But it's only two inches off….

Our progress has been slower than expected, but we are moving along. The last couple weeks have had their ups and down.  Apparently, our kitchen shrank by two inches between the time that we measured for the cabinets and when they were delivered.  Bad math?  Bad magic?  Doesn't matter. Since we measured, it's our liability. 

I have ceased to shake my fist and lament to the heavens. But the upshot is that we lost our "filler strip" in the pantry corner. So that means the cabinet has to go right up against the wall (not ideal). The other options?  Buy two smaller cabinets (upper and lower, cha-ching) and wait three weeks for them to be delivered. Not gonna happen.  Or the sink cabinet could be off-center—but with a sliding window, a double-bowl sink and a symmetrical cabinet, it would be really obvious.  I envisioned myself sitting at my pretty breakfast bar, glaring at the zigzag arrangement.  That's a no-go.

And so we end up with a pantry cabinet that sits flush with the wall.  Oh well. 

But let's focus on the ups!  I have a refrigerator inside my house for the first time in about seven weeks.  I had purchased it from Lowes back on Thanksgiving weekend.  Yeah.  It's been sitting in the garage that long.  The nice delivery men came back today, moved it inside and even connected it for me. Et voila!  I'm back in the 21st century.

Don installed the microwave-hood combo, so that brought me up to two whole appliances!  And we moved the stove back in shortly thereafter. 

Still in progress: The countertop "templating," as they say in the biz, was completed on Monday. Now we wait 10-14 days for installation…at which point I can have a sink again—hallelujah. We also need paint and trim.Oh, and a window. Not that the plywood doesn't look awesome.  And we still have stucco to repair outside.   

Here's how I ended up with three holes on the house.  The first one you know about already—we had to tear out the bump-out because it was leaking, which set me off on my window adventure.  Still waiting for delivery.

 The second one is the planned removal of the strangely low window. It was nice to have a second window in the kitchen, but there were a couple issues. First, the window was too low for counter height.  Second, there was no place to put the larger refrigerator.  S'long, window. Hello stucco repair.

Which brings me to hole number three…a bonus hole, if you will.  As you see, we had the remnants of a bad repair job from some prior owner.  It was cracking around the perimeter, so I asked Don if he could please patch it up when he does the rest of the stucco.  So he set Lalo to chipping out the crack to make way for the repair.

I come back a short while later, and Lalo has opened the wall from the window sill to the ground.  Needless to say, I was taken aback.  It was explained to me that the entire repair was bad and couldn't be salvaged. And then Lalo kept going, since the wall exposed the plumbing, and we would be able to install a laundry fixture (the water/drain combo that makes it so you don't have to use the sink—which looks pretty awful).  So as alarming as it was to have a surprise hole in the side of the house, it turned out to be a boon.  Hooray for a pretty laundry room…someday!