hitting rock bottom before you can rebuild

Our new kitchen is almost finished! The only major things left are the ceiling lights. After that I'll have to repair the ceiling, repaint and put up a pot rack, but those are very small, minor things. It's taking us a little while, though, because Pd has been busy with other things (he is the electrician in this family), and honestly, there isn't as much motivation as there used to be — the kitchen is useable, more or less, so we can afford to wait.

Anyway, I figure, I will do a few posts about what we've done so far, and perhaps by the time I'm done I'll be able to show you a finished kitchen.

These are the befores:


It's a decent size, as you can see — about 165 square feet — but awkwardly laid out. There are doors, windows or other openings on three walls, and the fourth wall is a lovely brick that we don't want to cover up. (The upside to this is that we actually get lovely light in there at certain times of the day/year.) There was practically no storage — we had more cabinet space in our little galley kitchen in our old apartment, which was maybe half this size. Certainly we had more counterspace. All in all, it was an aggravating space to work in.

And the floor! I can't even tell you. It's linoleum, which is fine, but why this horrid pinky-peach? And the grey patches are random, literally random. I have had two and a half years to stare at this floor and I am telling you: there is no pattern. Which drove me up the wall, because I am not good at random.

When we bought this house, we always knew that we would do something to the kitchen, that it wasn't going to be satisfactory for very long. This time, we debated whether we should just refresh it — maybe put in furniture that would serve as a pantry or an island — but in the end, we decided that we wanted to do this once. And so, complete renovation it was, starting with the demolition:


The cabinets came down so quickly that I didn't have a chance to take any pictures. I went on a walk with the Spanish Inquisition so that they could do the noisiest parts first, and by the time I came back, an hour later, they were done. So we started on the floor, too, and by the end of the day:




Apparently, the reason for the ease of demolition was that the wall cabinets had been secured to the wall by six screws, and the bottom cabinets had been secured to the kitchen by exactly none. This disturbs me less than it probably should, if only for the fact that I only found out after six measly screws were no longer holding up all of my china. Conversely, the single shelf holding up the undercabinet exhaust hood was attached to the wall by seven incredibly long screws, in a pattern I like to call "Is it holding up now? How about now?"

The only other discovery of note was that a tomato plant, which I had thought dead, was still alive and had some green tomatoes on it — which was unfortunate, because we made this discovery only after someone dropped a sink on it.

(We were using our backyard as a dump for the time being. This particular plant had fallen off its stake, very early in the season, and as I couldn't find the vine again I had assumed it had died. Instead, it seems to have grown laterally. But it was already October, so I don't think the tomatoes were going to ripen in any case. Sad to say, but this is my most successful tomato growing to date. I am better with roses — possibly because I don't even like tomatoes. But it would be nice to be able to grow them. As of right now, I would need to get a bumper crop three years running to even approach a 50% success rate.)

hope

I want to show you something.

 This is a hellebore. It lives in my front garden, close to the house.




It was -18 Celsius when I left the house this morning, it's still dark when I get home and in my heart I'm not convinced that I will ever feel warm again.

But now, at least, I have hope.

and then there was Christmas

Okay, Christmas. Which was almost a month ago, but never mind. Actually I think we didn't manage to put up the tree until the weekend before, which would have been exactly a month ago. So I am late, but not (too) outrageously so.

I forgot to take pictures of the tree. It was an Ikea tree. (Last year it was a Loblaws tree.) Pd is adamant that we get a real tree, but other than that we're not terribly picky. I think it was a balsam? (I think they all are?) It wasn't very smelly, I'm afraid — then again, I spent almost the entirely of the holidays with a congested nose, so it's possible that my house smelled like the Black Forest and I was merely oblivious.


The Spanish Inquisition helped me decorate the tree. She loves putting things in and out of boxes, so it was perfect. The actual mechanism of hooking the ornament into the tree was a bit beyond her — particularly as I wasn't about to give her any of the ornament hooks — but she totally understood the idea and tried very hard to follow through.


(Here she is trying to balance a wooden ornament on a branch, next to another ornament — which totally makes sense to me. I think next year we're going to have a very bottom-heavy tree, decor-wise.)

The tree was for the Spanish Inquisition. The mantel was for me.

Behold:

Hogwarts Castle, Borgin & Burkes, and Gringotts. There was also Ollivander's, which you can see in the picture at the top of this post.  I was going to add the Hogwarts Express, too, but it turns out that our mantel is a little narrower than I expected. Also, we finished these at the very last minute — literally, at 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve — and I was so tired I forgot about the minifigs — so it turns out that, on Christmas and in the dead of night, only Dementors, a couple of goblins and a few random Weasleys inhabit Diagon Alley. Which I suppose isn't entirely unexpected.

I am really just an average (as opposed to fanatical) Harry Potter fan, and not a particularly skilled LEGO builder (although I do love it); it's just that I happen to like medieval villages, too, so Harry Potter and LEGO and a Christmas village was just too much good to pass up.


And finally, on Boxing Day, we had a big snowstorm — I mean, really, we were buried; it was wonderful. It turns out that there is a great tobogganing hill literally five minutes' walk away from our house, so we gathered some friends and took the Spanish Inquisition for her first sledding run. 


Okay, so honestly, she didn't seem terribly impressed. But the rest of us liked it.

new(ish) blog

I keep starting posts, and then not actually posting them, because everything I want to say doesn't really seem ... relevant. (What counts as "relevant" in a blog-o'-random like this one is beyond me.) I am changing up the look/template, again, because I never really did warm to the dynamic one — it's a nice idea graphically but it sort of fell down in the usability department — and ... well, it's January, and January and September are usually when I want to change everything up, so. But I haven't had much time to actually sit down and consider and play with things, so I don't actually know what I want, nor do I know how to accomplish it.

(Man. I kind of miss the old HTML days ... you know, like ten years ago? When you could bung a blog together with HTML and a smattering of CSS and it looked reasonably decent? Okay, that was more like maybe fifteen years ago, but whatever. Now everything is all fancy and I'm stuck using Blogger templates because I am too lazy to learn Wordpress.)

All this is to say that I am going to start blogging more regularly, starting with the Christmas thing soon, because I don't think there's any call to make any more Christmas posts after, say, this week. It should have been done by now but I'm having trouble with my iPhoto and Picasa and all that. (Man. I miss Flickr, too, although I guess that's still around.) My MacBook Air is having difficulties. It's first- or second-generation, which is to say that it's a few years old, and it's lovely but honestly I never should have bought it; I don't travel that much and I take too many photographs. So now iPhoto takes about 50% of all of the available memory and it's sluggish and generally cranky. That's another reason why I stopped blogging consistently; taking the photographs was fine but actually getting them off the camera and then into various other forms was just too time-consuming and grumpifying. That's another resolution for the new year, I guess: make it less grumpifying. Make me less grumpy, generally. I'm sure others would appreciate that.

Anyway. I am going to try to get photographs to catch up with all of this writing, and then start posting again. That's the plan, anyway. You can even call it a resolution, if you like — although I, personally, wouldn't. I would totally cave under the pressure.

notes on cooking

1. Our handheld immersion blender is really good at ... blending.

2. You know that "chunky" tomato sauce I usually make/was planning on making? There's been a slight change of plans. It's going to be slightly ... creamier. Like a smoothie. A tomato smoothie with stuff in it that you pour over pasta.

3. I will neither confirm nor deny that #1 is directly related to #2 ...

4. But I will admit that the white shirt was totally a rookie move.

a lighter spirit

Happy new year!

I will admit, I fell down on the blogging towards the end of last year. (Well — maybe not towards.) And I would post the reasons (and they are legion), but this is the very first post of 2013, and that should ... I don't know, mean something. So here is what I am going to do: I am going to post a little — maybe not every day, but at least more frequently than I usually do — about all the things I should have posted in December, but didn't, and then in a week or two we will be all caught up and we'll be able to start clean. Fresh. Like one should.

I will say something new-year-ish, though: it's amazing what a difference the calendar makes. I mean, I know it's a human construct, it's all artificial, but still. When I thought of December, my thoughts are dark — not in mood, but in the absence of light, literally dark. I think of twinkling lights, I think of softly falling snow, I think of shopping, outside, at dusk — and all of it is night. And now, it's light. Everything is clean, like a peppermint after coffee. Yesterday was my first day back at work after the holiday, and as I left work it was dusk — the sun had already set but it wasn't completely dark yet. And that little bit of sun made me so happy.

And yes, I know; that's a function of the solstice; we're past it now and galloping towards the light. But it's more than that. There isn't that much more light now than there was on December 31, and yet the latter, to me, is dark. We keep vigil while the old year dies. The new year doesn't begin until it's day, actually day, and you're tramping through the cold air to visit friends, and everything actually does, oddly, feel new. And light. January is as dark as November, maybe even more so, but it never feels as gray, or as depressing. Somehow all that light bleeds through.

Christmas post tomorrow. There's a cute baby involved — and also Harry Potter.