Day One (Monday, July 11)

So Bob and I are in the kitchen dealing with the gifts of the garden--making several batches of pesto to freeze and some habanero jelly.  In the middle of this pleasant domestic chaos we get a phone call from the installer--our countertops have arrived and he could install them tomorrow.

We weren't exactly ready--but we bit the bullet and said yes (as Lady Macbeth said--"if 'tis down when 'tis done, 'twere best 'twere done quickly").

Goodbye, old counters.

 

(actually it never does look quite this nice--we had already cleaned all the stuff off the counters.)  At this distance it doesn't look that bad--but here's the closeup.

 It wasn't a matter of just waiting for the next day.  Frugal beings that we are, we had elected to take off the old counter ourselves.  But first--and this is a big but--we had to empty out the cabinets.  All of them.  Even the "zombie" cabinets--those corner ones that have unreachable depths and where you shove everything that you don't use but for some reason keep anyway.  And the drawers had to be pulled out.

So now my living room looks like this.

 

Trust me--that's not all going back in.  There's going to be some serious purging.

 

*Then* we could start removing the countertops.  The challenge was to get to the screws in the far back corners.  Remember those "zombie" cabinets?  They are about 3 feet deep--but the cabinet door is only 8.5 inches wide.  Neither of us have arms that are three feet long--so I had to get into the cabinet.  Um--I'm a little more that 8.5 inches wide.  It took quite a bit of wiggling and rearranging of the squishy bits but I managed. 

 

 

 

And then I had to be able to work upside down--but I got all the screws out.

 

We slept well that night.