Our Olde House: December 2023

The kitchen was completed on December 4^th and the pod was retrieved on December 13^th, thus officially completing the ‘tree fell on the house’ project in just short of six months.  Back in June, I thought the longest it would take to rebuild the kitchen would be four months, and I was planning a trip to the beach at the end of October to celebrate. Another swing and a miss from my crystal ball, which is defective; maybe I should have been a weatherman.

We had a brief celebration with the installation of the stove/oven, the final task which completed the kitchen. All of Miss Sherry’s selections for the flooring, countertops, backsplash, cabinets and ceiling blend together perfectly; she really has a knack for interior decorating. The dishwasher and a new disposal are connected, with a switch for the disposal. We bought a new refrigerator, and had it installed, and the under-counter lighting works great on its own switch.

Miss Sherry had a lazy susan installed in the corner cabinet so that space is actually usable; my coffee bar next to the window has room for the coffee maker and carousel, and the toaster; the coffee pods and cups fit into the cabinet drawer, and extra boxes of coffee are on the cabinet shelf above. My favorite kitchen feature is the trash drawer which holds separate plastic cans for garbage and recycle under the counter; yes, I am easily entertained.

The sunroom is also done, just in time for the outside potted plants to be relocated into the sunroom for the winter. The kitchenette has been dismantled, with those items being relocated back to their permanent locations in the sunroom and kitchen. We unloaded the pod and put away most of those items, but some of our stuff remains in boxes. Miss Sherry is sorting and has identified some items we decided we can live without that will be donated to Goodwill.

We were totally unprepared for a tree falling on our house, and I suppose this is normal and expected. We had no idea how much chaos and disruption to daily life this would cause for such a long period of time. Our contractor did an amazingly good job scheduling the workers and minimizing the required breaks in working on the house. I also underestimated the number of different skills and people who would be involved in our restoration, and this was also taken care of seamlessly by our contractor.

The black walnut tree unfortunately needs to go before it falls down; it is dropping branches more frequently and when the oak tree fell it knocked off all of its branches that were over the deck. We are working on finding someone to remove our black walnut tree; one of the carpenters who worked on the kitchen wants the black walnut wood and will make us a kitchen table from some of it.

Somewhere along the path to kitchen restoration, I must have inadvertently blocked the actual ‘last’ hole where rats were getting under our house. The last rat under the house I saw was in June, and that one disappeared without my help. I had to rebuild the brick walls surrounding the crawl space in a couple of places where tree limbs punched through, and I did build my diversion dam in the front yard. So far, so good, hopefully I did not jinx it.

In the Spring we need to revisit having sod installed in the front yard where the azalea hedge once stood. My little diversion dam seems to be keeping the rain from going under the house, but with the drought it has rained here enough to have runoff only twice in the past six months; I am sure some gully washers will occur shortly that will completely test my dam.

And lest we forget, the back deck needs some serious repair sometime next year; this is the only remaining task from the fallen tree project. For now, neither Miss Sherry nor I can face more construction chaos, so this can wait. We are just starting to be able to even think about Christmas, with shopping and outside decorations non-existent at this point. We made a brief effort to get a Christmas tree, but what we want does not seem to be available.

We are not complaining, we will always be very grateful that all lives were spared, and all of our things have been repaired or replaced. We are still whelmed, but we are now able to look ahead to the future and work on some projects that we postponed due to our exhaustion and being over-whelmed by the kitchen restoration. God does bless us all; sometimes we need to go through that window instead of the door we would prefer. Merry Christmas to you and your families.