Life in 3D

Welcome home, microwave

Sorry for the radio silence.  We were on vacation for a very decadent 10 or so days, without either a camera or computer access.  But we're back and have been very productive!  Ladies and gents, our new microwave:

See, this here is what happens when you get the floor model and P.C. Richard can't find the box it came in.  They make you a box out of . . . old boxes?  Seriously, this was kind of embarrassing to lug out of the store.

But once it shed its ugly cocoon, it became a beautiful butterfly:

I know you're thinking, in the corner?  Really?  Isn't that such a waste of space?  Peeps, those corners are deep, and we tried it on the left, we tried it on the right, and the corner was just the best place for it.  It actually left the most room for stuff like the oodles and oodles of wine we bought over the weekend.  We realized recently that we had (gasp!) almost run out, so we hit up Smith & Vine (specifically, their amazing $12-and-under table) and stocked up:

T arranged them all in height order.  Now I'm thirsty.

The final product

Things aren't very tidy, but aside from a few loose ends, we're done with renovations!

Kitchen








Booze, as promised.


A full fridge!


A space-age freezer...


...with lots and lots of bacon!

Bathroom

I highly recommend the arced shower rod.


And the rainshower shower head.



So glad it's (pretty much) over!

Okay, now the end is really in sight. I promise.

Hopefully the last renovation update before everything is finished.  But first!  Since the last post was about the awesomeness of Mothra, I had to take this opportunity to wax equally rhapsodic about another member of the bugworld: fireflies.  I remember loving them as a kid -- they really filled you with such a sense of wonder on a quiet summer night, flickering on and off in the dark.  I feel like for whatever reason, I went through a period of years where I just didn't see them, either because I wasn't looking or because they just weren't there.  I'm happy to say that after the Great Firefly Dearth of ninety-something to now (can I please say "aught eight"?), fireflies are back.  Maybe it's because we're in the wilderness of Brooklyn, where fauna abound (including the rat I almost ran over with my bike last night).  Maybe I'm recapturing the joy of youth...or something.  Anyway.  Fireflies rule.

Reno stuff: so we were basically waiting on the delivery of an undercabinet pull-out garbage can.  Our cabinet person sent one, and when we opened it and put it under the sink, we were like, "Pff!  Whaaa?!  Midget!" -- or something like that.  Behold:

One of the things that bothers me when I cook is trying to stuff onion skins/potato peelings/butcher paper covered in yuck juice into an overstuffed garbage can.  We saw this lil' guy and immediately requested a bigger one.  Those of you who are plumbers probably can tell what the problem will be, but what we pipe-impaired people didn't realize was that the drainpipes from the double-basin sink were not in yet, and that Shorty was probably all that was going to fit.  Here's where the pipes will go:

So we sheepishly told our cabinet person that we'd have to wait until Norman came back to see which sink we could use.  But wait no more!  Norman et al. are coming on Monday!  Hooray!  In the meantime, here's a picture of the sink and the counter with the undercabinet lights on:

I know it's rude to boast, but it's kind of the hotness, right?

We also need to figure out if we should put pull-out wire baskets in the pantry, which is very deep.  I like the idea of being able to access cans and boxes of dry goods easily (and Lord knows I hoard stuff like it was Y2K all over again -- ha!  remember that? -- because I come from a family of (noseblowing) people who have an irrational but totally endearing fear of starving to death.  Seriously, we love food and obsess over it.  When we sit down to eat lunch, we talk about what's for dinner.  When I was little, apparently I would climb on people's laps when they were eating and ask, "What's in your mouth?  Let's have a share.").  But the baskets themselves look a little...forbidding, or something.  And like they might actually reduce the available space for the beans and the crushed tomatoes and the pasta and the rice and the dried cranberries and the five types of vinegar and the eight cartons of broth, etc.

Thoughts?

Oh yeah, we found the camera.  It was in my purse.  Oops.

Spring!

I have been feeling very unmoored lately without a kitchen, and therefore without, at least as I see it, much control over my food.  On the way to work I pass by the farmer's market twice a week, and all I can do is ogle the spinach and ramps and asparagus and rhubarb and other trappings of spring and sigh that I can't gather up great bundles of the stuff and play with it at home.  (Or rather, put it in our shiny new fridge and then cook it on our shiny new range at home).  Truth be told, I probably like the produce in summer (zucchini! corn! tomatoes! peaches!) and fall/winter (squash! cabbage! apples!) better, but it's still sad to pass by all of this lovely stuff and not be able to do much with it.

So today I bought a handful of sugar snap peas for a healthy mid-afternoon snack (to dip in ranch dressing, of course).

Hooray for peas and pods!

In other news, the countertop brouhaha has been resolved - after some raised voices and much exasperation and despair on my part (and after dear Norman came over and banged his head - drawing blood - on the new cabinets), the countertop man came over today, realigned the piece that was crooked and that had broken the wall, paid Norman to fix the wall, and voilà!  Peace and order in 3D.   The guys just have to patch up the wall and then the rest of the work can be completed in a day or so.  The end is in sight...

Almost there

So after the elevator-related delays last week, Monday was a big day for us: the counter and sink got installed and the appliances came.  This was very exciting and overall very wonderful, with some small bits of heartbreak thrown in, as you'll see below.  Unfortunately, we can't seem to find the camera, so this entry is all going to be pictures from my cell phone, and thus not very good.  Not that the camera ones are that good, but you know what I mean.

Onto the show.  Here are the appliances waiting eagerly in the entryway to go to their rightful homes:

I like how the stove is kind of hiding behind the fridge, which would have been perfect and fondle-able except for it has a scratch on the front!!!  AIEEEEE!  Bit o' heartbreak # 1.  I tried to take a picture of where it is, but I'm not sure you can see it:

Anyway, it's right there, right on the front, which is (oddly, I thought) not covered in that blue stuff that covers the sides, which you gotta figure, most people aren't going to have the sides of their fridges showing, so why protect that part more than the front?  I guess so you can see the smoothness and fondle the front?   Because people, that is a hot-lookin' appliance right there, right? 

After a great deal of fretting on our part, Gringer is going to be sending us a new door along with instructions on how to replace it (and I understand that these instructions might be in the form of a human being?).  Anyone need a fridge door?  T says otherwise we're gonna use it as a sled.  I'll show you the inside of the fridge, with the rolly shelf, when it's all set up.  I know you're thinking, ooh, rolly shelf?! Tell me more!  By the way, I highly recommend Gringer.  They have a great selection, competitive pricing, and they were really flexible with our constantly changing delivery time, and then this with the door thing (when it might not even have been their fault) is just great.  I praise them because I've seen some complaints about their service, but we really couldn't have asked for better.

Counter time:

I have to say, I am loving how it looks.  I think the greys look really nice together, and the whole thing is clean and modern without being too severe.  That sink is like 450 feet deep on the left side (T's request).  Another plug for a vendor: Designer Plumbing Outlet.  We had initially ordered our sink through Hanssem Kitchen, who did our cabinets, but it was backordered.  I found the sink online for a pretty good price, and the best part was that it had already been delivered by the time I got the shipment notification email!  Seriously, it took less than 24 hours for this thing to arrive from when I ordered it.  Pretty cool.

Time for bit o' heartbreak # 2:

These are the two pieces that will be on either side of the stove. WTF?  The first pic (the left side of the stove) is awful - it's totally off-center and the guy managed to break holes in the wall!  The second is less egregious - just slightly misaligned, but seriously.  It's so surprising because the rest of the counter looks pretty good.  This is just sloppy.  Our contact at Hanssem (who coordinated the counter installation) feels awful and is working on getting it fixed.

Finally, the last conundrum.  This doesn't really qualify as heartbreak material, but because of the way the old pass-through was put together, we were left with this exposed piece of wall on the dining room side of it:

What to do?  Here I'm going to try to use a web poll.  Let us know your thoughts!

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Back to work

Our little family, as it were (T, Nina, me), had a nice long weekend lounging about and being decadent on Fire Island.  Beach, beer, barbecue, repeat.  The weather was really nice - a little too windy and not hot enough to be true bake-in-the-sun weather, but perfect for reading, drinking vinho verde, and practicing cartwheels.  Ahem.

So, in the opposite of what usually happens weather-wise, it was really creepy yesterday afternoon.  More pictures from the office window:

I'm not quite sure why the clouds seem so much more dramatic from this viewpoint than they usually do.  Maybe it's the nice combo of height (12th floor) + relative paucity of tall buildings in Brooklyn.  There were bizarro spots of light in the clouds, too:

[cue chorus "aaah" angels-in-the-sky-type music].

Oh.  In bummer news, we forgot to reserve the elevator for our countertop and appliance deliveries today, so it got bumped to Monday.  Disappointing - I can't wait to show you all the new fridge.  But I will try to be patient!

Waiting, waiting

Norman et al. finished what they could do last week, and we've been waiting for the countertop to be fabricated and installed (next Wednesday).  This is pretty much what things have looked like since then:

Running water, no drips, and perhaps most importantly, second toilet.  This toilet is really something - it flushes really fast and aggressively and is pretty amazing.

Vroom vroom!  The bathroom tiles are Daltile Downtown Nite (so posh for a bathroom floor, right?), and we had originally ordered the 12"x12", but those were backordered, so we went with the 12"x18" and I kind of like it better.  The nice thing about the reno is that the bathroom is much brighter now, with much more medicine cabinet storage:

It doesn't actually look that dingy and yellow in there at all - it's quite bright.  In kitchen news, not much is going on except we got one of the two new ceiling fixtures we ordered:

The undercabinet lights went in as well, but I didn't take a picture of those.  The counter is going to be dark grey (Caesarstone "Raven") and the backsplash is going to be an almost vermilion red, which is my favorite color lately.  Hopefully it will be my favorite color for longer than that, or at least that I'll be able to tolerate it.  Click here and scroll down to see "Red."  (They called it "Rosso" at the store, and that sounded much more romantic, don't you think?)

Finally, I hope everyone noticed that this is the first blog post with links.  Yay for me.  Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

 

What the dogga thinks

Mommles dear, Popplekins, WTF.  When I drool on these paper floors, it goes plak plak plak. 

Pobre Nina.  She gets put in the bedroom when the dudes are here during the day, and (woof, this one's for you) has anyone ever heard the song New York City Cops by the Strokes?  The sort of pre-chorus lyrics go, "Nina's in the bedroom (deer duh deer duh deer), she says time to go now, etc. etc. etc."  Anyway.  Whenever I get home and release Nina, that song always goes through my head.

More days, and the shame of math

So.  Days something and something + 1 (and possibly something +2) have now gone by (read: Thursday, Friday and Monday? maybe?  Clearly I am not keeping up with this blog thing).  We were out of town over the weekend, and so I was excited to come back to see new stuff.  And new stuff there is!  As of Thursday evening, most of the kitchen was in.  Bottom cabinets and FLOORS!  I luuurve these floors.  Norman teased us because the stripping in between the tiles is silver - some comment about a disco. 

Hey everybody!  Come to our kitchen and do the hustle!  Dee-der-dee-der-dee-di-der-dee-dee etc.

Here's a slightly less blinding shot:

Those on the middle-right there are BIG ASS DRAWERS for all the big ass pots and pans!  Hooray!  Drawers!  I can't even tell you, this has been my dream for like, at least 2 years or something.  I have nurtured it to fruition.  I am feeling very accomplished.  (I also really like the stack of four drawers on the far right).

And here is another of my other fave lower cabinet goings-on:

Baking sheets + cookie sheets + wire racks , come to momma.

So.  Onto the bathroom.  T called today and said, "are we sure we ordered enough wall tiles for the bathroom?"  And I thought and thought some more and realized, nope, we surely did not.  I measured the wall space using the old tiles, which didn't go up all the way to the ceiling, and so I am feeling like a huge math tard right now because look:

I am so pretty pretty.  Green and soothing and shiny.  And we turn to our left and

WAAAAAAAH!!!  WAAAAAAAHHHH!!  [string of expletives]  Seriously.  So close, and yet . . . I'm an idiot.  Seriously.  And the stupidest part is that we have enough of every other tile we ordered (kitchen flo', bathroom flo', probably kitchen backsplash ) practically to put TWO layers of tile down.  But at least Tubby is safely set.

Here's said bathroom flo', for what it's worth.  There's all sorts of gunk covering it.

The super annoying part is that these wall tiles took FOREVER to come in from Bella Tile.  Maybe I can do a decorative mosaic of tiles laid out to look like math equations to fill the gap?

Days 4 and 5

So.  Got home Monday evening and was very excited to see some gunk drying all over the kitchen floor and some of the upper cabinets installed!  Check it out:

Gunk on floor.

Cabinets on walls.

We weren't allowed to go into the kitchen because the floor was still drying.  The guys made a pretty formidable barricade:...oh wait, I forgot to take a picture of the barricade.  It was mostly to keep Nina out (though she's not the type to try to scale formidable barricades).

Onto day 5.  All the upper cabinets are up!  Don't tell Norman, but I went into the kitchen and took pictures, even though I don't think I was supposed to go in there.

Up thar's whar the booze is gonna go.  Yay booze.

Not a ton of stuff going on in the bathroom, but it looks like they're building the platform so T doesn't end up in standing water to his shins:

Don't leak on me, Tubby.