Home Remodeling for Delusionals

It's very difficult remodeling a house without outside help. The kind of help you pay for is OK, but there's usually a limited supply of funds, even when there's no limit to the help that is needed.

Free help from friends/neighbors/church members is great, although the supply is even more limited because people have their own Jumbo/LARGE to do lists. And while jars of homemade apple butter help, it's essential to make very judicious use of free help so it is there when you really need it.

As mentioned earlier, I am in the process of replacing the kitchen cabinets with wire shelving. Here you can see a "before" and "during" shot of one of the smaller cabinets. I think it will look quite nice when it's done (tile behind, paint touched up, etc) and I'll be sure to post a picture when I have one.

Four of the five counters are small, and I can get do the work myself. However, number five is a very large counter that covers four cabinets, the dishwasher, and includes the kitchen sink. This I can not lift on my own, so I have enlisted the help of my Home Teacher and his three teenage sons.

One of the challenges of remodeling with free help is that beggars can't be choosers, so you need to take whatever help you can get, when you can get it. Saturday would have been the ideal day for this task, as it would have given me the whole week to get everything ready. But Saturdays are ideal for a lot of things, and therefore are usually booked solid.

So the cabinet replacement party is scheduled for Wednesday night. This means that I have a lot to do to in the next three days - backsplashes removed, steel pipe (for under the sink and the triangle sections) cut and washed, and all the many pipes and hoses disconnected. This is all on top of lining our sauna with glass, by Friday. But that's another story that I'm not prepared to share just yet.

So enough of the blogging. Time to get to work.

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