Came home yesterday to the following.

1. Pipes no longer frozen. Yay!
2. Contractor who had thoughtfully put a ton of insulation in the interior walls temporarily so we’d be warm and the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Yay!
3. No more countertop or cabinets on 3/4 of the kitchen wall. Yay!
4. No cooktop. Hmm.
5. Microwave shorting out the outlet in the dining room. Oh dear.
6. Dust everywhere. YUK.
7. Progress. Yay! Yay! Yay! 

Friday the contractor chipped away the stucco on the back wall of the house, and boarded up the naked insides of the back wall for the weekend. We cleared out the cabinets on that wall and began the setup of our temporary kitchen, which will reside on a wheeled cart, and which consists of the two most important parts of our kitchen: the microwave, and the coffeemaker.

It was cold as balls in the kitchen all weekend, and today we woke up to 10-degree temperatures and frozen pipes in the kitchen. That’s not good. We also have to keep an eye on the furnace, because the thermostat is close enough to the kitchen that it’ll run the heat all day and run down the water level in the boiler.

I keep telling myself, this is just the start of the “fun.”

Construction has started. WOOOO! According to Hubby, there’s a backhoe-y shovel-y kind of thing in our yard, and a bunch of trucks in the driveway. BRING IT ON.

Every time something was annoying with our kitchen this weekend, like things falling off the counter because it’s only 18” deep, or containers rolling around in the bottomless pit of my pantry, I would holler at our not-present contractor, “NEIL! GET ME A NEW KITCHEN!”

Neil, it seems, is here, and the new kitchen shall be kicking ass and taking names very very soon. I hope. If mother nature calms down with the wind storms and ice and crap. 

So today, Hubby, Baba O’Riley and I drove nearly 2 hours north to go shop for kitchen items. We walked into a huge warehouse of sample kitchen setups, only to find that what we had listed in our planners as a 10am appointment was marked in the sales rep’s calendar as 11. I am reasonably sure that Hubby didn’t goof on that one because 11 is around when Baba eats. No way we would schedule for a time when we would be distracted by chow time.

No matter - we ended up working with someone good, and what I thought would take for freaking ever was not difficult at all. We’d been thinking about the kitchen, what we wanted, the decisions we’ve made (or the contractor made, really. We picked out 3 elements of the previous house’s kitchen reno total) and features we’d love to have so when it came time to pick things, Hubby and I were in this weird sync. We’re never in sync. If Hubby isn’t arguing, well… let me put it this way. You know how sharks that stop swimming die? I think if Hubby isn’t arguing every statement made in his direction, his head explodes.

But here’s a sample of what it was like with Morag & Hubby (and Baba, who doesn’t talk) in the kitchen design showcase:

Becky: “Here are some samples of door styles available in the finishes that you like. We have this one… this one… this one....”
Morag: “No… no… no… that one.”
Hubby: “I agree. That’s perfect.”
*cue Morag and Hubby waiting for giant earth tremor*

Becky: “These are the countertop samples in the composite material you mentioned you liked.”
Morag: “There’s a grey I saw at another place - do you have it?”
Becky: “This one?”
Hubby: “Oh, man, I like that.”
Morag: “I figured you would.”
Becky *looking shocked* : “Ok. So we’re moving on to hardware.”

That was the part that Hubby wasn’t interested in - he fed Baba while I picked out hardware. In the end we picked out two sets - one very traditional and somewhat boring, and one that’s kinda funky and looks more like the stone-style counter top. We picked out backsplash subway tile (for some reason I love subway tile backsplashes) and some other items, discussed what kind of features we wanted inside the cabinets, and that was it.

Here, however, are some things we did not pick:

Farmer’s sinks. Also known as apron sinks, this would not be a good look for our house, especially in this area. Besides, we think it would look like our counter had buck teeth.

A tile mural backsplash for over the sink or behind the range. While we are doing a different tile, it’s not a picture of anything, like a rooster, or for God’s sake, a naked dripping emaciated woman.

Now, there were a few tile murals in the store - apparently they are VERY hot or something - and one of them was words. “Sage.” “Parsley.” And you guessed it, “Rosemary” and “Thyme.”

Now look. If there are going to be words on my backsplash, you can bet your left asscheek that two of them will be “Gin” and “Juice.” And possibly “Bitches.”

1. Carrie Underwood bugs the crap out of me. She sang the national anthem a few minutes ago, and I’d like a word with her stylist: the giant, giant wavy curl? Over it.

2. The National Anthem Yodel should be ILLEGAL. It’s as bothersome to me as when people cut up the American flag and use it to line a jacket (Bono are your ears burning?). I know I sound like a conservative gasbag, but whatever your feelings about the US, the flag was not meant to absorb armpit sweat from world-minded Irishmen.

Further, the national anthem does not feature a one-octave yodeling jump on the word “Free.” Quit showing off. It’s one note. One note. No need to over do it. And for God’s sake, stop with the jazz hands.

3. I have been looking for the faucet from our kitchen renovation in Jersey City. I loved it that much, I wanna use it again. I saw a picture of it on the Home Depot site, but I couldn’t find it for sale. Where did I find it? Faucets.com. Why didn’t I think of that earlier? 

I woke up this morning hoping to sleep until about 8. No such luck - Baba was up and grunting for food at 630, and then he refused to go back to sleep, no matter how much *I* needed to rest. Add to that a throbbing migraine and a lot of things on the to-do list today and you have a very very grumpy me. So not pleasant. Pity poor Hubby who had to put up with me this morning.

Today I have to go down to the shore house, as there appears to be a leak in the back wall, and I’m sure that fixing it will require my writing several large numbers on a check. That said, we have been lucky in that the house hasn’t had many maintenance issues - at least, that’s what I’m telling myself so I’ll stop whining already.

Dear Coffee. Please enter bloodstream now. Thanks.

As for the kitchen, I’m still researching. And in doing so I’ve discovered the cure for baby constipation - not that Baba is ever constipated so far in his life. He poops like a champion. But on Sunday, in the most upscale kitchen ever designed as a sample, I took fifteen minutes to feed him, and BEHOLD. THE POOP OF DOOM.

Then, Monday, I went to a sample kitchen place near our house, and again - the minute he got a whiff of that new counter, new cabinet smell: BEHOLD. THE POOP OF DOOM.

It is kind of handy, though - pushy salespeople are repelled by the POOP OF DOOM and leave us alone so I can check out the samples in peace.

Today Hubby and I went shopping. OMG. I’m exhausted. I don’t as a rule love shopping in stores, which is sad because I live in Jersey and there’s nothing Jerseyans love so much as Big Box Stores. There’s one section of Rt. 46 that is literally every furniture store known to man, all adjacent to one another (why?!). There’s a Levitz next to a Raymour Flanigan, next to Futons R Us, then Nutin’ But Bedstands, We Gots Yer Rugs Right Here, and Bob’s Discount Furniture And Annoying Commercials. It’s weird. But there’s never any shortage of places to shop for crap in Jersey. And our sales tax is often lower than Manhattan so we get shopping commuters.

And that means just about everything is crowded, which I hate. HATE. I can’t imagine why I live in a metropolitan area of 14 million people when I love the company of masses of humanity so ever freaking much, but whaddayagonnado?

Anyway, we started off at Best Buy, where the stereos were all turned up so loud some of the refrigerators were vibrating - sort of an added bonus since I definitely felt up a bunch of them. We found all manner of different configurations for water dispensers inside French door bottom freezer models, the details of which I won’t bore you with, but I did grab Hubby’s phone so I could take a picture of this funkass contraption:

Check this out. This is a $3200 fridge with what looks like freaking disco lights inside. For $3200 it better make me dinner, clean up and load the dishwasher, AND play all the songs I like from the past 30 years including Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue. In HD.

We went to three different stores, including Home Depot, and looked at dishwashers (I love the drawer option but it’s not worth the money), cooktops, refrigerators, wall ovens and all kinds of other crap we don’t need and didn’t know existed, like wall-mounted cappuccino machines and personal dry cleaners.

I’m exhausted, and my feet hurt, but I’m glad we didn’t see the fridge from LG with the tv embedded in the door (WHY?!) because I would have had to talk Hubby out of putting it in the back of the Prius and driving it home today.