Hello, Food Network?!

We have not had cable tv for almost 10 years. Hard to believe, I know. Trust me, we have spent all the monetary savings on other things, like horse bedding and fence. But the psychological "savings" are without measure. My children haven't been exposed to thousands of murders, crimes against women and smut-without-end.

There are certainly things we would have enjoyed watching. We are probably the only people to have checked out an entire season of Ask This Old House, from the library--and watch it from beginning to end, with delight! It is great to have online access to tv shows and movies nowadays. How handy it is to pick and choose at our convenience, and without most of the ads.

Because we DON'T HAVE A KITCHEN, we eat frequently at my mother-in-law's house. Bonus: She has cable. We, of course, gravitate to the Food Network. Our favorite is Chopped. I know most of you have been watching this for eons. But it is relatively new to us. (We tend to be about 3 years behind on most things, including fashion.)



We really love Chopped. We pick up children late, so we can watch Chopped. We take children home to bed past their bedtime so we can finish episodes of Chopped. We critique it. We compare it. We have teared-up watching it. We are planning living it in our new kitchen!

But I really think they should change the parameters for a show that has professional chefs as contestants. Yeah, the time limit thing is a challenge, but please--They have access to every amenity, appliance and ingredient. They don't even have to clean up after themselves, other than wiping the little plate rims!

You want a challenge?! How about NO cooktop, NO oven, 4 sq. ft. of prep space, which is a plastic folding table? You have a microwave, toaster oven, rice cooker, crock pot and electric skillet; but must use only one outlet--and it is touchy, sometimes turning things off without your knowledge. There is one propane burner--but it is OUTSIDE--which does affect your cooking in winter, as well as the length of time you are willing to stand there.

There is an almost-empty freezer, limited produce and three hungry children. One of them doesn't like ground meat. One of them won't eat chicken if it resembles a chicken. One of them doesn't like mushrooms. Nobody wants a sandwich and everybody wants homemade macaroni and cheese. The grocery is ONLY 3 miles away. You have 45 minutes, but your significant other is on his way home, after having had a catered lunch...clock is ticking!


Your basket contains: 1 pkg. frozen chicken tenders, 1 large potato, some dehydrated onions, turkey pepperoni, frozen corn and whole-wheat tortillas. There are some pickled beets, cottage cheese and Paul Newman's Caesar dressing in the refrig. Afterwards you can clean it all up, take out and feed the dogs, clean the horse stalls, do some laundry and then prepare for tomorrow.

Those guys are pansies! (Although the episode with powdered strawberry milk and cheese curls was a toughie!)

One night, after Chopped ended--waaaah!--we watched Worst Cooks in America. How sad is that? We all thought it sounded pretty lame, but we watched. (What is the matter with this country that we have people barely able to feed themselves, let alone their families??)



A couple of things happened as a result:

1. I am much more confident in my "kitchen". (I felt like Emeril next to those people!)
2. I don't have trouble getting things to the table at the same time.
3. I know how a can-opener operates.
4. I have actually made sausage from scratch! (Thank you Needa!)

Although my hair often looks like Chef Anne; Handyman has assured me, I do not qualify for that show!

Whew!

Splish, splash, ever seen a tape measure??!

So, the plumbers in the fancy trucks came. It was to be a two-day gig, and unfortunately, Handyman had to work on day one. This is never a good sign. But I try really hard to be knowledgeable and impressively determined. I learn lingo, I read articles. I am not the nit-wit wife of old.

I greet them. I pop in and out of the kitchen/laundry area multiple times, to be accessible. I chit-chat about football. Trying to make them feel comfortable talking to me. Hoping they will realize I am not clueless in this realm-of-man-skills.

Handyman leaves me a scale drawing of our laundry room, to present to the skilled craftsmen. I do this. I say, "Here is a scale drawing of the layout for this space." They say, "Okay. Thanks." I leave them to their devices while I go educate my children.

They work diligently all day. At one point, I go out to the garage refrigerator to get milk. As I turn to come back in, I glance up and see one of them, through the ceiling, in the room above the garage. It strikes me as odd for some reason...but I am in a hurry, so I let it go.

I remind them a couple of times that Handyman will be here tomorrow. If there is anything they are unsure about, he will be here all day. They never ask me one question, all day.

When they are ready to leave, they show me where the trap for my upstairs shower is now positioned, right in the exact geometric center of my new kitchen ceiling. Which should be fine, except, the "trap", the curvy little bit of pvc pipe is hanging down below the level of the main support beam across the kitchen.

We are not putting up drywall on our ceiling. We are doing a wood panel that will be painted white. That means there is no, I repeat, NO extra space to hide anything. ("WHAT?!" I think.)

Nonchalantly I say, "What is going on there?" mustering every bit of self-control I possess. They say, "Oh, we had to do that to get the slope for the run of the pipe. You can just box it in."

(One of my New Year's resolutions is to stop swearing. I don't know why I derive pleasure from swearing--usually to get a laugh...This is when I am really bummed that I can't just let it rip!)

So what they are suggesting, is that in my new kitchen, in the exact center of the broad expanse of glorious, flat ceiling--right next to the beautifully boxed-in, painted white beam, there will be a little bitty box hanging out of the ceiling. And my guests will inevitably say, "What is that?" and I will respond, with bliss--"Oh, that's just the trap to our shower. You know, where the hair clogs hang up." And we will all smile and go on eating artichoke and goat cheese s'mores.

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" my mind shrieks! The equestrian in me has been trained not to shriek unnecessarily, so I smile vaguely and say, "He's not going to go for that."

They imply that he's going to have to, and I think, "You do not know Handyman."

I say, "Well, you guys can all work it out tomorrow. Bye." And they leave for the night.

When Handyman gets home, he is fuming before his coat hits the chair. He sees the trap, like an owl sees a mouse. He can't believe it. And then he mentions to me that they also fell through the garage ceiling--twice! Remember when I said I could see him above the garage? I was in such a hurry, it didn't register that I was looking through a hole in the ceiling drywall big enough to pass a basketball! And that wasn't the only one!

I was completely shocked that they would not have mentioned this to me! I know stupid mistakes happen. I make them all the time. But I would never, not for one minute, not mention to my client that I did something really, really ridiculously dumb!

Then he took me out to my new laundry area. I actually like doing laundry. I can't wait to have a laundry area that is not in my kitchen. I have lots of pictures of pretty laundry areas. I am looking forward to my new, completely-new, laundry area. He showed me where they had placed the washer hose box, about a foot and a half away from where the washer will be situated...behind the dryer actually. So much for the scale-drawing.

He tried to settle this in his mind. It was all done with PEX. We have never had plumbing done with PEX. So we re-read our plumbing book and it did say that to "old plumbers" PEX looks messy. So we tried to decide if these were actually just problems with how it looked--because once that drywall goes on, you won't be looking at your plumbing anymore :)--or were these actual issues with the job?

We hate to be complainers, don't like to cause trouble. These guys came highly-recommended. Maybe we were just too P-I-C-K-Y...then we glanced up, above our kitchen island, at our new conversation piece: the trap.

Handyman reached for the phone, at 8pm on a weeknight.

"I'm calling the boss," he said.

In the beginning was the house, it was void, without form and needed a lot of work.

Timeline of a kitchen: We purchased this place in 2002. It is a really cool God-story, that I won't go into right now. You'll just have to trust me. The original kitchen had old vinyl flooring that looked like bricks--no, that was in the other house. This kitchen had dusty blue counter tops, (and I know that was God dealing me some cards), dark burgundy walls (not kidding), dark Mediterranean cabinets with heavy pulls, and a border wallpaper around the ceiling that was big, gold-edged diamonds colored hunter green, navy, burgundy. Uh-huh. Not making this up.

Two walls had dusty blue counter top at desk height, with glorious fluorescent fixtures above as task lighting. Not really sure if this was eating space or homework space. There was an island with a butcher block top, which was nice. Icky side-by-side refrig, cooktop and double wall oven.

We did not unpack into the cabinets, at all. Not even going there. We were sure we were going to be redoing the kitchen pretty quickly. (What a bunch of morons we were.) We bought a bunch of white laminate bookcases and lined them up along the walls and unloaded all our goods, food, dishes, you name it. The cabinets sat empty. I didn't even clean them out.

We ripped out most of the upper cabinets and moved them gleefully to the garage, for workshop storage. They were not cheap cabinets, just ugly and out-of-style. We ripped out about 3,500 pictures of kitchens from magazines and taped them up, everywhere. Inspiration at every turn.

We did pay a contractor to come in with a glue-lam beam to replace the wall that separated the kitchen space from the laundry area, which also had a full bath (shower stall), and a door to the adjacent breezeway. The workmen had to go down into the crawlspace to put in a pier to support the beam at the dining room wall.

"Um, Mrs. P." they said. "We're pretty glad we're putting in this beam for you, because your load-bearing wall isn't sitting on anything right now." WHAT?! "We can see the upstairs floor sagging in the center right now, as we're jacking the beam into place. Bet your kitchen floor will spring up too."

The builder had moved the entire load-bearing wall over about 6" from the original blueprint in order to squeeze in a cold-air return. :)

We did replace the big window over the sink that fall, and made it even bigger. On the very day we did that, in fact the very hour that the window was removed, the farmer to the south of us harvested his beans. I still remember standing in the kitchen with my mother as the Wizard-of-Oz-quality cloud of soybean dust came at us. There was absolutely nothing we could do, but duck, and then vacuum.

The bathroom (now in the kitchen space), had rough-sawn cedar siding as wainscot, a shower stall, toilet, and a slop sink. It was the only shower we could use that first year. And there wasn't a heat vent in that bathroom. My MIL swore she could smell marijuana in there. We started calling it the stash bathroom. We took the girls over to Grandma's once a week for a bath in a tub, with heat. And then, I got pregnant that winter.

Spring came, and I confessed to my friend Needa, that we weren't going to be able to get to the kitchen after all. Not anytime soon, anyway. So she organized a corps of devoted friends and they came out to clean and paint the place. (I did pull down the wallpaper about an hour after we moved in.) Their workday ended up being the actual day I delivered #3, although it wasn't planned that way.

They painted the walls light yellow and the cabinets a brighter yellow, at my request...to brighten things up. We all knew they were painting finished wood, and it wouldn't last forever...but it was cheaper than Prozac. The blue countertops were to force me to find joy no matter my circumstances, for the next eight years.

If only I had known that reality tv would become so popular, I would have started back then, documenting the insanity that has become our life. Today, when I looked around, I actually started crying that the house looks like Sarajevo, from more than one direction. I was laughing while I was crying, but Handyman had to agree.

A few weeks ago, we wanted to replace one little window, on the back wall of the kitchen. We have owned the window for several years, but never had replaced it yet. We hauled it down, and pulled off the siding to frame in the new opening. But of course, the band board, 3 feet below was rotted on the foundation. And you can't build window framework on rotted wood; and of course, this particular band board extends for 20 feet underneath ancient decking that was installed by the Romans.

So, to replace the window required a trip to Menards with the dump trailer, to pick up a new 20' board, that is treated for exterior use. Then ripping out the ancient decking to expose the band board's full length...which also has a 4x4 post sitting on it, that had already been wrapped in fibercement trim, which will now have to be redone as well. And cutting an opening into the family room wall, at floor level, in order to get the bandboard into place properly. (This little opening provide the entrance for "Zeus" later that week.)

I suppose the big chasm in the deck provides a little security from burglars trying to enter from the east side. They would fall right into the possum nests, or be attacked by feral cats. The Romans would be proud.

The Doldrums

We've reached it...the Doldrums. The slow, boring dead zone of February, post-Superbowl. Football has ended--waaaaaah! Handyman has returned from his exciting post on the Jimmy Fallon show, which means I have to feed him, not just them.

The poor kids have been fending for themselves for awhile. They've become quite the little scavengers. I cook 2 lbs. of pasta at a time, on the driveway...okay, on a propane burner on the driveway. That lasts for a couple of days. (In my defense, it is Barilla in the yellow box, with all the protein and whole wheat and whatnot.)

But we're kinda, more than kinda, REALLY tired of the whole thing. In the beginning, it was a little bit fun to buy convenience foods that I would normally not buy. For example, Progresso soup. Progresso soup is more expensive and has more unique choices. Normally, we eat canned tomato soup and make the rest from scratch. I am not kidding. Handyman makes Emeril's Chowder of Love. We make white chili. We make tortilla soup, pasta fagioli, baked potato soup, Panera broccoli cheese soup, jambalaya, you-name-it...we made it from scratch.



But sauteeing is a thing of the past. I've tried it in the cast iron skillet on the driveway burner. It's not adjustable enough. Charred onions doesn't cut it, so I moved over to premade. This is hard for a girl like me--the daughter of Mrs. Make-It-From-Scratch-or-Don't-Show-Your-Face. My mother has actually purchased whole nutmegs and a grater, to GRATE THEM HERSELF. Do you see where I am coming from?

So the Progresso was a little fun in the beginning; Italian Wedding Soup, Chicken and Dumplings, Baked Potato with Bacon, yadda yadda yadda. Yesterday I made (heated) some for #3. She ate most of it, meaning the chicken, dumplings, and bits of carrot. As I was dumping it out in the sink, I tasted the broth. Ack!

It was so bland, I almost gagged. The thought that came into my mind was "camel drool". Do not ask me why...but I knew the worm had turned. It ain't fun anymore. #1 and I are on Pinterest, and we both have these boards covered with baked goods. We yearn for an oven. I have a major fear that we will be candidates for Biggest Loser this time next year, once we get our oven back. I dare not even look at Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls...

I would write more, but it is Wednesday...which means one thing: I have to pick up the Pizza Hut.

:*(

Remodeling Cred, and a book review

I have routinely told people that Handyman and I are "serial remodelers". And I mean that in the scariest possible way. We cannot stop ourselves. Or perhaps more accurately stated: We are never going to be finished in our lifetimes!

We had a friend, who wound up in the construction business through no fault of his own. He came over to our place right after we moved in, (which was awhile after we actually bought it--because it was too icky to move into immediately), and Handyman took him around the house to show him "the plan".

His response...and I quote "It's big. You're screwed." Gut level honesty...what we all want in friends.

ANYWAY, to provide evidence of our commitment (in a sanitarium would probably be appropriate), I submit: Handyman is known, BY NAME, at Menards. I am not kidding. I have multiple witnessed occasions of this fact. He comes around a corner, orange vest (or whatever they wear) comes around the other corner, "Hey Tom! How's it coming along?"

And for myself: Yesterday I am checking out at local grocery, where I go EVERY SINGLE DAY. I was getting only cat food, and one of the cashiers said, "Did you get your kitchen done?" I know my mouth fell open, because I honestly don't remember ever telling her that I didn't have a kitchen. This in itself is a sign of my oncoming dementia, since I tell everyone we don't have a kitchen.

I told her no, but that we were putting up some more drywall this week. Stunned, I walked out. Is it obvious? I was only buying catfood. Not my usual Progresso Chunky Soup, tater tots and milk. Oh well.

And a book review: No remodeler, no matter how small should be without the terrific book, Gutted, by Lawrence LaRose. At first I read it through an intralibrary loan. But I knew, as I read, that I would have to have my own copy to put beneath my mattress. To whip out on days when there were feral cats in my sink. When Handyman refuses to get out of bed.

This book made us feel SMART! It made us laugh at what some fools will do to have their dream house. I wish I could have the Laroses over for dinner, someday when I have a kitchen...if they are still married. It's a great book and you don't have to be a nut-job like us to enjoy it.