Wednesday morning I took the kitchen plans down to the city. They told me that if I came in at 8am sharp there would be no line, and they were correct – I was whisked immediately to a desk to talk to one person who entered all my info into the computer and assigned me a permit number, and then to a second person who poured over my plans and asked a whole lot of questions. After an hour I left, clutching an in-progress permitting report, and a sheet of exactly one plan correction required. The good news is that it’s not a change to any of the plans; it’s only some additional documentation that is needed (because we’re removing structural walls and adding load-bearing beams, the city plan-check guy wants to see it written out exactly what type of foundation we currently have, so he can verify that our existing foundation is sufficient to handle the load). I spent the next two days bouncing phone calls back and forth between the engineer and the designer, as we all figured out just what was needed. So assuming that gets dealt with quickly (the designer said he should get me the plans back this week), we should be good to go on the permit.

This is good news because this weekend we met up with our contractor and after discussing schedules, and the amount of work that is going to be needed to the kitchen framed to the point where the cabinets can be installed, we’ve finally picked a start date. Next Monday, assuming all goes well with the corrected plans and the city building department does not pull a ‘oh, did we also forget to tell you to fix’ on me, the kitchen construction finally begins!

I have been having small moments of panic about the impending construction period, mainly because I am still not entirely sure where we are going to put everything that is *in* the kitchen in the meantime. It’s not just a question of packing everything into boxes – that’s the easy part of this whole thing. It’s the question of setting up a make-shift kitchen in the dining room; of figuring out how we can store all the dry goods so we can still get to them without creating a huge mess in the process. There is the issue of clearing out the guest room because they’re moving the doorway in there, and that’s also going to be their access to the bathroom, so anything left in that room is going to get pretty dirty and dusty and gross over the next few months. And of course there is also the issue of rigging up dust barriers in the dining room and the bathroom and more importantly, some kind of makeshift door at the base of the stairs so that, while we can continue to come and go as we please, the cats can not. The next few months are going to be extremely annoying to one particular disapproving little tortie cat (Checkers) because she is used to having the master bedroom pretty much to herself, while the rest of the cats prefer to hang out upstairs. I am already nervously predicting that some of us (me) are not going to be getting a lot of sleep for the first few weeks of this process until the cats work things out.

Ironically, the one thing I am not at all stressing about is how we are going to be handling food prep over the next few months. We already have a microwave and a coffee maker and a rice cooker and a veggie steamer. There’s an electric skillet tucked away in the back of a cupboard that is going to start getting a lot more use, and this afternoon we went out and bought a little toaster oven and some cute little pans that will let us continue to bake and broil. And Richard’s already looking forward to cracking open all his grilling cookbooks and trying out some new recipes. Really, the only thing we’re not going to be able to do for the next few months is boil anything, and to prepare for that, we’ll be cooking up a veritable mountain of pasta and stashing it in the freezer to tide us over in the meantime. We’re still working out the logistics for washing dishes, but we’ll figure something out (mainly because we’re both not comfortable with the idea of using disposables for that long a time period – too much waste).