week of destruction

The demo started this week. Day one started off well enough. We got a bit of a late start because we had to rent a Uhaul van to move our couch into the storage space. When I rented the storage space, there was a dude living next to the my cubby who clearly had diabetes and had swollen, bleeding feet bursting out of his shoes. There was a puddle of blood in front of his space. Did I mention that his space was next to ours? When Chris and I dropped off our bed the next day, he was still there and the blood puddle spread to what I can only assume is the bathroom. Finally, on day one of demo, we went to move the couch into storage and we were almost unable to gain access to the space as the blood was now all over our floor and a hazmat team was called in. Fun.

We demolished the living room and the dining room on the first day. I wasn't very strategic and advised the dumpster driver to put the dumpster in a space where it was almost impossible to open the door. Oopsie number one in what I assume will be a sea of mistakes and mishaps. So loading the dumpster was unnecessarily difficult the first day (Dad saved the day later on and I am now a master dumpster rearranger). The demo transformed our downstairs from this:

To this:

And here are the happy campers at the end of a hard work day.

Day two... well not so great. Chris and I were dogsitting for this gal a block away. I got up a bit early to walk the dog and meet my dad for demo day 2. I let Chris sleep in a bit and figured he'd get some coffee, take the dog for another walk and join us. When he got up, he was taking fan down the step and slipped on the first step and tumbled all the way down. He got up, tried to call me and my phone had no signal. So he walked over to the site after sitting and assessing his goose egg. He came over and lucidly told me that he fell down the stairs and asked me to bandage up his arm. I asked, "do you think you have a concussion?" He wavered, said, "whoa" and passed out in a house full of exposed beams and rusty nails. His head, and eye, scraped all the way down a very scary wall. I tried to catch him and think I might have diverted his eye from getting completely destroyed by the nail. It was very close and he was very lucky. He could have very easily lost his eye.

I had our friend Ray call 911 and wouldn't let him move. We were both very scared. The paramedics arrived and put him in a cervical collar and on a board as a result of his trauma. They had him in the ambulance for a while to work on him. It was an excruciating wait. We got to the ER, they stitched up face and did a cat scan. Luckily, he didn't do any damage to his eye and his cat scan was okay. The end of day two looked like this:

We were so lucky and unlucky at the same time... more later!

Out of the loop and in Baltimore

I don't know if anyone really follows this. But I've been trying to reorient myself to Baltimore, figure out this house thing, and write a paper. It ain't so bad. Writing will always plague me and feel like pulling my fingernails out. I feel like it's just the nature of academic writing and I am not sure if it'll get easier. I really miss (but don't) the formulaic style of journal articles. Lit review, gap in the literature, how I intend to fill that gap, methods, findings, limitations of my particular study, using those limitations to suggest future research and get myself tenure. Ta da!

This post is actually about the house. The ugly, soon not to be as ugly, house and our hopes for it. Actually, the kitchen is the room that's plaguing us the most. Other rooms are easy enough (until I really think about the bathroom). But the kitchen! Planning a kitchen from scratch - well from scratch with the parameters set up by the space - is so hard. First, most kitchen cabinets are u-g-l-y. Really. Chances are, if you are renting or didn't choose your kitchen cabinets, they're probably not the ones you want to look at. Given that ours can easily fall apart at the stroke of a sponge, we are just getting rid of the fuckers.

We've heard from several folks that Ikea has the most affordable, durable, and attractive cabinets around. Frankly, upon visiting, we really weren't that impressed. I had all these dreams for a penny round tile backsplash and wooden countertops and attractive, but sparse, white cabinets. Nope. Cheap and u-g-l-y. Unless one is willing to plunk down a hefty chunk of cash, it's pretty likely the cabinets she buys will be fairly unattractive. So, Chris and I, in a moment of clarity, decided on the module, free-standing Ikea cabinets. could this post get anymore boring, you ask? Sorry. I'm gettin' this down for posterity.

Here's what we're looking at:

From this:

To something like this:

Or some approximation of this kitchen given that we are not morons and know we cannot make this exact replica. But these are the units we're interested in. Now this question is: what color walls?