Another Brick in the Wall

Jinkies, you guys. Should we talk about something else? (OH PLEASE YES, is what I am hearing screamed from the other side of the internets). You are right. We should talk about something else.

How about home improvements? The whole thing about our house is that it needs improvements. When we bought it, it pretty much had a really good framework and a long list of improvements and that is about all. And we were going to do every last thing ourselves, which takes oodles of time. Like, years of time. In other words, Nordic Boy's dream come true. We have a master project list that is The Thickness, y'all. It involves binders. With tabs. There are also stacks of notecards. There is never not a project going on around here. A lot of it is stuff that is unsexy, like when we ripped our roof off and replaced it, or when we insulated our ceiling. Now that we are winding up those types of guts-replacement projects, we are actually getting around to more cosmetic-y things that actually are fun to take Before and After pictures of. Nordic Boy totally disagrees with me on this, but there is nothing entertaining about a Before and After picture of a new electrical panel or some shit like that.
So, let's talk about my kitchen.

There are many things that do not work about my kitchen. First of all, it is (like everything in our teensy house) small, which would be totally ok with me except for the fact that it is enclosed on four sides, with only a narrow doorway and a small window over the sink. This means that there can really only be a maximum of 2 people in there at any given time (we call this the Two-Butt Max), which hey, that works because we are a family of 2! Except you know what? We know and love more than each other. And we often have those more-than-each-others in our house. And those more-than-each-others want to (SIGH) interact with us. This results in a situation where people are over, and we are in the kitchen, and the non-us people will inevitably squeeze themselves into the tiny kitchen with us because we are MAGNETIC, and then we start yelling "Two Butt Max! Two Butt Max!" as a sort of alarm because it gets sardine-like right quick. And then folks get out of our kitchen and go back to the dining/living room where they talk amongst themselves, and I'm sure they do not talk about their weirdo friends in the other room who have invented butt-quantities as a unit of measurement. And we, poor kitchen-folk, have to toil by ourselves in our lonely Two Butt Max world.

Here are photos of the old kitchen, taken the only way I could- by standing at the doorway and looking left and then looking right. Please also note the sad old electric oven/cooktop and the horrible wire shelving.

We decided that we needed to be able to see and talk to more than just our own two butts while in the kitchen. To accomplish this? Dress ourselves up like the Kool-Aid man and bust a hole through the effing wall! Ok, so there wasn't really any sugar-drink cosplay, but bust through the wall we did.

Whenever we do bigger projects in our little teensy house, the first thing we do is figure out what needs to happen so that we can actually live around the perimeter of the project. Nordic Boy is a genius about containing things so that our whole house doesn't go to shit every time we work on something because homegirl over here would not be happy.

In this case, before wall-busting, he framed out a temporary wall, covered it in plastic, and then constructed a thingy-do-bob that vacuumed the dust straight out the dingbusted window! Awesome.


(Living room side).




(Kitchen side).
Bonus: Is that not exactly like the final scenes of E.T.??? Phone home, kitchen wall!

Then the crash-through happened:



And when it was done, being in the kitchen went from this view:



to this view:



Hello, people hanging out in the living room!

And this is what it looks like from the living room (you can't see that the sad electric stove is now a beautemous gas range, but trust me, it is happening):






Hello, Two Butt kitchen toilers!

I am super in love with it.