They’ve been busy-busy in the kitchen the last week or so, although there hasn’t been much to photograph. Mainly it’s been all about the painting. We picked a gorgeous blue for the walls that looked amazing next to our little collection of tile and granite and cabinet samples, and I’ll adimt I was a little nervous that it would end up too dark, but it turned out exactly as we’d hoped. There was some initial confusion regarding the ceiling and what color it was supposed to be, but that’s all worked out now, and the ceiling is thankfully white. They finished off all the siding on the exterior, and put in all the framing around all the doors and windows, and there are even bulbs now in all the light fixtures (although we still don’t have actual light switches with which to turn those bulbs on, but that will come).

At this point, the initial phase of the work is nearly done, which means this week we moved on to phase two, which involved a wee bit of redecorating on our part. This morning Richard and I dragged the piano and the dining room table out of the dining room, and wedged them into the (much smaller) living room, in preparation for this:

That’s the view from the door of the office, into our dining room / temporary kitchen (note clever placement of refrigerator in front of main bay window, and assortment of alternative cooking implements lined up on either side) / staging area for the cabinets. Those four big boxes in the middle of the room are only the tip of the iceberg, because the kitchen currently looks like this:

The color on the walls isn’t nearly as dark as it looks in the picture but this is the best I can do right now (see earlier mention of lack of light switches). Inside that maze of boxes lies all of our new kitchen cabinets. Over the next week an industrious team of burly men will be unpacking and installing every single one of those. Conveniently, the box of knobs and pulls for all of those cabinets was waiting for me on the front porch when I got home, so somehow we managed to work that timing out just right.

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I finally gave up and pulled my two sorry little carrots out of the garden, since the tops had started to fade, and I wasn’t entirely sure how one tells if carrots are ‘done’ anyway. We’ve toyed with the idea of filling in some of the empty spaces with a few new starts – maybe a cucumber or even a squash, but so far we haven’t managed to work up any enthusiasm for that yet. The tomatoes, however, are still rampaging merrily along; in fact yesterday morning we harvested about four cups of assorted cherry tomatoes – most of them of the Black Cherry hybrid variety, since that one seems to be doing its best to outproduce the other three, and three more beautifully red regular tomatoes.

Last week’s harvest included two perfect green and yellow striped Green Zebras along with the usual red and cherry varieties, and the three remaining herb plants have finally decided to stop with the pouting and commence with the growing, so two nights last week consisted of some whole wheat spaghetti, a splash of olive oil, a liberal sprinkling of grated Parmesan, and these – tomatoes and basil, fresh from our garden. Delicious!