The Home Stretch

We're in the home stretch with the renovations. Great news-- the countertop installation has been moved up to Wednesday-- it was originally scheduled for Friday. The painter came in and touched up some rough spots in the bathroom and kitchen. Other than that, the kitchen is pretty much the same as it's been for nearly a week. Having built and installed kitchens for a living at one time in my life, I'm at a loss as to why they waited until last Thursday to measure for the countertops; that was something we did early in the project when I did it-- in fact, it was done before anything else. Whatever.



Yesterday, after dropping Adam off at my ex's home, Kim and I ran out to the IKEA in Schaumburg, hoping to solve some specific furniture problems. We met with success. We found a birch countertop that was not only exactly what we were looking for-- it had bonuses-- two sets of shelves underneath, and three drawers. I'll include a pic after I drag it from the basement and put it together after the counters are installed. It'll function a lot better that the garden bench I had there before. We also got a couple of matching birch and metal stools with backs. It'll be a nice place to sit and have breakfast, answer email on my laptop, sit with Kim and have a chat and a glass of wine, or sit with Adam or Mel and talk.

The bathroom looks better.



They were originally supposed to put a cheap plastic insert into the shower, but realized that they couldn't because of the window. Happily, they decided to instead put ceramic tile in there. They also used some of the tile to make a splash-guard over the new sink.

They also put some shelves in.



One bone-headed thing that they did was to cut the pipe for the bathtub the wrong length. Consequently we can use the bathtub, but not the shower right now. How they're going to fix this will be interesting. At least until tomorrow, the faucet in the bathtub is a pipe coming out of the wall.



One other score last night was a table and chairs for the back porch to replace the weathered set I'd thrown out recently. The table is metal with a granite top. The chairs match it and fold up. We'd stopped at Target and Menard's on the way home. It was the last set Menard's had-- being that it's near the end of the season, we weren't sure we'd find anything at all. Both IKEA and Target were tapped out of garden sets.

Keep your fingers crossed. A lot's going on this week. With any luck, they'll have the renovations done by Friday, and Kim and I will be sitting out on the back porch at our new table and chair set, relaxing-- and maybe celebrating-- over a couple of glasses of red wine. Details to follow.