After the whirlwind weekend of painting, I was quite glad to put away the paint brushes for a while. Joe had done a marvelous job on the electric and the HVAC was installed just a few days after Joe finished the electrical. This place was starting to look like an actual house!
Look at that cute, little heat pump. It’s so adorable!
Since the walls were done, they were able to put up the vents, registers and thermostat inside. They were done! Once the power is turned on, we will have heat in the house!
I had wanted to see the moon rise on the farm ever since we bought the place. Well, I finally got my chance. It was lovely! Working late nights out at the property did have it’s benefits!
Next, we needed the sink base cabinet put into place we could install the kitchen countertop and sink. We also needed the bathroom vanities and the commodes put into place. Once that was done we could have the plumber come hook everything up and we would be ready for the final inspection. Wow!! The end was in sight! It might still be a long way off to the move in date, but at least it’s in sight now.
So, we went to Home Depot to get the rest of the cabinets and the interior doors and the appliances. We thought we would be smart and rent a U-Haul truck to bring back all our goodies and save the delivery fees. Well, that might not have worked quite so well. Some of the cabinets we needed were out of stock and others we had to order. And the appliances had to be ordered too. So the doors and the base cabinets were the only things we were able to take home with us.
However, on the way home we were able to swing by the house and load up all the bathroom vanities, commodes, the water heater, and the kitchen sink that we had bought months earlier to take to the house.
Let me just say, that was a lot of hustling and a lot of lifting! My back was shot by the end of the day. I kinda think I would like to spend the extra money and have Home Depot deliver the appliances after all when they come in. Whew!
We were so tired that night and we were in a rush to get the girls to play practice. So we put stuff in the area where it was going to go and we left. That wasn’t much fun…
Boy did the bathrooms look smaller with all the boxes in there. Yikes!
The next morning we went to buy the counter top for the kitchen sink to set on. I really wanted butcher block countertops but Jim didn’t want to wait for them to be made and delivered. And they cost a little more money than we wanted to spend for now. So the pre-made countertops at Lowes were our next choice. Our plan was to buy one to fit over the kitchen sink and dishwasher. The rest of the counters we were planning to make out of some scrap wood we had. They were going to be my very own DIY butcher block countertop. I was excited! Maybe a little too excited. Or a little too distracted.. Or a little too impatient… Or a little too tired…. Or maybe a little too much of all of those things actually…..
After we bought the countertop and got to the parking lot, Jim started the truck, put the kids in and then disappeared again. Jim is Jim. And after 20 years of marriage, I know this and yet, I still get frustrated at times when he has his own plan. And I am not aware of the plan! I will fully admit that this is completely my issue. Jim hasn’t changed and probably never will. Most times, I laugh about it. Yet, when I’m tired, or frustrated, or impatient, well….that never ends well for me.
Anyway, back to my embarrassing story… Jim had disappeared. Not really, I just didn’t know where he was. It turns out he was trying to buckle up the kids since they had climbed into the front seat of a running truck. Obviously that was a very responsible and caring thing to do. He was looking out for the safety of our kids. I just didn’t know that. I couldn’t see him or hear him and assumed he had went back in the store for something. Or went to talk to someone. Who knows? I didn’t. So, I got impatient. I briefly looked at the counter top and the trunk of the Suburban and decided I could slide it right off the buggy into the car. It seemed like a reasonable plan….
Well, if I had taken the time to look a second longer I might have seen that the buggy only had one bar going across. That bar didn’t go all the way across the buggy. So, when the countertop slid a few inches, the whole thing fell hard on to the bottom of the cart. I tried to catch it buy my back tightened and it slipped right through my hands. Boom!
Jim chose that exact moment to walk around the back of the truck. Of course, he shows up the moment I break the countertop! Of course!
Yes, I cracked the back of the countertop!
I was near tears and Jim laughed!! Honestly, that is one of the reasons I love that man. I do something stupid and impatient and he finds it funny! I would like to think that if the situation were reversed I would laugh as well, but I can be a little more unpredictable than Saint Jim. Saint Jim just laughed and headed back into the store to buy a new countertop.
I think it was easier for him to laugh because he’s not the one who actually broke the countertop. He gave everyone inside the store a laugh too apparently, when he told them his wife just broke the countertop we had bought not 5 minutes ago. Needless to say, I did not go back into the store with Jim. I sat in the car trying to laugh at myself. I wasn’t entirely successful, but I tried.
Once Jim came back out and we loaded up the second countertop we headed to the property. I had already figured up that the broken countertop could be cut and used for the counters on either side of the stove so it wasn’t a complete waste of money.
After we got the countertops inside without breaking them, we tried to line everything up. The problem was that the sink base cabinet looked weird. It looked wrong. The sink didn’t fit and the front side was missing at the top. What???? Why????
What is wrong here??? (If you already see the problem, feel free to laugh at us! If you don’t see the problem, welcome to the overworked, over stressed, you need a vacation club!)
How do we fix that? What was the problem? I had no answers, so I went outside to coat the interior doors with polyurethane. I love wood and we splurged a little to get real wood doors inside the house. Staining the wood doors was very relaxing for me and I forget all about the messed up cabinet and broken countertop for a while. Jim stayed inside and tried to figure everything out. Saint Jim, again. He is awesome, always.
It took us a little while but we finally figured out that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that cabinet at all. Nope, the cabinet was perfect. We are idiots. We had the cabinet upside down! Of course it looked weird and wrong! It was upside down! Once we flipped the cabinet over, everything looked great. Oh, I so need a vacation!!! Or at least a day off! Hey, at this point, I’ll settle for just an hour or so of down time!
Okay, realistically, 5 minutes of quiet time would be lovely!!!
