Kitchen Trauma.tic Distress. Disorder.




This is what C accomplished in one weekend while I kept F/M out of the house.



We're doing this between the kitchen and the den.We're not ones to make traditional decor decisions, so we're basically marrying two crazy-looking rooms. Soon I'll be able to cook and watch/interact with the kids while they play (all without looking through exposed studs).

The studs are true 2x4s of southern pine. We're thinking of replacing them with new ones from the hardware store and using the old wood in a visible way, such as making a sealed butcher block style counter top for the bar area, or as the front underside of the bar area instead of gypsum. Perhaps a bit like this kitchen from an Apartment Therapy Home Tour...though we're keeping the vintage wallpaper in the kitchen, so our version won't be nearly as cleanly modern looking.



The Fix or Replace Daily: Internet Edition



Last weekend our modem was on the fritz. We did all the typical rebooting and it worked for a few days, puttered out mid-week, repeated rebooting and started looking into getting it replaced. Mind you, over the past month our oven went out and we were discussing whether to fix it or replace it. We could fix it for about $40 but the whole thing new was somewhere around $200.  We have a counter top convection oven that has assisted nicely while we thought about what would be our best decision. A couple weeks prior our upstairs furnace stopped working. This, we knew, could be fixed for about $50 rather than being replaced for hundreds of dollars. Then, shortly after the modem-spasms started, the 30-ish year old dishwasher lost its oomph. With all the home cooking we do, 2 days without a dishwasher meant every single nook in the kitchen was piled high with dirty dishes. The dishwasher had to be replaced.


Let's recap our list of broken electronics: Modem, Furnace, Oven, Dishwasher.

Charlie put in a call to Windstream and they told him we'd have to pay $75 for a new modem. Well, we paid about $85 a month for a land line and Internet, so an extra $75 to waste time was a hefty price knowing we had another big purchase to make. Plus, without the Internet, our bill would go down to $25 a month.

C and I sort of already resented ourselves for how much TV we watched (thanks to Netflix...another $10 a month), and neither of us relies on the Internet for work. We have access at work and on our phones, so it wasn't entirely nuts for us to discuss the option of getting rid of the Internet at home.  That, plus the money-saving math, plus the series I'd just read for adults on Project-Based Homeschooling (no, I don't homeschool, I just think Lori has an incredibly smart outlook on leading a purposeful family life, yes, I do realize the irony that I had to read something on the Internet to push me towards this) made the decision fairly easy to nix the 'net.

There you have it: no home Internet and a new phase of home life that I hope will lead to deep investigation, creativity, and finding self-purpose. I'm not sure what will happen, but I'm sure it will end up here!