While pulling some weeds in the neglected part of my yard (read: any part of it), I saw this perfectly good machete lying on the ground yesterday. At least I assume it is perfectly good. I have not tested its goodness, and I don’t have on tap a machete evaluation schema. But this machete appears to be in working order, and was just hanging out innocently enough near the fence at the very back. Out in the open. Under a tree. Minding its own business.

Spouse disavows knowledge of this machete, saying “All of my machetes are accounted for.”

Sigh.

Ignoring that for the moment, I don’t know where it came from or what it was up to before I found it. I’d ask my neighbors, but… that would involve speaking to my neighbors and this is something I avoid as a matter of policy.

And that’s really all I have to say about it.

Er… have a great week.

Spent a couple of lovely days in slower lower Delaware recently, visiting wit the fam, tormenting their canines, plundering the prime outlets (tax-free Sony factory store? Hells yeah), dominating some skeeball, winning a little whack-a-mole and generally enjoying a leisurely hammock-filled visit.

One highlight was a delicious and fun dinner with some dear family friends. They’re awesome people and I love their house – they’ve got a great eye and everything’s just thoughtfully set up and very lovely and beautiful, and well-humored. They come by these traits honestly – Don and Arlene are founding members of Friday – an architecture firm in Philadelphia.

As it happens, they are also total freakin’ geniuses.

They recently subscribed to a satellite TV service. They didn’t like the look of the dish, sitting as it does right in front of their tidy and gracefully casual house. The solution? Take a can of paint, some artistic instincts and a good sense of humor and just make the damnable thing blend.

I could have sworn there was a dish here a moment ago.

To celebrate the independence of our great nation, Spouse paid off our kitchen-related debt yesterday!

In the spirit of the Fourth of July, I observed an annual tradition around here and stood in the parking lot in front of my house in the rain listening to the fireworks at the country club down the street. They sound incredible from here. You can only see the top third of most of the bursts since the trees are healthy and robust, but the sound travels down the overhead phone and electrical lines to the office buildings down the way, and back. It sounds like some super hip high-tech stringed instrument.

Here is a super short audio file of the results. It was hard to get a clean clip, I’m afraid. The wet road made the cars really loud.

But back to what’s really important – our solvency. See where we were a mere 1.5 years ago when the Kitchen Remodel Was Revealed!

The longer we live in this house, the less there is of the house we bought. I find this interesting. Here’s the list:

• New roof
• New windows
• Kitchen remodel
• 2 bathroom remodels
• One bathroom re-plumbed after idiot contractors Did Everything Wrong. Everything. It was amazing.
• Electric upgrade (from fuses to breakers – no more staggering around in the dark replacing fuses while cursing)
• New water heater, and washer/dryer
• New front step, storm door and assorted interior and exterior painting and wood repair
• Replaced garage door springs (no more being cut in half by the garage door while looking for fuses in the dark and cursing)

To celebrate this great day, we are making a vow for next time: Condo.

But, in the interest of sharing our good fortune, if anyone in the Mongtomery County area needs the Best Contractor Ever, I would be delighted to provide Saint Steven’s information. We also have a kickass plumber and electrician.

We renovated this bathroom about a year and a half ago. When I say “we,” I mean Saint Steven, of course. He did a bangup job, which is why we called only him when contemplating the kitchen.

It’s a lovely little bathroom. All blue and white. The blue color is named “Thar she blows,” which really clinched the deal in Home Depot when Spouse and I were wallowing in paint chips trying to decide between 20 identical pale blues.

Since Steven hates to paint, we opted to paint this guy ourselves, and then a well-timed e-mail from Urban Outfitters made me thinks these flower stickers would be just the thing to liven up an otherwise sterile space. I think they’re adorable, and knew we’d be up against it when it came time to repaint.

Sadly, that time is now. Since I did the original paint application, it is not up to the challenge of standard shower steam and the ceiling is peeling, the rest of the paint is cracking and every morning I gaze upward and think about toxic mold.

We’ve employed some very lovely painters to make it right, and they started today. They made quick work of my stickers, and will be applying a couple of coats of Benjamin Moore’s “blue jean” tomorrow. With any luck, this is the penultimate indoor upgrade for a while.

Next up: The great outdoors.

Well, that was easy. Just goes to show what a little imagination, a life savings and a couple of spare kidneys can get you. The water is hooked up, the sink is draining, the floor is sealed and the touchups are touched up. Here, for the record, are a couple more before-n-afters:

This utterly depressing throwback has now given way to the following:

Really, I’m just stunned. But probably that is my credit rating talking.

This next little number demonstrates the glory of pegboard and a ridiculous pantry closet that greatly interfered with any potential utility this kitchen could have otherwise mustered.

And now we have this:

Which, frankly, I find to be much preferable. Pay no attention to the disaster in the dining room beyond. We’ll have that tidied up in no time – just as soon as I can get some shelf paper down so as not to mar the perfection.

Saint Steven has been paid in full, and there’s nothing left to do but wash every dish we own, buy some food and learn how to cook again. In no time we’ll be living like people. Just in time, too; I started looking up the symptoms of scurvy the other day.

At this stage of the game, I could use a reminder of what we were up against two short months ago. The no-ceiling, pegboard crap kitchen of doom. The microwave perched delicately on top of the fridge which had started to make ominous noises, possibly due to the microwave-shaped dent in the top. The three square feet of counter space and the total of three cabinets, one of which opened up into the side of another.

And here is where we are today.

I love it, I love it, I love it. The photo doesn’t do the counter and floor justice. Nor does it accurately portray the scale at which our personal finances have been pillaged. On the plus side, with a working kitchen that is such a delight to occupy, we won’t have to go out as much. This is good because we can no longer afford to leave the house. Or to retain the house, really.

Ah! Oh! A kitchen! With stuff in it! Stuff that you plug into the walls and into various pipes that emit liquid and gaseous substances that aid with the heating and cooling of assorted foodstuffs!

I’ll say it again: That. Looks. Good.

The floor is in, and the cement or whatever seems to have cured because we have dispensation to walk on it, though I’m still taking it somewhat gingerly, mostly wearing spouse’s shoes because they’re big and I’ve decided that weight distribution is key until the load-bearing grout has been applied. I’m wrong, of course, the floor is fine to walk, tap dance, or gaze admiringly upon. And I’ve got to say, it looks good.

With this done, I believe the next steps before we achieve Fully Operational Kitchen status may possibly be concluded within the next two weeks. Or before the new year. Or some time before we retire. I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

We cleaned about three pounds of dust out of the house today – by weight, the bulk appears to be plaster-related while the remainder consists of fluff units produced by the felines. God only knows. But we have household consensus that we’ll do a massive commando-clean when this project is joyfully concluded.

Damn, that’s pretty.

Now this. This is a beautiful floor. Or it’s going to be. You’re going to have to trust me when I say that it looks way better than the picture. It looks like we know something about how to go about this. And by COB tomorrow, it won’t be covered with the little white plastic spacers that currently look like confetti. I’m sure that Saint Steven didn’t leave them like that, but one of the felines has figured out how to get past the elaborate cardboard barriers that we’ve erected, and she enjoys rolling about in the nubbins. It’s stone tile, in various shades of gray with a little blue veining that is going to be way totally perfect with the counters, if they deliver what we selected.

It was meant to be. We went to the counter place and picked up a sample divot of the countertop material, and took it to the tile place. This was the first tile we saw. I made spouse accompany me through the rest of the store to be sure, but this was the winner from the first moment.

At this point, though, I really don’t care what kind of counter turns up. I have a deep and abiding need to braise something, and this kitchen must cooperate.

I’m not entirely sure what this orange floor coating is all about, but apparently it is both very important and very expensive. Saint Steven said something about how it will help the stone floor we’re putting in survive the minor shiftings and movement that a 67-year-old house is prone to do. It is so important, in fact, that we’re not allowed to walk on it for a couple of days, though the cats are sufficiently lightweight that we don’t have to keep them out of there. I don’t think he’s taken a long enough look at Mourka, if he came to that verdict.

Meanwhile, Spouse has taken it upon himself to relieve us of our worries. His method was untraditional. He’s decided to burn down the house using some cheese-filled Russian pastry as accelerant. He left the tasty little nugget pictured below unattended in the toaster. I don’t mind that he burned it. I do mind that it actually caught fire.

Reminds me of my college days. I lived in a co-op once that actually destroyed 13 toasters in one year. It takes significantly more than 13 toaster fires to destroy 13 toasters – we were really quite adept. And on a first-name basis with the fire department by Spring Break.