MelissaH

Some of the issues we've run into so far: a quirky electrical system, structural stuff in less-than-perfect locations, and deliveries not arriving within their windows. The structural stuff we can't do a whole lot about. We've had to relocate the range two inches closer to the dining room, because otherwise the hood's duct would have been right at a ceiling joist. This isn't a problem, because we built some wiggle room in to the design. It just means that we'll need to figure out whether to put the two inches between the range and the cabinet, or between the cabinet and the door. It also means that we'll lose two inches of the countertop overhang we'd planned. Again, it's not a big deal: there will still be about six inches of overhang. In fact, until yesterday, I didn't even know that a little bit of overhang was in our kitchen plans, but we have the extra little bit of butcher block, and we have the extra little bit of space, and my dear wonderful husband realized that an overhang would be a great place to clamp the pasta machine. (Yes, I still hand-crank mine. We don't use it often enough to warrant anything fancier.) I also include the vent stack pipe we found in the structural category; there's a bathroom just on the other side of the wall from where the oven used to be, and in the process of putting in new outlets and switches we found the vent pipe for the toilet. So we had to move the locations of things a little bit, so we didn't try to use the toilet's vent pipe as part of the electrical system of the kitchen. No big deal. As far as the quirky electrical system: the house is over 40 years old. We've found a couple of places where the original electricians ran three-wire cable through the walls, and then split the red and black lines to two separate circuits and breakers but used the same neutral (white) wire for both the circuits. It worked fine, but has caused some major headaches when we started to trace things and figure out what went to what. In a couple of cases, things that we'd expected would be cold actually still had power. (Example 1: the back wall of one of the boxes. It was a case where the cable was split, and one circuit was off but the other wasn't. No harm, though.) We think we've found all the split cable circuits, and separated them from each other. For most of the kitchen, we're running brand-new everything, so both of us spent time pulling wires yesterday, and things are pretty much as far as they can go without having the lights here or the power on. On deliveries: we were told that the range, hood, and dishwasher would be delivered on Thursday afternoon (two days ago) between 2 and 6 PM. Which was fine; we cleared our schedules and made sure that the path upstairs was cleared. The delivery company had both my office phone and my cell phone, and I kept calling and calling my office voice mail but never had anything there. We waited and waited---nothing. Finally at 6:30, I called the delivery company, and was told that they were at the stop before us. Fifteen minutes later, the truck finally showed up. The dishwasher was pretty easy, and only took one guy to bring up. All the various bits and pieces of the hood, and the smaller boxes of range parts, were also relatively easy. But the range itself was an absolute beast, as we'd expected. Because of the way our split-entry house is laid out, the 350 pound range had to come into the foyer and get lifted over the half-wall separating the stairs up and stairs down. And that was a really tight fit, so the staircase wall got slightly banged up. (Not a big deal; we have plenty of other drywall to fix next week anyway.) At one point, my husband even had to get in to provide a little bit of extra muscle on the stairs. Eventually the range made it all the way upstairs where we'd wanted it for now: just on the other side of the wall from where it will wind up in the completed kitchen. We put a cardboard box on top of it, so the cats don't investigate too much and so that we could then put the hood on top and open the pathway through the living room again. Right now, the living room is an absolute wreck, between the range and hood, the stuff in boxes, and the pieces of various half-built cabinets. I don't necessarily mind deliveries coming at 6:45 PM. I don't even mind deliveries taking an hour to get everything into the house, especially when they do a relatively good job. But I do mind, tremendously, when they know it's going to be later than they'd originally said, and they have phone numbers to call, but they make no effort at all to contact me! Obviously, someone in a dispatch office somewhere has a schedule of some kind written out. They know the order in which they'll be making the deliveries. They also are figuring on X amount of time to make each of the deliveries on the schedule. So if they get somewhere early in the afternoon and the way isn't cleared, they need to take down a door, the homeowner needs to move furniture out of the way, or whatever it is that takes longer than the dispatcher's estimate, call me and let me know that the delivery schedule's now half an hour late, and don't expect to see people until such-and-such a time! Is this so much to ask? This morning we've been dealing with more electrical untangling, and also working out hood details. We went with the Monogram restaurant-style hood, which is set up to take 10-inch vent ducting. Our local hardware store carries 10-inch ducting, but only in 2-foot lengths. They don't have a good cap for the duct after it goes through the roof, or flashing for where it comes through the roof, or the other stuff we'd need to finish the vent system, though. (Neither does anywhere else in town.) We can get 60-inch lengths of 8-inch duct, and the accessories for 8-inch ductwork, but not the adapter to step down from 10 inches to 8 inches. Furthermore, we're now debating whether we'd be better off going straight up and through the roof, or if we should instead bend and come out through a small gable area. Therefore, on Monday we're going to call our local HVAC contractors and see if they can tell us where to get the stuff we'll need to plumb in the hood, and what they'd recommend as far as the best way to run the vent ducts from the hood to the outside. My husband's asking for my help, and tells me I should probably turn off the computer. This can only mean more games with walkie-talkies and circuit tester. MelissaH

We are now into the electrical system. My husband's been up and down to the attic today, running wires hither and yon, and trying to make sense out of the existing wiring. Earlier today, we spent a couple more hours (and many more $$$) at Lowe's, getting mostly electrical goodies (switches, lights, yards and yards of wire, outlets, screwcaps, the works) as well as a little piece of drywall and other drywall patching supplies. The electrician will be back on Monday to connect things up, and we'd like to have all the internal wiring in place in the meantime. Our electrician is also certified to run gas lines, so he'll do that on Monday as well. We've tweaked and tweaked the electrical plan, making sure we'll have sufficient outlets and being sure the switches are in logical places. We'll have a total of 11 recessed cans, in two rows, evenly spaced except for the "missing" light right over the side doorway where nothing (other than traffic) will happen. The four cans in the closed end of the kitchen plus the unpaired can by the sink will be on one dimmer switch. The three cans on the window side of the kitchen will be on a second dimmer switch, and the three cans opposite will be on the third dimmer switch. We decided in the end not to bother with a pendant light over the baking area (we decided that AFTER the drywall had been cut, so now I get two more electrical outlets instead! ), because we'll be able to run undercabinet lighting all the way across. (Furthermore, if the shelves are made of anything but glass, the light from up above wouldn't get down to where it's needed anyway.) This leaves us with one pendant light over the sink, and in the end we decided that the 50+ inches of open space between the two runs of wall cabinets merited more than one pendant light. So at Lowe's this morning, we picked up a linear triple fixture, and three UFO-shaped shades to go on that fixture (2 yellow and 1 red). This fixture takes bulbs with a small base, and we were able to find 40 W round bulbs to fit. There are compact fluorescents with the small base as well, but they're bullet-shaped, and I think the round bulb will look better. (Tangent: we'd also looked at a fixture that takes normal old bulbs. But the shades were plain old white bell-shaped glass. It looked like the sort of thing you'd put in if you were fixing up a house to put it on the market: new but rather impersonal. I like our UFOs, enough to deal with the hassles of a not-normal bulb.) For dimmer switches, we went with kind of fancy ones that you tap on and off, and have a pre-set level. But if you tap the switch twice, the lights go on full blast. And for the garbage disposal switch? That's a standard old-fashioned switch, the only one in the kitchen. All the light switches will be the big rocker-style switches, the kind that are easy to bonk on with an elbow if need be. So Darcie B and Smithy, I think I've won this one. The big reason my husband wanted the disposal switch in the cabinet was so that it couldn't be turned on by accident. Having the different kind of switch should make it obvious, and we can always put a little flip-up cover on if we want to be even more obvious about it. I'm happy. We haven't ordered under-cabinet lights yet. But my husband put together one of the wall cabinet boxes, so now we know that the bottom of the cabinets are completely straight all the way across, and attaching a light longer than the cabinet won't pose a problem. (Eeeek: weird thought! We were planning to leave the area of shelves between the wall cabinets un-lit from below, originally. I hope we have enough of the light valance to cover the opening. Although if we had planned to do the returns on both sides, it shouldn't be an issue.) We also now have a mark on the wall showing where the bottom of the wall cabinets will come down to, mainly so my husband knew where to cut the drywall to put outlets and switches. After Lowe's, we stopped at a grocery store since we were on that side of town anyway. We've been invited to a picnic tomorrow, and were asked to bring soft drinks, so we got some stuff and a bag of ice to chill it down. Everything's resting in a big cooler for the duration. While we were there, I asked my husband what he wanted to eat tonight. He wants Thai, so that means I won't have to do dinner dishes for two days in a row! So far, the part that's getting to me most is NOT the cooking facilities. It's the &^%$ little barsink I have to use to do dishes in! I'm hoping that things continue to go smoothly, and that we're able to get back upstairs sooner rather than later. MelissaH

I know there are places that sell the yummy white powder. Has anyone ever used it for homemade cheese popcorn? Does it taste as good as the bought stuff? How much butter do you need to add, to make the yummy white powder stick? And no, the orange powder isn't nearly as yummy. MelissaH

The electrician came to consult yesterday. We're going to be able to put our new subpanel in the utility room, as we'd wanted! This is particularly good because it means we'll be able to save on wire, running the new circuits. Everything kitchen-related will be in the new subpanel, and because we'll be moving some things from the main breaker box to the subpanel, we'll be able to open up some spaces in the main box for things like a 220V circuit for the tablesaw! Yesterday, my husband also opened up a little bit of the subfloor, to see what was down below. The subfloor is actually two layers of subfloor. but we liked what we saw: it will be really easy to run wires from the kitchen into the utility room because the chase is completely clear. My husband is currently working on getting wiring in place. We may be able to start cleaning up the drywall by the end of the weekend! MelissaH

Thanks, Darcie. I think the panic's over. My husband told me where he was planning to order the recessed cans from (USA Light) and I took a look at their under-cabinet lights. And their Web site specifically says that their lights are designed to be installed permanently and hard-wired to the circuit. The recessed cans will be ordered sometime tomorrow. One more little detail, something those of you with IKEA cabinets may be able to help us with: are the upper cabinets flat across the bottom? My husband commented that we probably wouldn't be able to mount a 12-inch light in a 12-inch cabinet, and I wondered why you couldn't just put the lights across multiple cabinets. It seems to me that it would be really tedious to have to match many small sections of light to the sizes of each cabinet. If I can get an answer about the cabinets in time, we may be able to include the undercabinet lights in the order with the recessed cans. Today's little surprise: The wooden casing came off the side doorway, the one that we weren't willing to close in because it's the main route between kitchen and stairs. Underneath, we found some of what we believe to be the original paint color. Today it would probably be called mustard. Back when it was put it, it was probably called harvest gold. As for me, it reminds me of what was in my cousin's two-month-old baby's diaper. I won't be sorry to see that go. My husband talked to the electrician, who will be stopping by tomorrow sometime to discuss adding the subpanel that we'll need. In the meantime, my husband's working on the corner cabinets, adding the nonwimpy shelves and turntables we want. The plywood for those will be delivered either tomorrow or Thursday. The range, hood, and dishwasher will arrive on Thursday afternoon between 2 and 6 PM, or so the company says. This afternoon I cleared a path to where they'll rest until we're ready to put them in. We'd forgotten about the double-trap situation in the kitchen sink. We might need to ask a plumber to help clean that up, but there's plenty of time before we'll be ready to think about running water. My husband went over to look in on our friend's cat this afternoon. Said cat was rather upset with me, because I spent nearly 3 hours there yesterday (productive hours, making a dish of mac and cheese, another of lasagna, and four baked potatoes to boot since the oven was on and there was room) but didn't let him go O-U-T. Tux doesn't particularly like anybody other than his mistress, but he's particularly un-fond of me and my husband both. I got an earful yesterday, and this afternoon he picked up with Casey right where he'd left off with me. I'll probably be back at it tomorrow. If I plan it right, I'll scoop the mac and cheese and the lasagna into two-person servings and freeze them before I go over, so I can use the big sink in our friend's kitchen to wash the pans. MelissaH

Help! The ugly under-cabinet lighting issue has come back to rear its head. Apparently I surprised my husband when I said that not only do I want them ALL THE WAY AROUND the kitchen, but that I also want them to have wall switches (rather than just the little rocker switches on the individual lights) for the three sections of light. I'd kinda thought that was normal, when you had lights you also had light switches. I envision one section from the fridge around to the shelves over the baking area; a second section (with its own switch) from the baking area around to the sink; and a third bank of lights from the sink down to the end (again, with its own switch). My husband hadn't realized that I wanted the third bank of lights, because he thought the recessed cans in the ceiling would take care of lighting the workspace there. I'm not convinced that the cans won't just shed shadows onto the countertop, and so I at least want it to be easily possible to add them in later if shadows are an issue. Anyway, I think I've settled on fluorescent lights, because (1) they're cooler (thermally) than halogen, (2) they're less expensive than xenon, and (3) they're possible to change after the fact, if necessary. But all the fluorescents I remember seeing are the kind that you plug in to an outlet, and then use the integrated rocker switch directly on the light body to turn on. Anyone know of a source for undercabinet lights that you can hard-wire directly in? Or does anyone know if it's possible to modify a plug-in light with an integrated switch to be hard-wired into a normal switch? Should I be saving these questions for the electrician later tonight? MelissaH

The floor is now getting some serious ammunition: the heat gun came home from the lab! As for me? A friend and I just got back from a pleasant little bike ride, my first of the year. Now, to the lawnmower. (Grass is food for some organisms, right? ) MelissaH

As of now, about 2/3 of the flooring has been removed, and the wallpaper backing is now gone. My wonderful husband worked on floors for several hours yesterday, including bashing a thumb open, and finally called it quits at about 3 PM. The cats dealt with the noise remarkably well. I'm really glad we're doing a floating floor. Otherwise, we should have bought stock in the companies that make self-leveling compound. This morning, he's in at the office, working on a presentation he'll give to some of the summer students tomorrow. I took advantage of the empty kitchen to get in there myself with a scraper and spray bottle filled with warm water, to get rid of the paper backing from the wallpaper. The backing's all gone, but much of the glue still remains. I scraped off what I could, but the walls will need a washing down and I don't know where the TSP substitute is. So, when my husband gets home, I'll take care of the rest of it, unless he's going to be back beating on flooring. If that's the case, I'll mow the lawn to stay out of his way. Wallpaper is evil! MelissaH

Did I say the barsink wasn't too bad for doing dishes? I'll need to get a nice low chair to sit in before long, since I hadn't reckoned on the sink's height (or lack thereof). By about 2 PM today, we'd gotten nearly everything out of the kitchen and had even vacuumed most of the junk up. Some interesting notes: * The "faux brick" is actually NOT faux! They took half-inch slices of real gen-yoo-wine red bricks, and glued them onto the wall with something black along the lines of tar. They came off relatively easily, with a prybar banged with a hammer. We'll definitely need to do some drywall patching, though, and certainly a skim coat of plaster or mud over the debricked area. The good news is that we probably won't need to completely redo any of the drywall. *We actually had three, count 'em, THREE layers of sheet flooring. There was the one we had always seen, which was only glued at the edges and would have come off in one big sheet had we been able to maneuver it down the stairs and out to the dumpster. We couldn't, so we got out the utility knife. Beneath that was the red mosaic stuff that we unearthed when we removed the semicircular shelves on the end of the cabinet. That also seems as though it will come up without too much of a fight. But the surprise was beneath that, we found what was apparently the original floor, some kind of pastelly ugly floor. *We found no fewer than three different versions of shelf paper in all the various cabinets. They're all ugly, and various shades of rust, avocado, and harvest gold. Someone at one time thought it would even be a good idea to run the paper up the insides of the drawers, glue exposed, so that the screws holding the knobs in were covered. I got to use my own utility knife to expose the screws so I could remove the knobs and add them to the collection. Our local Lowe's doesn't have the cans in the size we were looking for, for renovations and able to be in contact with insulation. We may be able to use new construction IC cans, though, depending on what we find in the attic. Otherwise, we'll have to order them from somewhere. Right now, as far as outlets, it looks like we'll be going with regularly and liberally spaced duplex or quad outlets along all the walls. Since we have walls to put outlets on, we're in a somewhat different situation than our friends with the beautiful enormous island with the power strips. I'm still wavering between xenon and fluorescent under-cabinet lighting. I can waver for a bit, though: those won't go in for a while, and can be done well after the rest of the kitchen is completed if need be. (I hope it won't, though!) Dinner tonight was in fact Mexicanoid, cooked indoors on our single electric burner because it's been yucky and raining all day. We also heated up some black refried beans in the microwave, and I chopped up a bit of colby-jack cheese, half a tomato, and some lettuce. We rolled it all up in flour tortillas. My husband added some salsa to his, but I didn't feel the need for any additional heat since we'd used a hot-and-spicy taco seasoning. The cooking was easy, but the cleanup made my back ache a bit. I think I know which cutting board I'll be using until I have a big sink again: it's the biggest one that's small enough to rinse well in the barsink. Coming upstairs after dinner, doing the dishes, and dark, I realized that the upstairs hall light is not working. Must investigate whether it's just got a dead bulb, or if it's on one of the kitchen circuits that's turned off. A hallway light that's out of commission could get to be a pain in the butt, because when the sun goes down, it gets dark in the hallway! Tomorrow's tasks: remove all the old flooring (get out the dust masks!), and get the electrical completely planned out so that we know exactly how many circuits will need to be run, and therefore how much wire we'll need to buy. (We're waiting to see what the electrician says about locating the subpanel: whether it needs to go in the garage right next to the main panel, or if it can go into the utility room where it will be much closer to the kitchen, meaning less wire required per new circuit.) I'm guessing that I'll probably be spending at least some of the day on the stepstool, armed with a spray bottle and a wide putty knife: I was able to pull off the outermost vinyl layer of the one remaining section of wallpaper with my bare hands, but the paper backing and glue residue are still on the wall. Historically, we've been able to get rid of most of the backing pretty easily by spritzing with water, letting it soak in for a minute, and then scraping the wall with a nice wide flat blade. Once all the paper's gone, if it looks like a lot of glue residue is left behind, we'll go back and wash with TSP substitute. (We tend to think about phosphates a lot, this close to one of the Great Lakes.) No sense in thinking too much about patching drywall yet, because we'll need to make more holes to deal with the electrical. And at some point tomorrow, we need to look in on our friend's feline beast, who doesn't like anyone particularly. We'll also need to go food shopping sometime this week, so I can use someone else's oven to make lasagna and whatever else I come up with. My own oven is now in pieces in the dumpster. Good riddance! MelissaH

Nina C. and coquus, thanks for your thoughts on food. I'd forgotten about spanakopita, but about a month ago we ate the last of the spinach-and-cheese phyllo triangles we'd made a while ago. They reheated reasonably well in the toaster oven. It's been raining here today. I'd considered grilling dinner tonight, but it's chilly and cold and damp, so something indoors might be more in order. My husband predicted that our pantry and freezer supplies will dwindle over the summer. Maybe Mexicanoid for tonight, since we have lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and cheese? (Burgeroid is what we call the frozen bags of veggie crumbles, just as the spreadable butter substitutes my husband grew up with and still prefers for spreading on toast have become butteroid, and all the small breads with holes in the middle available around here are bageloids. When burgeroid is used as a substitute for ground beef in combination with taco seasoning, it long became known in this house as Mexicanoid. And since we discovered how well Mexicanoid works for us, we almost never do "Mexican" with real ground beef, although we certainly do our share of other, more authentic, Mexican cuisine, although we probably won't be doing much of that this summer. In general, we've found burgeroid substitutes reasonably well for ground beef, as long as you aren't cooking it for too long or trying to keep the cooked leftovers around for a second meal, since in either case they get a mushy texture that neither of us likes. But for quick-and-dirty meals when neither of us has much time or inclination to cook anything fancy, Mexicanoid (either rolled up in tortillas, or dolloped onto chips to make nachos, with other appropriate stuff added as well) fits the bill for us. For nights when we grill, we've also discovered that Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers fit nicely into a tortilla as well, when halved and the cut side is nestled into the tortilla fold. As long as you don't expect it to taste like a real meat burger, which definitely has its place in our book, it's pretty good, really easy, and involves minimal cleanup.) The bar sink isn't great for doing dishes, but it's far from impossible. While we were on the east side of town, we considered a trip to the grocery store, but decided that we'd wait till tomorrow when the new ad comes out, and see if anything good goes on sale. I'll be getting lasagna fixings (already have mac and cheese fixings) and whatever else strikes my fancy, to cook and clean up in the real kitchen I'll have access to next week. The grocery store has rectangular cooked but not browned pizza shells in their refrigerated section, which they sell in packs of two. We did a test run with those on the grill during finals week when we were both busy and didn't have time to think about cooking, and discovered that you can do a respectable pizza on the grill using one of the shells from the store, pre-grated cheese, and whatever sauce and add-ins are on hand. One shell feeds us for two nights, so a pack of two means four meals. The shells freeze well. I suspect that's going to be our M.O. for summer pizza. Last night, we ate from paper plates. We assembled the salad out of the contents of two fridges: leaf lettuce, red pepper, cucumber, grape tomatoes, lunchmeat, feta cheese, two kinds of olives (big and green stuffed with lemon and orange zest, and small black oil-cured), and a dressing made from lemon juice, walnut oil, and a blob of raspberry dijon mustard. We heated some crusty rolls from the grocery store in the toaster. For dessert, from plastic cups: vanilla ice cream, made from heavy cream, half-and-half, sugar, a healthy glug of vanilla, and whatever else was added to the freezer bowl since I wasn't in the room at the time that happened. Eaten with Hershey's dulce de leche syrup, which Anne and I love but my husband claims tastes like sawdust...and he oughta know! We did see some lights flickering with both the toaster and the ice cream machine on last night, and this morning the coffee maker cycling also made the lights cycle. We haven't had to reset any breakers yet, though. Breakfast this morning was downstairs. Or at least the cereal and bowls were downstairs: the milk is still upstairs in the fridge because we didn't do anything about getting a small one to go downstairs (and now don't really have a good place for one). After breakfast, I removed all the knobs from the doors and drawers. They're destined for eBay. This morning, we realized that it gets really dark in the kitchen when the power is turned off. So Lowe's got more of our money, in exchange for a stand with two halogen worklights. The stand will migrate down to the garage workshop eventually, to give my husband better light down there. (The outlets on the non-cabinetted side of the kitchen are apparently on different circuit(s?) than the ones for the stove, oven, and cabinet-side outlets. We left those on for now, because it makes for a better place to plug in the worklight.) We also got a cat's paw-type prybar, because the one we'd had was a bit big for many of the kitchen jobs. The new one works well on things like molding and to yank cabinets out of their moorings. We'll see how well a job it does on faux brick veneer. If that doesn't come off easily, we'll have more drywall work to do than we'd initially anticipated...but it will mean that running electrical stuff will be easier. Before starting the heavy-duty demo, we used the adjustable poles we'd gotten and some old sheets to wall off the open end of the kitchen, to try and keep dust down. So far the cats are both doing OK with everything: Lyon's been sleeping on "his" bed, and Leo's spent a bunch of time on top of the bookcases downstairs. We'll know when Leo's had enough of the noise, because he'll vanish into my closet. The kitchen cabinets are currently on their way out: all the uppers are gone except the one over the oven, and the tall cabinet that had been next to the fridge. On the back side of the tall cabinet, we found a packing label that said "September 10, 1962" and the company's name, "Gregg and Sons." We knew the house had been built in 1962, but now we know about when things were being finished up inside. I took a picture of it, but we haven't even gotten around to downloading our Belgium class trip photos yet. To get the tall cabinet to move, my husband first had to take out the molding around its base. The first piece took some effort, but after that, the other two sections popped off relatively easily. Underneath the cabinet is just plain old plywood subfloor, so the cabinets obviously went in before the flooring. To get the uppers out, the soffit had to go. We figured that would probably be the case, because when we got the new fridge two years ago and needed about half an inch more space than the cabinets on top of the fridge permitted, we had to destroy that soffit to get rid of the cabinets. So my husband took a hammer and started bashing away at the soffit, to get a look inside. We didn't get any big surprises, and these cabinets came out about as easily as the ones over the fridge area had. With our first look inside, we also confirmed that the soffit was added after the fact, as the wall behind the soffit was nicely drywalled. I hate soffits, and I really don't understand the point of adding one afterwards! I heard my husband buzzing away downstairs in the garage just now, with what sounded like the router, maybe? No clue what he's doing. It's quiet now, so maybe it's time for a lunch break? Or maybe not: I just heard some crashing so I peeked out the office window and saw the upper corner cabinet with the turntable resting on its side in the dumpster. And now there's more noise coming from the kitchen, so work's underway again, probably this time on either the oven or the lowers. The cooktop's already in the dumpster! MelissaH

We're underway! Let me backtrack, briefly. Much more, including pictures, will be forthcoming. We took 14 university students on a ten-day trip to Belgium, getting home on Wednesday at about 5 PM. The trip was fantastic, and they all seemed to enjoy themselves for the most part. But that's a story for another thread. The relevant part here: we were able to get in as stand-bys for the earlier JetBlue flight from JFK to SYR, which meant that we got home much earlier than 1 AM. This is important because it meant that we were both functional yesterday and today, albeit more than a little jet-lagged. The weekend before we left, my mom came to visit on her way to a ceramics workshop in the Ithaca area. Because she and my dad are moving out of the house I grew up in, they were looking for a new home for their dining room table (40 inches wide, 74 inches long with no leaves, but with two leaves that each add 19 inches). So along with all the cabinets in the garage, we now have the dining room table and four chairs to go with. Also that weekend, my husband was driving back from Michigan, and he brought some more IKEA goodies including four more chairs to go with the table, door pulls, and slow-close drawer bumpers. So, because we were functional yesterday, we spent much of the day packing the kitchen up. The things we thought we'd use, we put into plastic bins. The stuff we thought we wouldn't need, we put into cardboard boxes. Most of the boxes are stacked and in the spare bedroom, but a few with the fragile stuff are on the mantel, where they'll stay for the duration. We also made a trip to Syracuse yesterday, because we needed to pick up the floor. The floor is now in our living room, acclimating. The red accent tiles for our floor are exactly the same red as the new chairs from IKEA (Bonus: we got to go to Wegman's yesterday!) We finished the last of the packing (and purging) this morning. (Jet lag is a wonderful thing: it makes even those of us who are not morning people jump out of bed wide awake at 5 AM!) Then we went to our local Lowe's to get floor underlayment and pick out a paint color (current choice: a very pale yellow) and look more at lights and backsplash tiles (shiny black 2-by-6-inch with bullnose edge, we think) and get a plastic mat for under the dish drainer downstairs, and a few other things I don't remember in my currently foggy state. This afternoon, we relocated the refrigerator to the dining room, right next to the window. We'll find out before long whether the outlet it's plugged into is on the same circuit as anything in the kitchen. This afternoon, we also got the sink and the four turntables that will be used to modify the base corner cabinets from IKEA. The dumpster will arrive in about an hour. We're expecting the stove, hood, and dishwasher to arrive probably late next week. Demolition will begin tomorrow! In the meantime, I'm going to have one last hurrah in the kitchen by preparing a sort of Greekish salad. Our friend Anne is joining us; we'll get to borrow her kitchen for the next week and I plan to make a batch of lasagna to freeze in portions and microwave later, maybe a baked mac-n-cheese to freeze in portions, and whatever else comes to mind. Any other ideas for foods that are good to eat in the summer, but freeze and reheat well? MelissaH

I'd go for the vinegar treatment myself. Most of the "fishy" smells are from amines (chemical compounds containing nitrogen), which are bases. If you treat bases with acids, you neutralize the two and make a salt. Since the salts are not volatile, you don't smell the amines anymore. Furthermore, the salts are likely to be water-soluble and relatively easy to wash away. Chemistry at work! MelissaH

Oh, I wish I could get such nice looking squid! I wish I could get any squid worth buying at all! MelissaH

The floor (Marmoleum Click) is ordered. We decided to go with a pattern that is mostly Silver Shadow (because it's lighter than the Serene Grey we'd originally been considering) but with a Bleecker Street red "zipper" up the middle of the aisle between the cabinets. We'll lay the floor across the short way of the kitchen. That way, we'll be able to use almost entirely the 3-foot-long planks of gray, with only two boxes of red squares. I'm hoping we can get the old vinyl torn up without also destroying the subfloor. We've also started to deconstruct the kitchen. The table that used to be next to the refrigerator has been relocated downstairs near the barsink in the family room, as has the IKEA kitchen cart. We've started to sort through all the stuff, to figure out what we want to keep available and what can be boxed and stored for the duration. I'm already missing having a surface next to the fridge, to make it easy to load or unload. (I'm anxiously awaiting more word from the temporary kitchen thread that wonderbread just started, to see if any good ideas come up.) I'm debating whether it's worth keeping the Rubbermaid containers available. The other choice is storing all leftovers in plastic bags and/or whatever gladware-type containers we deem necessary to acquire. Our water source for the duration of the remodel will be the bar sink in the family room. We took the bar out, because it divided the family room and made it feel really small. But the sink was attached to the wall, not the bar, and it has a bit of countertop next to it that was covered up by the bar. (I'll try to take a picture in the near future.) The sink is about the size of a bathroom sink, but it's stainless and it has a "catcher" in the drain so we don't need to worry about sending gunk into the pipes. It'll be adequate for the short term, but I'm still planning to minimize the amount of dishes that will need to be washed. I sometimes wish we had more options for take-out food in this little town. There are a couple of Italian restaurants, but to me their stuff is more suited to cold winter days than the middle of summer. We have pizza, of course. The burrito place here is only about half as good as Chipotle, and it hasn't gotten any better over the time it's been open, so we don't consider them a viable alternative. We have a decent Thai place, as well as OK if a little greasy Chinese. (I prefer Thai.) And Rudy's, the fish place on the lake, will also do take-out, but there's no reason not to just walk there and eat in rather than taking it out. I sometimes envy those of you who live in cities with take-out choice. Once the farmer's market starts up, we'll start to see some local produce also. That's always nice, especially since much of it won't require too much prep. We're currently taking bets on whether the faux brick on the walls behind the current cooktop and sink will come off without destroying the drywall we presume is underneath. But either way we win, sort of: if the drywall is in good shape, we don't have to redo it. If the drywall doesn't survive, the electric stuff will be easy to do. As far as heat for cooking: we'll have the Weber gas grill and the old propane 3-burner stove outside. Inside, we'll have the Black and Decker toaster oven we got for a wedding gift, as well as a microwave, the rice cooker, the crockpot, the electric water boiler kettle, and a single electric burner. These will probably all be set up on the cart, since that's closest to the wall with the electrical outlets. The table will be an adequate food prep area, and the space under the table will be for storage of drygoods and the equipment we want to keep available. We're thinking we'll keep a bunch of tongs, at least a couple of silicone spatulas, the pasta pot, a 3-quart saucepan with lid, and our crappy old non-stick frying pan that we'll probably toss out when we get the kitchen done available. We have a good supply of paper and plastic, to minimize the need for dishwashing. I've been vacillating on whether or not it's worth having a metal 9-by-13 pan available as well, to act as secondary containment for marinating meat in ziplock bags or in case I get the urge to try baking something like brownies in the grill. I'm also quite torn about whether or not to keep the KA mixer available: without an oven and with limited ability to clean up poofed-out flour, I'm not going to be baking anything touchy, but I'd like to have some kneading help available if I want to make some pizza or flatbread dough to grill. But we can get respectable rectangular pizza shells at our grocery store (one makes enough to feed us about 2 meals, appropriately topped) and we also have a pizzeria willing to sell us balls of their dough. I'm leaning towards packing the mixer at this point, much as it breaks my heart. And my friend Anne has one, as well as a range with a functioning oven, that I can probably use should the need descend upon me. We'll probably keep our chef's knives and a couple of paring knives out, as well as the instant-read thermometers and probes. Maybe a whisk and a pancake flipper too. The ice-cream scoop might be a good idea also...or we'll make a point of walking to Bev's on the lakeshore if we want ice cream. It's always a nice walk there, and it lessens the guilt somewhat. The fridge will get wheeled around the corner to the living room, at least until the kitchen is demolished, the utilities are done, the floor is laid, the walls and ceiling are painted, and the cabinets are into that end of the kitchen. At that point, we'll be able to set it back into its new home. We'll probably be pulling Rachael Rays, seeing how much refrigerated stuff we can get into our arms in one shot for each trip downstairs. Maybe that's another reason to keep the 9-by-13 pan available: to help shuttle cold stuff. Or maybe we see if we can acquire a cheap dorm fridge now that all the students are getting ready to move out at the end of the week so we have something downstairs. Our plan is to keep as much as possible in whatever drawers they're currently in, since the drawers can be stacked one on top of another somewhere out of the way. A bunch of other stuff is already in covered plastic bins. The other day at Big Lots, we got more plastic bins with lids, to hold the rest of everything that needs to be stored. (Note to self: might be a good idea to keep at least a little bit of flour and sugar available.) We've entered the clean-out-the-refrigerator phase. This week is the last week we'll have a kitchen to cook in! As far as lighting, I'm thinking xenon for under the counters. I like the ability to dim the lights there, if necessary. And the ones I looked at in our local Lowe's were most definitely less thermally hot than the comparable halogen lights. IKEA's not really an option, because we won't be anywhere near one until long after we'll be ready for the lights. MelissaH

Susan, Marlene, and Mike: This has been a wonderful blog, weather and all. I particularly enjoyed seeing the smoking and grilled pizzas. That, to me, is what tag-team blogging is all about. Thanks to all three of you! Marlene, I may have to try that broccoli gratin at some point. Have you ever tried cooking it in its pan on the grill, essentially turning the grill into an oven? But all of you: at least you HAVE a dishwasher to unload! My dishwasher is currently typing this note! (At least, for another three months, that is. By the end of August, I too should have a non-human dishwasher to unload. And then I can join your chorus. MelissaH

Back before we started packing up the kitchen, I decided to try making a cake featured in the May Cook's Illustrated magazine. It's the base for their Strawberry Cream Cake, but I didn't bother with the cream part, just the cake and some strawberries chopped up and tossed with the sugar. When I baked the cake, it wound up with a dense, greasy line close to the bottom. I know I've seen a list of cake troubleshooting somewhere, but I can't find it for the life of me now. Any guesses what I did wrong? Is it me or the recipe? (As an aside, I'll be keeping the recipe because my husband, who loves yellow cakes out of a box, said I'd hit the flavor dead-on. ) MelissaH

Matt, I would be interested in your recipe, particularly the ale barm part. My husband's a homebrewer, and I'm always looking for ways to make a direct connection between his beermaking and my breadmaking. (And the current eGCI course is also on homebrewing.) Could you please paraphrase and share? Thanks! MelissaH

This doesn't help much, I know, but I keep remembering the line from My Big Fat Greek Wedding: "What do you mean he don't eat no meat? Oh, that's okay. I make lamb." Good luck, and have lots of fun on your trip! MelissaH

Those of you with under-cabinet lighting: what kind of lights do you have? I'm concerned about the heat that a halogen light would generate, but I'm also not thrilled with the color of the fluorescent lights I've seen. I'm hoping that the under-cabinet lighting will be the major source of task lighting, and my husband's put me in charge of choosing the ones we'll use. Any advice? MelissaH

I'm particularly of the diet red raspberry, with a good squeeze of lime added so it's not quite so sweet. MelissaH

Friday morning, I was getting ready to head out to a conference in DC for the weekend. My husband grabbed me before I headed out the door, to say, "While we were in the faculty meeting, I got a call from the shipping company. I'll let you know what's going to happen." So, I headed to the airport, and while I waited for my plane, I talked to my mom. While I was talking to my mom, my husband called. The cabinets were due to arrive to them later that day, and they wanted to deliver them on Monday! Now, this wasn't in our plans: we'd hoped to have the cabinets delivered at the beginning of JUNE, not May! But he decided, and I agreed he was right, that it would be better to have the cabinets in our garage than to have them bouncing around a warehouse for a month. So yesterday morning at 9 AM, a semi backed down our street, and disgorged three pallets of cabinets for us. Luckily, they had a pallet lifter in the trailer with them. It didn't take long to get everything into the garage. One of the three pallets was obviously countertops. The other two were about waist-high with other stuff. We immediately noticed that one end of the countertops looked like it had been smashed in a little bit. We opened up the three countertop slabs to check them out, and discovered that a piece of styrofoam had taken the worst of the damage. One of the pieces has a bit of a nick, though. The good news is that we don't think it will be a big problem: we'll need to trim the countertop pieces to fit, and we should be able to cut off that edge without a problem. We didn't have any time to do anything else until after we got home yesterday. So yesterday evening, I worked on dinner while my husband went through and first compared what actually came to the packing list, and then compared the packing list to what we'd ordered. And out of nearly 200 packages, there was only one thing missing: a 24-inch base cabinet box. We got all the other parts (shelves, door, hinges, etc.) but there's no box to go there. It's not that big a problem, because this is likely to be the last cabinet to go in anyway, since it belongs next to the stove. The other things we couldn't find were the hinges to go with the two corner base cabinets. This morning, my husband called IKEA, to find out what was up with the hinges (the corner cabinets take different hinges than everything else, and they should be packed in the box), the missing cabinet (one will be on its way), and the nicked countertop (if it's a problem, we let them know and they'll send a new one). Tonight's a late night on campus for both of us, so nothing more's going to happen until Wednesday. But we still need to open all the boxes and be sure everything's OK. When we do that, we'll probably start grouping things by cabinet. We might even start putting some of the stuff together. The car's out of the garage until sometime this summer, since it's full of cabinets. Oh: when I got home on Sunday afternoon, I discovered that my husband had pulled the bar out of the family room! It had been a divider, about chest height, to wall off the sink from the rest of the family room. We still have a counter by the sink, and the whole length of that counter is now usable, even the two feet or so that were previously covered by the bar. We moved a shelving unit down to the end of the counter, and when we start the demo we'll relocate the kitchen cart downstairs, and we have a small table to help with prep space as well. The whole area is near the door to the patio, and we moved the bar itself outside (a little rain won't hurt it any, since we're planning to get rid of it) to help shield the old propane stove from the weather. I really like the more open feel of the family room without the bar! Tonight, we'll be going to Big Lots to get plastic tubs, to hold the stuff we'll pull out of the kitchen. It's getting much closer! MelissaH

This summer, should it ever get hot enough here to be an issue, I won't be using my oven because I won't have an oven. We're going to be totally renovating the kitchen, and my cooking will be limited to what I can do on the grill, toaster oven, or portable propane stove that dates back to when my husband's grandparents still had farms. If I get desparate enough, I might need to try a pan of brownies on the grill (Weber gas, from the generation before the Genesis series but the same general idea). MelissaH

The faucet and garbage disposal are here! MelissaH

Coquus, That's where the Marmoleum Click comes in. It's snap-together planks, easy to install, no seam sealing needed. We looked at sheet goods, but we couldn't do that ourselves. We'd also need to spend a lot of time working on preparing the surface for the flooring, since it would be glued down. While it might take us a little longer to put down the click floor than it would take a pro to put down a sheet, we won't have to put much time into floor prep, and we won't have to pay an installer. Owen, It all depends on your perspective. Where my parents live, there are only 2000 people in the entire county. For them, a trip to a town the size of Oswego counts as "going to the city." We haven't tried that one, because when we're in that neighborhood we tend to stick only to places betwee Ahn's grocery on Erie Blvd. at Teall and the DeWitt Wegman's (hey, if I'm driving 50 miles to get there, I'm going to make a point of getting some stuff that I can't get in Oswego. Their fish counter is miles better than anything at either of our grocery stores here or the Wegman's in Clay) and not wander too far. We've been relatively happy with the Korean dishes at Tokyo Seoul (can't speak for the Japanese dishes, since we haven't tried them). But if there's another good place in town, we'll have to investigate. We had a wooden bullnose on our Ohio kitchen's countertop. We might have considered something along those lines more, had this particular IKEA countertop not come with a round-over on the front already. Since neither of us sees much sense in running every single piece of countertop to rip off a rounded edge so we could put on something else, we'll just keep the factory round-over on these. Sounds nice! We're great fans of polyurethane finishes, and anything more that we need to build or refinish will be getting a few coats. It drives me bonkers when appraisers on the TV antique shows mourn the loss of the original finishes, since someone decided to put something practical like polyurethane on to make the piece more usable. (My in-laws' dining room table and secretary both have a beautiful polyurethane finish now. It might not be original or antique, and the pieces may have lost "value" to an appraiser, but to all of us in the family they're worth far more because they can (and are) used every day. Once we recover from the kitchen project, we may start thinking about a sideboard. The original motivation was to hold a set of china that my MIL picked up from an estate sale with us in mind, but we'll have tons of cabinet space in the new kitchen and may not need the extra storage, especially for things that we don't necessarily use every day. Then again, is there a such thing as too much storage? Bruce, We didn't have a problem in Ohio with the wooden added-on bullnose there. But that bullnose was well in front of the front edge of the cabinet, so it wouldn't have been an issue as far as liquid getting into the crack. And we never spill anything anyway. I'd like to be able to check out samples of floor, to see how they'd look in the kitchen. But we'd have to get them back relatively quickly, and each round trip from us to there is about 100 miles. We typically head to the Big City once a month or six weeks, and on every trip we run multiple errands, the things we can't do closer to home. And we won't have the lights in the kitchen until after the floor will need to be ordered. Fortunately for us, the floor place is close to a Home Depot, so we'll be able to bring our door along, borrow a piece or two of floor, and choose our backsplash and wall colors. We were really hoping to find a chunk of counter in our pattern waiting in the As-Is section. We struck out on that count. Oh well. I liked As-Is more when it was closer than 5 hours away. MelissaH

Yes, but Owen, you're blatantly ignoring the choices you make for your place in the social contract. You are a high intelligent, driven person. If tomatoes were higher on your list, you would make room or time for them. When you state, "I have no time, or access" you are leaving things unsaid. ← Owen, I'm with you. My husband and I are both teaching this semester. We're regularly on campus 10+ hours a day, and even when we aren't on campus we're working, as long as school's in session. Many days, when we get home we're both tired enough that even putting a pot of water on to boil seems like a lot of work. It's easier on those days to open a jar, to pair with a reasonable brand of dried pasta. Do we find cooking both therapeutic and recreational? Sure. Just not when we get home starving after 8 PM. Weekends? Those are for catching up on grading, lecture notes, exam writing, and all the other stuff that doesn't happen during the week. If we can make up a batch of sauce at some point and freeze in portions, great. But it's much easier to open a jar than to either plan enough ahead of time to take it out of the freezer, or to try and microwave-thaw it without giving yourself a major cleanup task. MelissaH