This was our kitchen on Friday:

And this is our kitchen this morning:

I won’t show you the current interior view. I know everyone knows that remodeling is chaos and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about but I just can’t. I suppose the kitchen remodeling experts would say we’re doing it wrong but we’re doing it in a way we can live with and the results will look expert. The cabinets are out except for the island. The range and refrigerator are still plugged in and we’re working around them. We also have a countertop convection oven that sits on its own little cart near the island. The kitchen stuff is mostly in boxes in the living room. The things we use all the time, and some stuff that just didn’t get put in boxes, are all over the dining table.

After getting the cabinets out, and the small closet that opened into the hallway, we fixed a bad place in the floor and moved a couple of electrical outlets. Last night we started putting up bead-board paneling that is pre-primed for painting. It’s easier than tearing out all the old paneling and putting up dry-wall and I like the look of painted bead-board. (When I say “we” of course I mean mostly my husband. I’m mainly the holder and fetcher.)

We’re going to be without a sink or countertops for over a week, probably more like two or three weeks. In a little while I’m going to go buy a bunch of microwavable meals. I hadn’t originally planned to do that. We can use paper plates but the problem of washing pots and pans without a kitchen sink is a little more than I want to deal with every day.

I don’t feel terribly stressed out. Occasionally you see women on HGTV who are shocked and freaked out about all the dust and chaos. I’m not like that. I knew exactly what we were getting into but I do miss my kitchen. I miss my sink and the twelve inches of countertop to the left of the range where I used to make my tea in the morning and I have moments when I think I just wish I had my kitchen back – any kind of kitchen. But when we’re done with this project I’ll have a whole eighteen inches of countertop to the left of the stove and a few extra inches on the right too. And it will be bright and cheerful like a kitchen should be.

The picture above is not exactly what our kitchen looked like when we moved in. I don’t remember if I have a before before picture. The original countertops were butcher block patterned Formica with the pattern going the wrong way. The linoleum was a complicated tile pattern in shades of brown. It was a very brown kitchen. The range was an ugly stainless steel model and the refrigerator was almond. The original island was a bar just twelve inches deep. My husband built it out to normal countertop width to gain more storage space so we had to have a new countertop to fit that of course. I wasn’t especially in love with the blue at the time. I picked it because it was the only in stock color that wasn’t some shade of brown but I’ve grown quite fond of it. The new countertop will be blue also but I don’t know yet if it will be exactly the same blue.