A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

On Thursday, March 12 of 2009 my good friends Jason and Cheryl Fenrich became the proud parents of a new daughter, Jorja Ann. Later that day Jason gave me a call to announce the arrival, letting me know that everything went well, and that mother and daughter were both healthy.  I asked him to let me know when they were accepting visitors so Michelle and I could meet Jorja.

The following Monday I got a text from Jason (you heard me right - Jason now text messages regularly) inviting us over to see the new baby. Michelle was at school late that night so after I picked her up we headed over to Jason and Cheryl’s.

It had been a while since I held such a new baby, but I think I did alright. She mostly slept while I held her which was alright by me. The less squirming meant the smaller chance of me dropping her. It was Michelle’s turn next and she looked like a natural holding Jorja. I think her motherly instincts kicked in.

I look forward to taking pictures of this cutie in the years to come.  You can see my first shots of Jorja on my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr

Even though our cabinets had been installed our kitchen was still in an unusable state since we were now waiting on the countertops to be built and installed. Because the dimensions can change during the cabinet install, the counters cannot be built until a final measurement is made.

Pristine Countertops showed up a couple days after the cabinet install to take measurements. We were under the understanding that it would be a couple days for them to build and come to install the counters. Michelle decided to call J&H Builders to find out when the install would actually happen and it seemed that we couldn’t get a straight answer. After being redirected to Pristine, we were told it would be late the following week.

By the time we reached the middle of next week we still hadn’t heard from Pristine so Michelle decided to find out what was up. After getting bounced around a bit we were told that it likely wouldn’t be until the following week. Michelle found this unacceptable and convinced them to reconsider. They agreed to install Friday morning.

The guys showed up early Friday morning and had the counters installed within three hours. We were ecstatic to clean the kitchen and get everything moved out of the living room and back to where it belonged. We could now start putting the final touches on the kitchen.

My first task was to install the over the range microwave. I looked over a installation video on the Panasonic website on how to do this. It made it sound really complicated so I was a little worried as to my ability to do it. I decided to dive in anyway.

As it turned it was way easier than I was anticipating. We hadn’t installed an electrical outlet in the above cabinet yet so we were hoping to just be able to run the cord to an outlet just below. This plan didn’t pan out so we will have to install the outlet sooner rather than later. An extension cord will have to make do for the time being.

Michelle’s uncle Ray showed up at the tail end of the microwave install to see what would be required for the sink install. He put together a shopping list for me so I could make a trip to Home Depot before tackling the plumbing the following morning.

Ray arrived late Saturday morning and we immediately got to work. He mentioned earlier that he was having some painful back issues so he was going to have me do the work as he coached me. I wasn’t sure if he was serious about this, but as it turned out he was. He directed me through 9/10ths of the plumbing work and installation of the sink and faucet. I had no idea how any of this stuff worked prior to this, but with his instruction I now have a pretty solid foundation for future work in this down this path. As the old saying goes,

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

The work took a little longer than I was expecting, but that can likely be chalked up to me going slowly as I was taught Kitchen Plumbing 101. We managed to have a working faucet and sink by the end of the day with minimal glitches encountered along the way.  (Hey…that was like a poem).

The kitchen was pretty messy after the day’s work, and even though I was totally wiped I wanted to get everything cleaned up so we could have an actual working kitchen. Under all of the sawdust and ABS pipe shavings Michelle presents what was hiding.

Following admiring our new kitchen, the three weeks of renovations finally overcame me and I made my way to the nearest couch and collapsed. I could cherish the next few weeks of a normal household until we tackled the final step of tiling the backsplash, and fixing the completely out of place light fixture.

You can check out more pictures on my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Microwave Install Thumbnails on Flickr
• Microwave Install Slideshow on Flickr
• Plumbing Thumbnails on Flickr
• Plumbing Slideshow on Flickr
• Final Product Thumbnails on Flickr
• Final Product Install Slideshow on Flickr