January 13: Sprucing Up

Phil made my day today. His ribs are not fully healed, but he is back in a limited capacity. He decided to simply grit his teeth and put in toe-kicks for the storage cabinets. Did I mention that we hired a designer to maximize this space? Modern Family Kitchens takes IKEA cabinets and does creative, marvelous things with them. I had done my best, and fit ten cabinets in the space. The designer, in the same space, fit 21. And the walkways work far better. Best $400 I spent, I think. (I got an order list, too, and a contact person at IKEA, so I just had to call to touch base, email my list, and wait for my shipment. I loved that.)

Anyway, the one issue that we ended up with was that the toekicks were not quite tall enough, so there is a 1" gap between the top of the toekick and the bottom of the cabinet. From most vantage points, this won't be terribly obvious, but it is one of those emotional blah things that make even starting a project discouraging.

But Phil put the toekicks in. He raised the dishwasher, which had been about an inch below the counter. While it was lower, it worked, but if both racks were out at the same time, the dishwasher tipped forward. That was disconcerting. I'm glad it is firmly in place now! He raised the stove, and re-leveled it.

The entire island had to be raised just a bit to allow the toekicks to fit (those toekicks! Arr!). I don't know how he did it, but he got the island raised, without emptying all the drawers and cupboards.

We no longer see yellow electric line, or massive dust-and-construction-debris bunnies underneath. Phil was surprised by how much better the cabinets look, now that they are finished on the bottom.

And we washed the exterior of four windows and put up four screens.

I think they are surprisingly un-obvious. We have seven more exterior windows to wash, and I am waiting to wash interior windows until construction dust is mostly finished.

At the end of all those hours (not everything went smoothly, so that took much of the day), Phil suddenly started to feel sick. We have really had a go of sickness lately. I don't think we've had more than a day or two of all of us feeling well since December 23. Many of the boys have been hit twice now. Jadon finally got it for the first time. I think I was starting to get the feverish aches, and I took a homeopathic Aconite and immediately felt better.

In other news, Abraham, feeling under the weather, went through about nine months of his drawings from last year. It was amazing to see the progression of an artist, from stick figures early in the year...

... to negative space in a cowboy hat ...

... and intricate drawings by the year's end.

He lives and breathes art. We were reading about an ancient culture last week, and the line was something about the "food, art, and military" and Abraham cheered, "art! Yay!" and stuck his arms in the air. He's a funny guy.

Going through the box of drawings, he whittled down his production (perhaps 750 sheets of paper or so) to a surprisingly small handful. But when I mentioned that we could keep the others, just rubber banded to remember that they could be disposed of, I think he was relieved. "I don't really want to get rid of them because they represent a large amount of effort," he explained. Of course. And I am so glad that you explained that so cogently, with your adult vocabulary, oh 7-year-old.