First off, hooray for the AT&T technician, who showed up, looked around briefly, and then replaced the wire which was loose, or cut, or something. I have my suspicions that somebody did something while they were mucking about with wiring, because the two times we’ve had it go out has been right after they’ve been doing wiring in the kitchen, but whatever. The point is, the phone line is finally working again, so, yay.
In other news, we have flooring. Ta da!
It’s bamboo – engineered, hand-scraped something or other – with a walnut stain that picks up a little bit of red from the lights and the cabinets just like we hoped. It’s not completely done (obviously, from the picture above), but enough is down that we can now avoid walking on the extremely dusty subfloor, something that makes me happier than I can possibly say.
In honor of having (some) flooring, I came home and promptly dragged out the wet Swiffer mop and spent about half an hour furiously mopping the floors to remove as much of that horrible white dust as possible. They put some kind of leveling stuff on the floor on Friday and then sanded it and ever since, the resulting dust has been unbearable. It’s the sort of fine grit that gets absolutely everywhere. We got a doormat to put at the entrance to the kitchen, but that doesn’t do a darn big of good, no matter how hard we wipe our feet going in and out, and of course the cats aren’t exactly big on wiping their paws either. I’ve tried to be very zen about the construction dust during this whole process because I knew that it was just going to be a part of our lives until the kitchen was done, but this was really getting to me. Granted, the cats are still likely going to insist on tramping around in the dusty parts, because cats are that kind of ornery (and you’ll see from the picture above that I *still* did not manage to get rid of all of it – that stuff is insidious!), but I can put up with a few sprinkled white paw prints here and there if at least we humans can avoid tracking any more of the stuff into the rest of the house.
They’ve put in most of the under-cabinet lighting, and it looks like there’s outlet strips lurking around on the counters so hopefully we’ll have those installed (we don’t have outlets on the walls – they’ll be outlet strips under the cabinets, behind the lights. Hidden. Very spiffy). Richard says they were going to try to install the dishwasher today except they didn’t have the proper washer or something like that, but I suspect we’ll get that in by the end of the week. Not sure when they’ll be putting in the refrigerator yet, since it can’t be installed until the floor is done, plus rumor has it that we managed to pick a brand of fridge that is a serious chore to install, but who knows, maybe by the end of the week we’ll get lucky on that too.
Everyone always wants to know when it’s going to be finished, but really, I have no idea. The guys who installed the granite apparently broke the hinges on the little pop-out drawer under the sink so that has to be fixed (according to our cabinet guy, who came out this week to see how things were going), and the light strip under one cabinet has to be special ordered, and there was an issue with our hood and the molding on top of the wall cabinets, so the cabnet guy had to come out and ponder that one too, but we’re getting there. Slowly. Especially now that there is flooring and 75% less nasty white gritty dust. It’s easy to return to being (mostly) cheerfully zen about the rest of the process now that I can finally be free of that dust.