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Little Home updates

Early spring, I finally got my curtains up and finished. Karen gave me her drapes and I bought the rod, measured and hung according to the drapes. They are not wide enough to close all the way. And...they are also a pain to open and close, they get caught and fall off the rings.  It is pretty much an epic fail on my end. Anyway, I do think they look very nice. For practical purposes, I would have been better off not to make any changes. Thanks to my handy dandy husband for doing the hard part.



We made plans to update the kitchen, but getting a contractor to do it has been such an ordeal. Someone would come to the house, do all the measuring, take notes, have a plan, and then months go by. I bug and bug and call, text, email. We started talking to a business in Feb 2021. Still we wait. In the meantime, I hired a guy to paint my kitchen, living room, and laundry room in March. It was so refreshing to have a clean new coat of paint, no more blue, no more wall paper, and no more cracks. Wallpaper removal is the pits. I got Mark and Luke in on it with me. We all had our version of what worked best.

My original contractor named Randy was super helpful and personable. He loved to talk and tell stores of Puerto Ricco where he now spends most of his days. After a lengthy time of planning, measuring, and estimating, we had a plan to move forward. The only problem, he wanted to start gutting my kitchen in October 2021. This sounded like a terrible idea. First, we would be in the middle of harvest, and also just coming out of a season of covid.  Who knows what they will do next, another lockdown and I could spend months without a kitchen sink, refrigerator, and half torn apart kitchen. I put a hold on the plans and wanted to start again in the spring. In time, I started to question the idea of gutting my kitchen. My cabinets are quality built and the color and style I picked out in the showroom and brought home, turned out to be a similar match. My luck I would redo my whole kitchen only to have it looking just like it did before I renovated. My new plan was to replace the countertops and the upper cabinet doors. With a new countertop meant a new sink. I have an odd location for a sink that required a corner sink with limited options. My previous contractor is dealing with serious cancer health issues and sold his store to a new couple. So now we have a new husband and wife tea, taking over. They are lovely people who I really like, however the sink choice was a bit of a dilemma. The sink should never have been installed. By the time it was in place, there was little I could do unless I wanted to tear out the brand new quartz countertops and replace the sink and quartz, doubling what I just paid. I wasn't happy with my sink but decided I could live with it. I really like the new counter even thought it is light colored and probably is not that noticeably different from what I had before. Of course it is lovely quartz and super nice. My next step is lighting and then cabinets. It is a process and is taking forever. I started talking to the new contractor in February and set a goal to have things done by Jake's graduation. I did that to push the contractors to prioritize and get things done. They were pushing for that date, but it still didn't happen. It was a week or more after graduation in June. The next step is lighting. Whenever I renovate or fix something up, I get buyers remorse and most of the time I liked it better before I fixed it than after. I think I should just let things be. Maybe someday we will start from scratch or move into a newer home just the way we like. As for now, I will make this little home cozy and enjoyable. 





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