If you wanna feel better about your family, just read about ours...

Starring: a dad, a mom, a son & daughter-in-law, a daughter & son-in-law, another daughter & son-in-law, 1 teen, 1 grandson, 3 granddaughters, 4 dogs, and a whole lot of love.






Family Story Pic

Family Story Pic

Labels

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Refriger-RAGE-er

As you might've noticed (or maybe you haven't), I'm on a once a month posting schedule here. I assure you, it's not for lack of material, but lack of time. One of these days I'll get to slow down...I think.

I'm a little behind, but hope to catch up on a few of our summer time dramas. So let's start with this one.

The older I get, the more OCD I'm getting. I don't need things "clean" per say, but I do need order. So the long drawn out process of remodeling our kitchen this summer was nothing short of a nightmare for me.

It started with the simple idea of refinishing the cabinets which required everything to be removed from them and stacked around the house. Four days of not knowing if dishes in various rooms of the house were clean or dirty. Awesome.

Cabinets, check.

When everything was put back where it belonged, we realized the cabinets looked so good that the countertops looked like crap. Five weeks and countless fights with Lowes later, our new countertops arrived...aaaaaand everything from the cabinets was removed. Again. And you can't upgrade your countertops without also upgrading your sink. Surprised you didn't know that. Enter 4 days of no countertop, no sink and no running water. And just for fun, picture our old countertop and stainless steel sink piled outside on our driveway because we're the best neighbors to live beside ever.

Countertops, check.

Now let's discuss the line of old paint running across our walls because the new countertop isn't as tall as the old one. There was also a rather large scraped up section from where the countertop was forced down the wall because it hadn't been cut short enough. My fingers were involved, as well as a string of profanity, so let's just skip over that scene, shall we? We'd just painted those walls last year, so back to Lowes again with scraps of chipped paint pieces...mixed with finger skin...for them to match with their super-cool-we-can-match-any-paint-color-machine, until the guy freakin loses my scrap of paint and decides to wing it and I get home to realize it's a shade too dark.

Repaint the entire kitchen, *%#&'ing check.

The kitchen looked amazing until you looked at the old linoleum floor. And if you're gonna change out the flooring, you may as well get a new fridge while you're at it. Adding the old refrigerator into the pile on the driveway earned us yet another Neighbor Of The Year Award. We're fun like that.

So one Tuesday in August, the stove, table, chairs, and dry sink were crammed into our living room and the guy who was laying our tile arrived. Thank you, Lord, an end is in sight...until he left at the end of his first day and said, "I told your husband you can't walk on this for 3 days. "Whoa, wait. What the crap did you just say?"

The floor wouldn't be ready till Friday, which was incidentally the day we expected the arrival of our new refrigerator, which is the one day a week I have massage clients come to the house, and was coincidentally the day we were hosting a get together for Ron's whole side of the family, because of course.

The floors were actually good to go by Thursday evening, so most everything was put back into place by Friday morning. The refrigerator was scheduled for delivery between 8 and noon. My first client was coming at 1 and Ron's family was coming at 6. This should run like clockwork. That is if freakin Lowes knew what clockwork meant.

They didn't arrive until 12:45 and when they dollied the ginormous refrigerator out of their truck I began to wonder how it would fit. Short answer: it didn't.

When my first client arrived, both doors into our house had been completely removed, a refrigerator was in our hallway and Ron and the Lowes guys were discussing the fact that he hadn't measured anything before choosing the fridge, but had "eyeballed it."

(Let's just say that an angry massage therapist is not ideal and I'll be surprised if that client returns.)

When Ron's family arrived for dinner, he was covered head to toe in sawdust from where he had to cut the bottom section from the newly refinished cabinets to squeeze the fridge under and unless you look closely, you can't tell. (Just please don't look closely.)

By the time his family left, so had my rage...until I tried to open the freezer and the kitchen door frame blocked it, which led me to discover that reaching the kitchen light switch was no longer an option, either.

Before I could say anything, he said, "This isn't a big deal...we'll just shorten the countertop again."

Head exploded, check.

In all seriousness, I want to thank my husband for a hard job well done.
The finished product almost makes me forget what we went through to get it.





Actually, no. No, it doesn't.