Kitchen Remodel, Part 1

Our kitchen remodel officially started on Thursday morning. The two contractors started by removing our old cabinets, counters, and amazing back-splash tile. They patched everything up, gave us a bit of new dry-wall, and made way for the electrician, who prepped us for the under-cabinet light and the microwave (which he accidentally hooked up to our light switch, so when the lights are off, so is the microwave. This will be fixed.). Here is our newly emptied kitchen:

Weird, right? Check out Trevor's lovely paint job above the cabinet line!

Then the guys came back on Friday to start installing the new cabinets. They got almost through, but our main man Dave called me at 6:30 last night (after they'd been working since about 8:45 a.m.) to ask if he could come back and finish it today because he didn't want to rush through anything. I said, "absolutely," and he's currently in the other room screwing in all of the cabinet handles (they look great).

This was their work at the end of the day:

It's not a great picture because I only had my phone, but you get the idea

So, other than some minor issues with the kitchen (the temporary sink wasn't standard size and the handle screws were too long, so Dave had to run to Home Depot; the aforementioned microwave/light switch; a mis-ordered cabinet that opens on the wrong side), it all went pretty smoothly. They told us upfront that they thought it would take two days, and both T. and I thought that was pretty ambitious thinking. And it was. But other than some possible re-patching when the electrician comes back to fix the wires, we're pretty much ready for the next step, which is getting measurements for the countertop. The guy comes out to take care of that on Monday.

And you know who else will come out on Monday, in addition to the countertop guy and the electrician? The plumber! Want to know why? Because our toilet broke. It BROKE. Thursday morning, about twenty or thirty minutes before the contractors showed up to start work in our tiny kitchen, the one and only toilet we have in the place stopped working. So we called a plumber (after T. tried diligently to snake it himself, but to no avail [and actually I called two plumbers, and almost a third, because no one was getting back to me and I was freaking out]) who wasn't able to come until Friday.

So, the plumber shows up on Friday morning, right before the contractors, and he tries--also diligently--to snake it, too. But that fails and he suspects a bigger problem. He needs to take out the toilet to get in there with a "huge machine" (god only knows what the hell that means; I'm actually terrified of it already) and then when the machine and the plumber can fix the problem, he wants to install a new toilet.

Soooo, that's what we're going to do. We'll have three lovely men in our place come Monday, doing a variety of machining, measuring, and wiring. And, by the luck of Trevor's Irishness, we haven't really felt the sting of no toiletness because we've spent all week at Greg and Paula's dog-sitting while they were in Michigan on a mini-vacation. And they have lovingly and graciously agreed to let us stay the rest of the weekend with them. So our two workmen had to suffer and go to the Burger Baron when nature called, but we've been more or less okay, hanging out in Greg and Paula's basement and living out of a suitcase. I'll be so happy when Monday is over and this upheaval has more or less finished heaving.