temple construction

I took this photo while stopped at a red light last week.  This is the progress on the Gilbert Temple thus far.  Pretty exciting to see it all coming together, on my weekly grocery outings.  I've been by here at least twice since this photo was taken and construction has progressed even more.  

kitchen before and after

our kitchen makeover has been at least a year in the making.

before:  tan linoleum, tan laminate counters, leaky rusted faucet.  

kind of blah.doors off 

concrete countertops in - love these!  i've wanted concrete for so long.  done by our friend, jeremy in the neighborhood.cabinets and backsplash painted (i was 8 months pregnant.  after being gone all day, we came back home to out-of-control fumes so the whole family slept at the in-laws for a night.  our painter was not even bothered by it.  said he couldn't smell a thing.  um, that's not good.)  

linoleum and carpet gone.voila!

another angle

the details

i'm trying these pellegrinos out for the summer.  may change them out for something else.  also probably something for the tops of the cabinets.  maybe. plants.

thanks to denise, who has a great eye, and gave me the push i needed to paint my cabinets white.  i love them!  and to denise (and deborah), who found the floors at costco, and the stools (love) at overstock.

i wish me kitchen was always this clean.  baby bottles and formula dominate these days.

smoke screen

• number of smoke detectors in our home - 8
• number of smoke detectors that went off, all at once, Monday afternoon - 7
• number of times i wrongly guessed what our alarm code was when i was on the phone with the alarm company - 5
• number of questions customer service had to ask to validate that i was who i said i was - 10
• number of people i thought were on my emergency contact list with the alarm company, but aren't - 6
• number of customer service agents i talked to, frantically trying to get the alarms off - 4
• number of people at the alarm company who knew what to do* - 1
• number of babies who slept through the auditory-damaging alarms - 1
• minutes it took to turn the PIERCING sirens off - 30
• trigger for alarms, per the alarm company - construction dust**, which acts like smoke when it gets into the smoke detector

*after being on the phone for 30 minutes, technical support finally told me to unscrew the detectors and take out the battery in each one.  duh.  why didn't i, or one of the 3 other people i spoke to, think of that first?  i was so panicked by the noise, i wasn't thinking straight.  what was their excuse?

**we've had a worker (as owen calls him) putting in new floors this week.  funny thing is, he's a smoker, and when the alarms went off, he told me he got really nervous that somehow he'd failed to put out his cigarette outside and now he was burning down the house. 

change is in the air

We have been gradually making some kitchen changes.  More to come.  Before and afters soon.