The floor is DONE. You have no idea how happy this makes me. This past weekend we charged up both the Roomba and the Scooba and gave the kitchen, dining room, and living room a thorough sweeping and scrubbing. I can finally walk around the house without feeling that horrid grit under my feet. It’s a lovely, wonderful thing. In fact, not only is the floor itself installed, they also put in all the baseboards and the quarter-round trim, so except for a transition strip between the dining room and the kitchen room, that part of the remodel project is complete.

The dishwasher is installed, and we stood there and carefully read through the manual to figure out how to use it (this is becoming a trend with all the new appliances; in fact, I admit to being just a little bit intimidated by the microwave, because it also doubles as a convection oven and the manual for that puppy is thick). In honor of finally having a working dishwasher, we pulled out all the pretty new blue glass dishes, ran them through the dishwasher, and then we packed up all the old dishes in paper and stashed them in boxes for a friend to pick up later. I’m hoping that this coming weekend we’ll have some time to swing by the local thrift store, so we can drop off the old microwave, and the toaster oven, and a whole bunch of other random stuff I’ve purged from all the boxes of kitchen stuff, and our closets, and the house in general.

Even better than the dishwasher being installed, however, is the fact that on Monday they finally installed the new fridge. It’s kind of a bear to get into right now, since it doesn’t have its panels (and therefore its handles) yet, but once it reached its proper temperatures, we emptied the old fridge and arranged everything into the new fridge, and that means that the old fridge can finally be removed from the dining room and maybe, just maybe, by the end of the week the dining room can finally be free of anything kitchen related once and for all. Having the fridge installed is something we’ve been waiting for, mainly because it’s so nice to no longer have to move from room to room when doing something as simple as pouring myself a cup of coffee, or when trying to cook something.

Speaking of cooking, we’ve actually been doing a little of that lately, now that we finally have a completely functional kitchen (and I will note right now how awesome it is that both of us can be in the kitchen, at the same time, working on cooking or cleaning, without bumping into each other, or getting in each other’s way). Friday night Richard decided to find a recipe that used as many of our new appliances as possible, so he put together some chicken packets with peapods and peppers and shallots and garlic, and they were delicious. And this evening I put together this Potato and Corn Fritatta that was seriously awesome. The original recipe called for scallions, but I wanted to use up more of the shallots Richard bought for the chicken packets, plus there was one red bell pepper left that needed using, so I chopped that up and stirred that in with the potatoes at the last minute. We’ll be taking the leftovers for lunch tomorrow, and we’ll also definitely be making this again. Delicious.