Screw T.S. Eliot

With all due respect, January is the cruelest month. Thankfully it's almost over. I suppose I should've ordered a light box sooner, but instead I've spent the past month going to bed embarrassingly early, eating too many dark chocolate peanut butter cups and searching, to no avail, for a face mask that will make me look less than 93 years old. Anyway, my friends, we have almost conquered winter and I hope that we can get through the rest in whatever fashion suits you, whether that be lots of yoga, booze or zoloft.

That is all actually a long way of explaining my absence - I just didn't have a good post in me. I'm not even sure if this one is good, but it's here, and that's what is important in January. I'm long overdue on a remodel post, and this one will be in multiple parts because it started in July and it's still happening! Our kitchen, of course the room we swore to remodel as soon as we moved in, and here we are planning to put the house on the market in less than two months and just finishing it. Let's start with the before photos, shall we?

I promise these pictures were not taken in the 60's but in fact in late June 2017.(We forgot to take any "before" pictures before we started packing up for the renovation so that will explain the cardboard on the floor). We lived and cooked in this kitchen for almost six years and while it wasn't pretty, it was pretty functional. Luckily that meant we didn't really want to change the footprint, just change everything else.

It took Boris a long time to convince me that he could handle a full kitchen remodel on his own and, to be honest, when I was working I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea, especially if he didn't finish when he projected, which is, ahem, kind of a regular occurrence. But when I left my job I had less of a leg to stand on. For one, the kitchen HAD to be redone before we put the house on the market, unless we wanted to sell the house for just about what we'd paid for it. Second, now that I was home, I could just take the kids to my parents while Boris did the really messy work and no working appliances. So that's what we did. Last July, I packed up the kids and headed to Detroit for a week while Boris demoed the entire kitchen and put in a new ceiling and started in on the cabinets. Here are some of the shots I received via text that week.

These are the shots from about the first half of the week. I knew the kitchen was going to be a big job, but when I saw these, I was completely overwhelmed and didn't know what we'd be coming back to. Luckily, the shots from the rest of the week were more encouraging.

And by the time the last picture arrived, the day before we were to return home, I could breathe again. Not too shabby for one guy (with a little help from a friend) in a week, right? Well, I'll leave you hanging right there and next time I'll update you on what we (Boris) have been working on for the last six(!) months.

See you in February, my friends.