At some point after we moved into the house, I was rummaging around in one of the bottom pantry drawers, and found a hole cut carefully into the back of the cabinet, specifically to allow access to an electrical outlet. Why anyone would have a need to access an ancient electrical outlet buried behind a rather deep floor-to-ceiling pantry cabinet I do not know, but that really isn’t the relevant issue here. What was more shocking than finding the outlet in the first place was realizing that it was covered in wallpaper. Floral wallpaper. Extremely ugly floral wallpaper, to be exact.

They demolished the kitchen today, and the big pantry cabinet is gone, revealing not just one little outlet, but an entire wall covered in ugly floral wallpaper. And if you think just one wall was bad enough, I will note that this was apparently also lurking underneath all the baseboards around the room, which suggests that at one point the whole room sported this lovely floral design.

A close-up of the pattern, because it’s always nice to share.

Isn’t it *pretty*? I mean, seriously. Someone, at some point, chose that wallpaper. On purpose. Trying to imagine the combination of that floral print with the hideous brown tile with black grout just sort of makes me feel a little nauseous.

As for the rest of the demo, let’s just say that it’s obvious which group knew what they were doing. Case in point – it took three of us, armed with crowbars, pry bars and sledgehammers, nearly two hours to demolish one tiny little cabinet. It took a team of four guys eight hours to go from this:

to this:

Not only did they remove all remaining kitchen cabinets and countertops, they also stripped the dividing walls between the kitchen and the back porch down to studs, *and* they tore out all the ceiling in the back porch, as well as all the areas where they’ll be installing the new supporting beams. Here is what the back porch looks like now.

There used to be a low ceiling up there, complete with a pull-down staircase for attic access. The only way anyone’s getting into the attic at this point is with a very tall ladder. Those windows, though, are gorgeous. They’re single pane, quite possibly original to the house (the glass is very wavy, so it’s pretty old), and I cannot bear the thought of throwing them away, so tomorrow morning I will ask the contractor to please, please, save them for me. Don’t ask me what I intend to do with them – I haven’t gotten that far yet. I just cannot bear the thought of those gorgeous old windows being tossed into the trash.

And now the answer to the burning question that I know some of you have been dying to find out. Long term readers will recall that back in November I mentioned that Rosemary had started lurking in the kitchen, staring intently at the dishwasher. She would sit there, sometimes for hours, just staring at the base, for days at a time. Plus, more recently, that rather mysterious lump emerged in the wood floor directly in front of the dishwasher. So Richard and I have both been a bit apprehensive about just what might be lurking under there when they pulled it out today.

I am sorry to report that apparently the answer is…..nothing. There is nothing on the underfloor that indicates there has been any water damage. There are no holes through which some kind of critter might have been entering or exiting. It was just dusty, boring flooring, same as the dusty boring flooring that was lurking under everything else. So at that point, we really have no further clue as to what it was she found so gosh darn fascinating under there – if anything at all. After all, I have already established that these cats are very, very good at playing the especially freaky version of Made-You-Look.