The addition windows were installed today! Even though the inside of the old and new kitchen area is still a shell, the windows -- along with last week's sliding door installation -- make it look much more like an actual room/living space.
Work is also continuing on plumbing -- for the kitchen sink/work area, the new laundry closet, and where the new refrigerator will be (it will have an in-the-door icemaker and cold water dispenser).
You can see the latest work-in-progress photos at view4.php.
Many thanks to Bev and Brian, who stopped by during demolition last week while Lee and I were away on vacation and just sent along lots of pictures of the actual demolition in progress! You can see their new demolition photos at view3b.php.
I must say that things already look quite a bit better now than they do in those demolition photos. Still, it's already starting to get tedious living here amidst ConstructionWorld. This is not any knock against our contractors, who take great pains to keep the bedroom and living room areas sealed off from construction, and clean up each day before they leave.
But there's no getting around the fact that half our house is completely unusable. It's not just the kitchen -- the dining room is emptied and not usable, with one wall stripped; the family room has two walls stripped and is also not usable.
What's getting to me most, though, isn't the construction-area dirt or loss of kitchen facilities or even the mess in the construction zone; it's the massive clutter in what little living space we have left! So much furniture and so many boxes have been piled into our living room and bedrooms that there's no clear path for walking or sitting. Sigh. Martin and Amy had the right idea during their construction project, putting a lot of things in storage.
Yesterday Marian, my Walking Buddy, came by during lunchtime for a quick tour of the Kitchen Project. She seemed pretty impressed at the speed of progress on the addition. And I must say that I felt perversely vindicated when Marian -- who re-did her own kitchen last year -- peered into the rest of the house and said, "This is worse than I expected."
Our friend Charlie told us that living kitchen-less starts getting old after about three weeks. I suspect I'm about two weeks ahead of schedule on that!
The good news is that we'll be taking advantage of lots of invitations to visit our friends over the next couple of months, so we'll have a lot of chances to get out of the Construction Zone for awhile. And we're sure it will all be worth it when it's over.