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Renovation Started!

7K views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  peanut 
#1 ·
It started this past week. Tuesday the contractor arrived with help and started ripping out the kitchen. It took two days. Then the electricians came. They were supposed to take one day. They were here for two and will be here for two days next week...at least. They found active knob and tube wiring throughout the house. Code says they have to remove it. Uhoh. Our renovation budget just exploded. Electricians do not come cheap.

We picked the paint colour for the kitchen walls and ceiling. The contractor showed up Friday with the subfloor all ready to go and was pretty ticked to find the electricians still here. He gave him one more day to finish the kitchen job.

But they also have to work upstairs in the bathroom, and in the studio/bedroom, and the dining room, removing the knob and tube, adding a fan and a plug in for Hubby's razor, and extra outlets. Plus, we need a new electrical panel in the basement to support all the extra circuits. AND the outside electrical meter is not to code anymore and has to be adjusted for height. Sigh. BIG electrical job here. The electricians are going to be here a while I think.

Other than that, things are going well. Meals are holding up. I planned some meals that were not a good idea. They are too watery for paper plates. I decided I should not have pasta dishes with sauces. The pasta requires too much water to cook, which is a nuisance when you have no sink on the main floor to drain it. You end up carrying hot pots of pasta and water up or down stairs. I think next time I will just bake a lot of spaghetti squash to use as pasta.

Our two burner hotplate has two temperature - boiling and off. Not the greatest for making rice, so I asked our boarder if we could borrow her rice cooker today to make some rice. It's made and in the fridge. We'll heat it up for supper. Supper is Peachy Pork Chops and in the crock-pot cooking. Smells wonderful!

We ate out twice last week. Once to celebrate the demise of the kitchen, and again at a pizza place to celebrate a friend quitting her crappy job. She has a new one she is very excited about. Hopefully it will be good.

We entertained once since the kitchen was removed. Thankfully we thought to stop by the grocery store last night after pizza and pick up dessert. We had some squares and cookies, along with grapes, tea and coffee to serve people.

Today we are cleaning up and doing laundry. Hubby is doing most of the cleaning and I am doing the laundry.

We have a neat water system. We looked at all the water jugs with spigots and had actually borrowed one from a friend. But we could not get the spigot to point in the downward position, no matter how hard we tried. So we went to Cabela's and talked to a girl in the camping section. We told her our problem and she knew right away that all the jugs with spigots were going to do that, making a mess in our dining room every time we turned it on.

She suggested we use a regular 5 gallon jug of water and a water pump. We were perplexed. We finally figured out Canadian Tire must have something like that, and they did! We picked up the pump for $15 and the jug of water for $15 (water and jug cost). We just refill the jug with water from the hose in the backyard. :) So far it's worked great!
 
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