C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 10

The cabinets—

Today we do battle with the sink base, and will be without water in the house until we get it right. If we don’t get it right, we and the cats will be spending the night in a hotel….but we think it should be just an hour’s work to get us the temporary (old) sink and the dishwasher back in function.

They are here—all 23 boxes.

And we thought we’d start with the waste-disposal cabinet (hides the trash)—which turns out, to our surprise, to have a motor. You knee the thing and it powers open. We’re on the phone with the company trying to figure are the slats on the bottom of the cabinets supposed to stay—no. They look like good wood to us, but they’re just shipping reinforcement.

Installation has sort of ground to a halt at cabinet #1, while we figure this out, but it’s going, at least! The color of the finish is exactly what we ordered, no variations; the colors we painted are great with the finish; and it doesn’t look now as if we have any problems with damage. Happy, happy.

WE HAVE LOCATED THE CABINETS!

They are in town. They will be delivered between 10 and 2 tomorrow.

Kudos to Lowe’s, who has chased this matter for 3 weeks now, starting with the company’s squishy ship date, to the fact they were on the road, to the non-fact they were maybe in Spokane, but—Thanksgiving—and now, finally, our poor Lowe’s person, on her day off, managed to ascertain where they were, and get us set up for delivery asap.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow…

We MAY have located the cabinets, and they MAY be in town…

I’m sure the freight company is backlogged with holiday messes, but we stand a chance of getting cabinets maybe tomorrow.

And it does not look as if we will see cabinets until next Monday. Maybe.

It is raining cats, dogs, and frogs at this point. It is a day overdue for a scheduling phone call. We are being inundated by calls from the countertop people, but the cabinets, which have to be installed first, are not here yet.

Thursday is Thanksgiving. Friday it will be sunny, but still soggy. We do not know whether these cabinets are coming wrapped in plastic and on pallets, or what. We have plenty of tarps, but our garage is not connected to the house, so there is no easy shelter.

Well, well, if things were simple, life could get boring. Ours never is.

The pond has frozen for the first time.

Leaves are still green on the quince, but the wisteria has given up.

Meanwhile Jane is still laboring over almost-the-last job we do, until we re-stock/shelve the kitchen. Scott is working for our friends Tim and Cheryl tomorrow, but hopefully (we thought we would hear from the cabinet delivery Friday, and now hope for Monday, with a Tuesday delivery) he will be here on Tuesday.

The cats explored the garden this morning, but are now in my room huddled around the air vent. Jane atypically has the heat on, since she is trying to get stain to dry on the pantry doors in the kitchen, which is full of sawhorses.

And…a delay.

The cabinets are not where the store thought they would be. They are still on a truck headed west. They are anticipated to be here Friday, but will not reach our place until Monday or Tuesday next.

There is plus and minus to this: the plus is Jane can finish the painting without hindrance and at a slower place. Understand, I have offered to wield a roller, but she states that, given my hand isn’t the steadiest, she wants to do the edging; and that after that, the roller part is her dessert, which she doesn’t want to give up. So I remain the Agent of Destruction: if something wants ripping out, down, or up, or if a board wants to be cut—it’s mine. But the drawing of cut-lines, the measuring, the painting, the figuring, is all the resident Agent of Art and Construction.

So that’s the plus. Jane is getting really tired and I can’t pry the paint away from her—my pony, she calls it, as in, “Keep shoveling! There must be a pony somewhere under all this poo…” And we get to rest a little.

On the other hand, the minus is—we’re going to be lucky to have countertops by Christmas. We ARE slotted in, because we bought them on sale, early, and we are in queue for installation. But certainly not for Thanksgiving.

I am not even sure we will have everything working for Thanksgiving, except the fridge and freezer, which have to stay plugged in: not sure of a sink (again) or the dishwasher.

So…I am promising Jane her ‘chicken with mandarin oranges and cinnamon’ for Christmas, not Thanksgiving, and I have made a reservation at Clinkerdagger’s, the restaurant that overhangs Spokane Falls. Snagged one of the last reservations for Thanksgiving noon, which will give Jane her turkey with trimmings (I’m, I finally discovered, allergic to turkey, but not chicken)—and me something else nice. With traditional desserts. And no dishes to wash. We’ve never holiday’ed-out like this, but it seems like Jane, after all her work, deserves something better than I’ll be able to put together in Chaos Central.

This isn’t a boo-hoo. With the wonderful kitchen that’s taking shape, there is no boo-hoo. Except about the schedule. We’ll at least be able to put away most of the stuff from the living room floor before Thanksgiving (it looks like a bad case of hoarding, and some stacks are as high as my head)—and we will be fine! But we are giving ourselves a little bit of R&R.

The cabinets should be arriving today in town—the store should send them tomorrow.

Fingers crossed. I so hope they’re what we want.

We are having some download problems on closed-circle

Don’t try to buy anything until we get it fixed. We CAN fix it, but it’s more complicated than we hoped.

burlap-ing the delicate trees and mulching the roses.

It’s that time of year. Burlap is smelly and sheds and I hate storing it in the house, but when you need it, you need it. Makes a great tree-wrap for mimosas and new Japanese maples. But we’re out. I wrapped Jane’s better of two mimosas and the new Emperor One Japanese Maple, and now I need at least a few more yards. We save the stuff year to year, but when it gets ratty beyond use, it gets tossed. And I fear last winter did in our stock. Our poor roses were caught by surprise in the storm that did in the koi, but they survived. THis year I have a de-gasser for the pond, a new floating heater, and we’re getting set for winter. Scott (our very tall carpenter) is going to help us get the canvas off the pergolas so that the snow weight doesn’t bow them—it was a close call last winter.

We have a guaranteed week of near 50 degree weather to get this done, but beyond that, I’m not laying bets.