The love hate relationship with water

This week has felt like trying to walk in gale force winds. (Ironically it has been very windy this week)
Every little thing is taking sooo long! Tuesday I got just about all of the tile backing ripped off the floor. That pretty much did me in for the rest of the day! We got the plywood on the counter,

and the hole cut for the sink.


That's when things slowed down. We were going to reuse our old sink in the new location, but it turned out to be too big. That meant searching for a new sink. We were disappointed to discover that double sinks don't fit in 30" cabinets. Phooey. We did find a very nice extra deep one though. Of course since it was extra deep it required moving the plumbing Aaron just installed.
He got that sorted and went to put the faucet on. Turns out we needed a new one of those too!

But after two weeks without a kitchen sink we finally got it installed! The best part of it was Friday night I came home expecting to go faucet shopping, and lo and behold Aaron had already picked one out and got it installed before I came home!! Hurray!

In the meantime, Wednesday morning I discovered a strange lump on our bathroom ceiling...and water at the bottom of the wall. Not good!


The water tank in the upstairs unit burst and was leaking through the floor, through our ceiling, down our wall, into our bedroom, through our floor and into the parking garage below! Ahhh!

The unit above is vacant so getting in was somewhat of an issue. We did get in though and now with the water turned off it looks like things are drying up. What is to become of our wall, I have yet to find out...

I must take a moment to reflect on the blessing it is to be born and raised in the country(s)that I have been. There are so many people in the world that don't homes like we do, or running water, much less a kitchen sink. Although it is inconvenient and uncomfortable to live in a construction zone, I just have to take a few seconds each day and remind myself how blessed I truly am.

Cleared Out!

The past week was a lot of tedious work. Since the sink used to be out in the middle of the room the plumbing had to be adjusted, which meant cutting up more flooring. Then the plugs on the wall had to be moved so that they weren’t directly above the sink once we moved it.

There is still a little more electrical work to be done- a few more plugs to move, but we got enough done to be able to get ready for the cabinets!


Yesterday we did some major hauling! We took 1480 lbs of rubble to the dump! Everything including the kitchen sink. That’s a lot of heavy lifting! We got almost all the tile ripped out, now there is just the underlay that needs to come up.



Still a lot of work, but it’s getting close. After that we joyfully took our old stove to be recycled and brought home a brand new one! Saturday night I went to make dinner and discovered our last working burner was no longer working. I haven’t had my own (working stove) in almost a year and a half, so this is super wonderful!


We got all the cabinets in place now. What a big difference! The room is really open now. We still have to order the doors so it wont be finished for a bit, but at least we have cabinets!


Next step will be a piece of plywood for a counter top and a kitchen sink!

Ground level

The sub-floor definitely needed replacing, chunks of wood were coming out when we pulled up nails. Aaron set to work ripping out the old floor...
And putting down the new stuff...

Next was installing this giant corner cabinet! Not any easy task. The feet kept falling off the bottom when we moved it. Aaron held it up while I crawled underneath to put the feet back on. We finally got it in place and bolted to the wall.

Aaron got the stove and fridge back in place and then ripped out the remaining cabinets. They were completely rotten and added to our huge pile of rubble in the living room. Fortunately the sub-floor looks okay, other than needing a good bleaching.

No guts no glory!

On to the kitchen! We tried to ease ourselves into this project by doing just the top cabinets. We emptied them, and started ripping them down.

I was hoping to be able to donate the old ones to the ReStore but they took some aggressive pulling to get down and unfortunately they didn't survive the fall.


We got a pretty good system down, I assembled,

Aaron measured and we both hung.

It is so nice to have even a couple clean cabinets.

We did all that in a Sunday afternoon. The next part took some working up to. We can't put the bottom cabinets in until the tile comes out. So guess who took on that job? Me!


Whew! Next was moving out the fridge.(me again) then the cabinet and stove.

Unfortunately there was an unpleasant surprise under there. More mold.


Looks like the sub-floor is gonna need replaced. We'll save that for another night. I'm pooped!