dinner, dinner anyone?

our kitchen BEFORE

Our kitchen is gone - so gone. Where our kitchen once was is now a big, empty room with cold concrete floors, ugly walls with some dry wall missing, lots of spider webs and a continuous cold breeze because of a broken kitchen window.

The window you ask...I spent part of yesterday afternoon harping on Derek about being careful around the window - I was worried he was going to break it. When he had finally had enough of me he quietly put his tools down and walked away to go find another job (I am assuming he went looking for the job that was farthest away from his crazed wife who was so sure he was going to break the window) I took over the job of carefully removing tile from around the window. I felt much better now that I was in control of the job knowing that I would be much more careful then Derek....CRACK! I guess I got a little heavy handed with the hammer and now I was to blame for the destroyed window. After a few minutes of complete shock I burst into tears and locked myself in the bathroom for a minute to compose myself. Derek was waiting with a hug and some comforting words "glad it was you and not me" So now we get a nice new window to go with our nice new kitchen.

The demo took about 3 hours and wouldn't have happened without the help of good friends. The Wrights, Hawkins and Smiths came over and went to town with sledge hammers, crow bars, etc. I can't even begin to tell you how much we appreciate them and all the work they did.

We now have our refrigerator sitting next to the sofa in our family room. We may never move it back to the kitchen because the current set up makes it very easy to grab the Ben and Jerry's out of the freezer without ever leaving the comfort of the sofa. Next to the fridge is a folding table to hold our crock pot, electric skillet, paper plates, paper cubs, etc. This will serve as our kitchen for the new few weeks. We are hoping that people will take pity on us and invite us to dinner so we won't have to use our make shift kitchen. We must seem fairly pathetic because today was our first full day without a kitchen and we had dinner tonight at a friend's house.

I am feeling nervous about this whole remodeling thing - wondering if I made good choices for cabinets, counters, appliances, etc. I wish I could enjoy the whole process more but if I am being completely honest it is just making me way stressed out. Derek is handling it all very well and trying to keep me sane. He has been amazing with finding all the things I want. For instance he found the sink I liked but it was on the pricey end for our budget. He spent hours searching for it on the Internet and found the exact sink plus an amazing faucet all for less then the original price of the sink. He gets a gold star for all his work on this project.

Here is just a few pictures from the beginning of demo. I ran out of room on my camera so Rona went home and grabbed her camera to document the day. As soon as I get pictures from her I will post them so that everyone can see the progress we are making.

     Rona and me trying to look busy

Derek getting ready to take down the first cabinet