Renovations

I came home the other day to an enormous pile of rubble in my kitchen.

While I was off having fun at the UnBirthday Party this weekend, Jeff was ripping up the old crackling vinyl imitation-parquet floor to prepare for the installation of the new floor.

There seems to be a trend to the pattern of home renovations in my household.

1)I go off somewhere.

2)Then I come back.

Renovations are suddenly in progress, or even sometimes complete.

Once I went back-packing in the British Isles for three weeks and came home to a completely renovated bathroom. There was even a new cedar ceiling and wall installed.

And a few years back, I toddled off to Italy alone and returned to an amazing renovation of the master bedroom closet: there were double rods and cubbyhole shelves and sweet little drawers . I'm quite sure that it was that closet that helped sell our old house.

It makes me want to go on vacation! (Don't worry, Jeff gets to come along sometimes!)

Well, I was only gone overnight this time and so the process is still in full swing. The roar of a belt-sander upstairs fills my ears as I write this. It was apparently a very annoying glued-down floor to take up and its left behind a lot of annoying stuck-on debris..

The photo above I took of Jeff is after a marathon bout of floor-ripping on his hands and knees. He wanted me to explain that if I posted the photo as he may look a little rough around the edges.

"Was there blood, sweat and tears involved?" I asked sympathetically when I came home.

"No blood fortunately", he answered. "A lot of sweat though. A few tears. And lots and LOTS of profanity. You can't have home renovation without profanity." :)

Ah, that may explain his sense of renovation timing.

Perhaps its due to my delicate sensibilities (oh, my ears!) that he waits until I'm out of the house before he starts these projects.

Last week Jeff, Kim, Baby Zoe, and I toured local hardware supply stores to find the best deal for laminate floors. As you can see from the photo above, we made a day of it and even camped out comfortably in the aisles a while. The wood we eventually chose was a quarter of our maximum planned budget so I'm quite pleased about that.

My own home renovation role seems to be Chief Wall Painter. It is almost time to change the look of my Cantaloupe and Plaid Kitchen (the previous owner's vision and not my own, although its coziness appeals to me about half the time) and I'm open to ideas.