Say goodbye to dishpan hands

Ever wished you could do the dishes? Ever watched plates and cups and forks and pans pile up around the kitchen, then overflow to the living room, the bathroom, even the bedroom and say, “Jeeezeree — I wish I could just DO the freakin dishes!”

Yeah. Me too.

But this week, dishes aren’t happening. Of course, it’s all part of the path to enlightenment: new countertops to replace the sickly permadirt white-ish formica countertops that came with our kitchen. Bob (whom I love and admire all the way to the moon and back) has been working his cute little butt off the past three weeks trying to singlehandedly update our kitchen. It’s astounding how much he has accomplished considering he still has his full time job working for the man. But it’s definitely slow going. Back when we thought we were going to be able to work on it together, we thought it would be a week-long (maybe a little overflow) project. As it turns out, I spent our free week (the monkeys’ spring break) in Charlotte with my Dad in the hospital (more on that here and here) and Bob stayed behind to work on the kitchen all week (we’ve come a long way from the debauched spring breaks of yore, my friends). He’s pretty hunky, Bob is. But the reality is, he just isn’t Ty Pennington, with a supersecret crew of ghost carpenters doing the actual work. Needless to say, although he did an incredible job in the time he had, he didn’t quite finish.

So now, four weeks out, it feels like we’ve taken a completely ADD approach to updating our kitchen. “Sure I’m working on painting the cabinets right now, but it will only take me a minute to go ahead and patch that 4 foot hole in the ceiling so I’ll just do that real quick … oh and I should re-plumb the refrigerator before we get too much further along … and someone has got to get started painting the little ladybugs on all the new cabinet knobs…” So we’ve started in on pretty much everything except putting down the new floor. And what have we completed? You guessed it: NOTHING! Lots of stuff is almost done, but nothing is actually done. And the biggest incomplete is the lack of kitchen sink. It’s amazing how crippled that makes you feel. Rather than take everything into the bathroom and clean it in that sink, my coping mechanism has been to just pile everything into a big plastic bin and wait til the sink is fixed. That and we’re eating out for every meal. Isn’t it great we’re saving so much money by updating the kitchen ourselves!

Update: Kitchen sink and counters finished. Dishes done.