Welp, womp womp. Kitchen construction is now delayed until after TG holiday.
Damn it all. This time, due to an illness in our contractor’s family, so understandable, but still disappointing.
We have lived in a construction zone for the better part of three months, and with the holidays, we will likely still be sweeping up dry wall bits well into the new year. We definitely won’t have the counters installed before then, that is now certain.
Worse yet, our old cabinets are on their way out this weekend, which means by Sunday afternoon, Operation Campsite will commence when we lose our kitchen sink and move full time to our temporary set-up. We are going to have the contractor swing by with a sink cabinet and hook the plumbing back up to get us through. I mean, it is better than washing dishes in the powder room sink for two months, but still.
Some major updates from the self-styled demo team, though:
1) The upper cabinets are down! The lowers will be removed this weekend. Contractor thinks we are going to have a major problem with the weight of the granite. We don’t disagree.
We got a very nice text from our GC saying that we do such good work, he’d like to hire us (he was joking), and continued, “the work doesn’t pay much, but the job satisfaction is up there.” JohnR told him we’d be happy to be paid in Advil at this point 
2) The load-bearing/not load-bearing wall dilemma. Five days, three holes, two professionals, and one husband have now had a turn at sticking their heads into our ceiling to see what they can see. There was some creative connecting of the partition wall to the joists above by the original builder, to be sure, but the word this morning is: go for it!
Nobody has a Plan B (or, rather, the contractor doesn’t want to say what Plan B is out loud to me for fear of a full-on grown up melt down), but I’m pretty sure it begins with “support” and ends with “post.” Before anyone changes their minds, we are going to start chopping on Sunday. If you are a church-goer, throw a prayer or two our way.
3) We finally, FINALLY, made a decision on the range hood fiasco. We SO wanted to go with an in-ceiling flush mount ceiling hood, but in the end, venting it outside would have required pulling a permit AND, because of the long struggle to understand a puzzled-together overhead joist system, our contractor was VERY reluctant to cut through any. Budget-wise, we could either hire a structural engineer or have pretty things. I’m going with the latter.
Luckily, we had our heads turned by this stunner! The company, Futuro Futuro, is one of few that do pendant range hoods with 960 whopping CFM. We are goo-goo eyed over the 36″ Balance model and it should be here in time for Thanksgiving. Not that anyone here will be cooking any damn thing on Thanksgiving, but we can gather ’round the swanky range-hood and give thanks.
The device will act as a pendant light as well as function as a powerful range hood, so a win-win in our books. And, the charcoal filter doesn’t need changed for five years. Not exactly what we thought we wanted, but something tells me this is going to be one of our favorite purchases.
(Fingers crossed because it is not returnable…)
Christine Anne Scott 