Two more weeks (thereabouts)

I'm getting really tired of the kitchen thing. I try to remind myself that my sister-in-law endured something like 18 months of kitchen renovation and I can surely endure 5 or 6 weeks. But I am very tired of washing dishes in a bathroom sink that's not big enough, making coffee in the dining room, and worrying that my wall-mountable microwave that's now sitting on a fish tank stand will rock itself off onto the floor and add several hundred dollars more to an ever increasing reno price.

I'm also very tired of the dust. It gets on everything, in everything, and goes *everywhere.* My sinuses - already a wreck after major surgery 2.5 years ago - have begun to show signs that maybe I need an emergency visit to the ENT. I was supposed to see him for a follow-up in February when I could have looked like a model patient, taking care of myself and showing up healthy. Instead, I never made it in February since I was on crutches and in physical therapy and it just seemed easier to wait. Now I seem to be on the downward spiral into sinus infection and I will get to go in to be vacuumed out.

My refrigerator is in my foyer. My range is in my dining room. My kitchen table and chairs are in the family room. Everything else is boxed up like we're moving. Which I guess we are - we're moving into new cabinets that are waiting patiently in the garage for the floor guy to finish, the walls to get painted, and the cabinet installing crew to come back on Monday and start installing.

I am too tired to be excited about it all right now - maybe that will change after we go and pick out our granite tomorrow night. Something I'm not really in the mood to do. Which seems bad - I can't imagine one should be picking a major decorative detail when not in the mood. I will psyche myself up with the online photo gallery of luscious stone with names like Mascarello. Sounds like something that should be in an Italian family's kitchen. Good thing everyone else in my family is Italian . . .

And it will all be done soon and I will probably not remember how annoying it was. I will be amazed at how much more my cabinets can hold (apparently the cabinet installers think we have *a lot* of cabinets in our garage - I translate that to mean I can put lots of stuff in them!) and how cool the soft-close feature is. I will stand in my kitchen and try to slam drawers every day. It will be fun.

If I can wait two more weeks, anyway . . .

Yellow?

I love green. I have 5 rooms in my house painted green - all different shades. I actually didn't realize this until recently when we had to go searching for one of the aforementioned shades to do some touch-up in the boys' bathroom (post-re-installation of towel bar after P *yanked* the thing out the wall trying to free his towel - I do not think I need to worry about the kid's strength).

But we never found that particular shade still lying around waiting to be used for small (or not so small) detail work. We did however find 4 other shades and realized that having achieved a rainbow* in our home, we're a little heavy on the green. (Though I challenge anyone who steps into my house to really pick up on it. I don't think we have an overwhelmingly green aura.)

Now that we are going to have to pick out a new paint color for the kitchen - in the kitchen-project-that-won't-stop - I was aiming for green. Before realizing that I'd have a perfect half-dozen of rooms in that shade. My husband balked.

"I like this one," he tells me pointing to one of the dozens of paint chips taped to the wall - it leans to brown. Yellowy-brown. Dare I say, baby-poo brown. The breastfed kind.

He's not terribly wrong. It's a doable color but do I want doable? I think not. I also really suck at this coordinating stuff. At least five times a day (in line with my shades of green), I wish for an expert to come and tell me what to pick so it all works together - backsplash, cabinet knobs, light fixtures, paint, granite. Someone, please, steer me away from serious error.

Alas, no kitchen color expert has come knocking. So I am wading through tin finishes for the backsplash, different shades of bronze for the cabinet knobs, sheer panic at the light fixtures, and page after page of granite colors.

Which brings me to the point - am I crazy for contemplating yellow granite? It's really pretty:

Arandis yellow. 

It has some red - my family room is red. It would work with bronze - the eating area light fixture is bronze. It's *interesting.* I want interesting. But do I want yellow?

And there's no way I could paint my walls green.

*Yes, I have at least one room in each of the following colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. I may have missed indigo but I'm pretty d*mn close. :)

And the housekeeping award goes to . . .

I enjoy having a clean house.

I do not necessarily enjoy the process of getting it clean. I especially hate bathroom cleaning and moving everything on book shelves to dust them. I do not mind doing laundry. I do not enjoy folding and I detest putting it all away.

I prefer activities that bring me *joy* (who doesn't?) and vacuuming my carpet doesn't bring JOY. Satisfaction yes. For a brief period of time (until the next crumb explosion or dirty-shoe-tracking incident).

All of that said, I spent a good two hours today cleaning. The boys' bathroom was getting pretty grotty around the edges and our bathoom mirror was a study in splatter marks (courtesy of my children - everyone prefers our bathroom when it's time to brush teeth and fling water around). I dusted last week but had failed to vacuum so that was becoming a necessity as well.

Generally speaking, I think I am a decent housekeeper. Not stellar but I am definitely not a house of squalor and no one's ever going to come to my house and then whisper in a horrified voice to another friend about how she was too afraid to touch anything or sit anyhere but the edge of a hard kitchen chair because of the disgusting condition of the home. That would not be my house.

Usually, I'm pretty good. I hate little bits of cr*p on my kitchen floor so I'm pretty diligent about sweeping that. I cannot function in clutter so we pick up a little bit almost every day.

But today, I was vacuuming my bedroom and found little white bits of drywall along the wall under my window. Like the kind of debris that comes from drilling holes to install, say, a new curtain rod. Which my husband did. IN DECEMBER. Yikes. How did it get to be June and I'm just now finding this stuff on my bedroom floor?

Hmmmm.

I'm going to blame it on the lovely curtains that are now hanging from that curtain rod since they come almost all the way to the floor. Yeah, that's it. The dirt was hiding from me.

Heads up to dirt in my house - you want to hang out for a while, find a place to hide.