entire apartment ran through that wall. This later lead to many hours of head scratching and witless banter as we searched the apartment for a phone jack to plug our nifty, super-duper, Geek-O-Matic phones into.
Point of interest; did you know that the phone company charges $125 per phone jack installation? And they won’t even run the wires in the walls so you have to deal with fat, ugly, white wires stapled to your baseboards? I do. Now.

Picture #3
Here is the first of THREE attempts by our idiotic contractor to install our cabinets. On this attempt, they realized halfway through that the back wall was not straight and thus the cabinets would not line up properly. Notice the piece of wood running up the wall in the back of the picture? That was their attempt at duplicity. You see, they were going to try to use that as a wedge to even-out the wall for the rest of the cabinets and not tell us. However, they failed to note that while the wall was only an inch out of alignment right there, it was a full six inches out of whack by the time they reached the far corner, making it impossible to correct without tearing down and redoing the entire wall. So, they tore down the wall and rebuilt it bigger, better and straighter. On attempt number two they scratched up all of the cabinet doors AND they put in cabinets of the wrong size so that we wound up with one less cabinet than we had originally called for on the plans. Those cabinets were also removed. The third attempt gave us the cabinets that we asked for but the doors were still messed up and badly crafted. At this point the contractor fired the cabinet maker and hired a new guy who has since made good, or at least made better, all the previous idiots’ gaffes. For those of you still counting yes, we are currently on cabinet boxes number four with individual doors being removed and replaced as problems arise. All told, I think these guys hate us for being such picky clients.
However, I know we hate them for being such crappy workers.

Picture #4
Here’s a shot of the kitchen as it stood last Wednesday. The final cabinets are in and the kitchen is finally coming together. The countertop, cabinet hardware, lights and appliances are all arriving this week and we are hopeful that by the end of this week we will have gotten rid of these schmucks for good. When we’re all done and the kitchen is complete, I’ll post another picture or ten of the final product. In the meantime, I think I’ll call it a day and prepare myself for tomorrows post where I’ll tell you some of the things that I’ve done in the last two months that are not kitchen involved.

If, that is, I can think of anything.