RENOVATION SUCCESS!!!!!

We are happy to report that the renovation is now history! What a crazy, long month it was, but we are now glad it is over and our apartment is outfitted to hold all six of us for a few years. Above are two "before" pictures of our kitchen. Then we have Skillet (and Mrs. Skillet) working on our counters and our cabinet man (he unfortunately never got a nickname - Sorry!) working on the final touches to the kitchen cabinets. He came to work injured and was in pain while he worked, so Albert tried to help him as much as he could while he was here. I unfortunately didn't snap a picture of any of our workers spitting on the kitchen floor. Sorry about that, but I felt like you could use your imagination on that one. It's not something I want preserved in a photo for the future. I don't ever want to see (or step in) a hocker on my kitchen floor again for as long as I live. Some things that happen over here, I promise, I will never understand! I suppose there are some things you have to see (and hear) to believe :)

Who needs a ladder when you have a chair with a plastic stool on top of it? We were amazed at how these guys worked and worked, with not many of the "conveniences" of home that we are used to. OSHA would have a field day over here. Albert said we live in "a tort waiting to happen". We're just happy no one was electrocuted that we know of while installing our new light switches and overhead lights.

And (drum roll, please) the NEW KITCHEN!!!!! Can you smell the spaghetti? Can you hear the southern food in the frying pan? Is your mouth beginning to water just looking at the photo? Come see us and I'll cook you something real American - We can fit you at our kitchen table now!

As we went through our month with no kitchen, we had to decide what to eat 3 times a day that did not involve any cooking on our part. This became a more difficult task as more time went by. Albert, as most of you know, is quite the adventurous type, but I would rather know I'm going to enjoy what I'm eating as opposed to taking too much of a chance. One day Albert happened to be the one who was out in town around lunch time and he decided to get us some rice. He saw the lady at our favorite fried rice place cooking something that smelled so good, with bits of marinated meat in it. He said, in broken Chinese, that he wanted to get two of those. He brought it home and said "We're trying something new today! It smells delicious!" We were all excited. Surely he knew what he had ordered and he was right - It would be wonderful. I opened the first package to divide the rice among us, and I saw something sticking out of the rice. That's not a toenail, I said to myself. They don't put toenails in rice. So I pulled a little more, and I was right. It wasn't a toenail. It was instead an entire chicken foot, and it had lots of toenails where the first one came from. As I dug a little deeper I found all kinds of interesting treasures - internal organs, bones and various appendages. Who knows what they really call it, but we've now termed this lovely dish "chicken foot fried rice", and we have vowed to never get it again. That was one of those days that our stomachs growled for a good portion of the day. I'm not sure how we'll not end up ordering it again, since Albert's not sure how he did it in the first place, but we'll try to figure it out.


OK, back to the pictures. At one point, Kendall decided the renovations were taking entirely too long and that she needed to take matters into her own hands (just kidding, but she did enjoy pretending to break the counter apart!).

What a happy day it was when Skillet got the toilet upright and in the bathroom instead of on the kitchen floor! It was quite frustrating for that week of no running water or working toilet to actually own a toilet, but to look at it, unusable, sitting in the middle of the kitchen. It is unfortunately now sunken into our bathroom floor instead of bolted to the top of the tile, so we feel as if we are in the children's Sunday School department every time we use the bathroom, but, like Albert has said many times, it's a lot higher off the ground than the toilet we used to have!

Mrs. Wok made our shower curtain, and it took quite a long time to actually get here and be attached to our ceiling. While we didn't have it yet and REALLY wanted to take the first shower we'd had in a month, the workers assured us that it would be OK to go ahead and take a shower anyway - We simply needed to make sure that the water fell on the bathroom floor and not in the bathtub. I'll leave you with that comment to ponder. If you figure it out, please let me know because we still are confused. But we are clean and are eating normally again! Praise the Lord for the end of the longest month in the history of Allen-kind!