Kitchen bitchin'

Here's what the kitchen looked like after the guys left yesterday. If I had known how much light the room gets without the hanging cabinet there, perhaps I could have saved a few thousand dollars on the eight indirect cylinder lights we ordered.

This is likely the last I'll be seeing of it for several weeks, as it's currently being sealed with plastic to keep the job site debris from getting into the rest of the house.

As the guys were packing up yesterday, we discussed a few electrical and gas issues. I tried really hard to pay attention but I couldn't stop looking at a large rat-sized hole in the center of the floor (and of this picture). It was like the pink elephant (or giant pink people-eating rodent) in the room. Finally I explained my intense fear of mice (my fear of rats should be assumed from that) and could we please stuff something in the hole? The guys humored me (not very affectionately) by putting that long strip of cardboard over the whole open part and sealing it with painters' tape. Any self-respecting rat (or mouse) could gnaw his way through it but it did allow me to stop focusing on it (for the moment, anyway).

After they left, I noticed a lot of other holes on that back wall, including a few such perfect mouseholes they could have been illustrations in a Beatrix Potter book. Since I know that's where our mice were camped out during our vermin problem, I was not a happy camper. I did my best to cover the holes with that blue painters' tape but finally decided it was wiser not to think about it at all. I did get some consolation from the knowledge that there's no food in the kitchen anymore, so the smart mice wouldn't be interested in being there anyway.

That doesn't mean I slept well, though.