Category Archives: Kitchen

Walls and Hobbits and Spock

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I walked into our kitchen today, and we had walls! With panelling on them! (Well, OK, about six to eight linear feet of wall, but still! Walls! Wow!

In the meantime, I ran into this truly amazing video of Leonard Nimoy singing “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”. I’ve been familiar with the song for over thirty years, thanks to the Dr. Demento Show, but I don’t believe I’d seen this video before.

It is horribly ’60’s: Leonard Nimoy, with Spock hair, surrounded by a bunch of (admittedly very nice looking) ’60’s chicks with Vulcan ears who make bunny-hop-like wiggly motions as Nimoy sings the song. Strange, very strange.

And if you go to Youtube to watch, you find other interesting things, like Leonard Nimoy singing “Proud Mary”. And “I Walk The Line.”

And William Shatner singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Please, make it stop!

Rally for Religious Freedom

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I could try to post something tonight, but I spent too much of last night lying awake, obsessing about our kitchen. (Which appears to be proceeding just fine, actually, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t obsess about it in the small hours.)

But enough of that. Tomorrow at noon, in well over one hundred cities across the country, there will be a Rally for Religious Freedom. Los Angeles is one of the cities, and I plan to be downtown (an odd place to find me, to be sure) standing in the crowd (an even odder place to find me) with my camera, so that I can stand up and be counted.

With luck, I’ll be awake enough to follow what’s going on.

Noooooooooooooooo!

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The shower in my bathroom is temporarily dead, thanks to the kitchen work. Supposedly they will have it all fixed up sometime tomorrow.

Oh, and the kitchen is filled with shear walls and other sundry supports because a major load-bearing beam was removed to make way for a new, much bigger (and up-to-code) load-bearing beam.

And they are getting ready to move some windows around, and move the electrical panel, and dig a hole under the breezeway to run new water and electrical lines (yes, They Really Are Tunneling Under My House!), and in general, there’s a lot going on.

But meanwhile the shower has a big gap in the tiles because they needed to move the drain.

There is an upside to this: the shower urgently needed re-tiling already. Now we won’t put it off.

Kitchen Notes

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The kitchen has been quiet for most of the last two weeks, while we waited for the structural engineer to finish his work. That was Wednesday; and by Wednesday afternoon the architect had the structural engineer’s plans in hand and OK’d by the county. On Thursday our contractor started work again, and on Friday they completed pouring the new foundation along two sides of our kitchen. Work should resume on Monday, and continue until the next unforeseen hang up.

It’s Quiet. Too Quiet.

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I’m at home sick with a cold, and, shockingly, it’s quiet around here. The contractors finished up the bulk of the jackhammering yesterday, and now with the extraneous walls removed and the foundations and plumbing all exposed, we can see what needs to be done structurally. We had the architect and a structural engineer come through yesterday afternoon, and now we’re just waiting to see what they tell us. In the meantime, it’s quiet. No hammering, no saws, no voices.

I’m sorry that the work isn’t going forward today (though not as sorry as our contractor is), but on the other hand, it’s nice that things are restful.

A Dirty Business

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So I went into my kitchen today, to see what progress had been made…AND THERE WAS DIRT! There was a big pit along one wall, and piles of DIRT! There’s DIRT under my house! Who knew?

You see, our house is on a slab. There’s no crawlspace anywhere; and all of the ground immediately around the house is paved with flagstones or bricks. I’ve always known that there’s dirt under my house, but I’ve never, you know, seen any of it. I wasn’t expecting to see it today, either.

However, it’s a good sign. Some of the drains coming down from upstairs need to be re-routed, and since we’re putting in a bathroom downstairs where our pantry used to be, we’ve got new drains to be added. The digging is all in aid of this, which means that we’ve moved from mere demolition to actual construction. Sound the trumpets!

D-Day Plus One

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So the kitchen is mostly demolished (though there is much left to do); we have a refrigerator set up in our temporary kitchen ($175, used, with free delivery), the initial recriminations are at an end because it’s simply too late for that; and tomorrow we might actually eat all of our meals at home. Plus, Jane transferred her cold to me, so she’s feeling much better. This is a Good Thing.

D-Day: We Cross the Rubicon

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The Contractors arrived to day, Joe and his crew of merry men; and the end result is that we have no kitchen. Yesterday, we had a dispirited, disheartened, forlorn kitchen; today we do not even have a dead kitchen. After the work that was done there’s nothing left but the kitchen sink, and that’s disconnected.

Demolition is about half complete, I’d guess; and what was uncovered wasn’t nearly as interesting as I’d hoped, despite the jackhammers. Seriously—jackhammers. When your kitchen cabinets are made of bricks and mortar, you need jackhammers to take them out.

Seriously—bricks and mortar. It’s—it was—as picturesque as all get out, but not especially practical. I’ll try to get some pictures up later.

Forlorn

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All humor aside, it’s somewhat heartbreaking to see the old kitchen looking so empty and forlorn.

That sounds odd, I’m sure; but our kitchen isn’t just a kitchen, it’s also the dining room, and it’s really the heart of the whole house. And it’s looked more or less the way it does now—or, rather, the way it did last week—for virtually all of my life. Now it’s empty, and I’ll never eat in the old kitchen again. It’s sad.