Tuesday Evening, Wk. 5

Some significant progress has been made. The painters completed the first coat of the new paint colors and it makes the room look like a different place. The second coat should add great depth. Because the laundry room is small, we chose to have just one dark wall and paint the remaining walls the trim color. The three laundry room walls ended up being ever-so-slightly green, or faint kahki-colored. I like it. I have asked the painting contractor to add the smallest touch of the dark green to the ivory paint for the laundry room to enhance


the echo of the darker green in the kitchen without making the room too closed in.

Almost all the cabinets have been set now, with the exception of the oven cabinet. All further work is awaiting the arrival of what are called "skins", the finishing cover for the unfinished plywood sides of the cabinets.

Today the electrician finished roughing in the electrical work and we now have functional switches hidden beneath the cabinets, along with the outlets and the under-cabinet halogen lighting. I understand that xenon lights are cooler and last longer and are less expensive to buy and operate, but we had a small communication breakdown and I have been assured that "everyone" is installing halogen, so we too have halogen. All fixtures will be unseen behind light rails with decorative rope trim.

The decorative trim design is repeated in the new cabinet hardware, installed yesterday and today. We are only short three pieces. Everything else is in. This should be a unifying element for the kitchen.

The primary unifier will be the granite countertops, chosen to pick up all the other colors in the room. We are now waiting for an appointment to have the template made for the countertops. Walter says the under-cabinet lighting will really make it "sing". I will just be pleased to see what I am doing after 22+ years of working in my own cast shadow.

Today Steve, the electrician, with the assistance of 6"4" Bud, one of the carpenters, installed the new living room chandelier. We have shopped for a replacement on and off the entire time we have lived here. The first visitors we had to the new house, before we even had furniture moved in, were Rod and Debbie. Debbie looked up and said, "What an ugly chandelier. So that's going, right?" Well, Debbie, it is finally gone!

I expect that nothing else will happen this week. Monday morning, week 6, hopefully the skins will have arrived and will be installed. The drywallers will return to patch the holes in the wall made by the electrician to access his wires, the fabricator will come to make the template for the countertops and then, maybe Tuesday, the painters will return for a second and final coat of paint.