It is now 9:40am on a Sunday morning.  I’m sitting in the living room, still in my pajamas because I refuse to get showered and dressed before 10am on Sundays.

There is only one closed kitchen door between me and two strange men painting my kitchen.  Other than one sleeping daughter upstairs, I am alone.

They sing in weird voices and one of their paint rollers has an annoying, repetitive squeak.  My cat is as equally on guard as I am.  She’s under the table staring towards the kitchen, on high alert.  Don’t you dare come through that door, she’s thinking.  Me too.  I’m in my pajamas.  I want my Sunday morning to myself.  One of them has started whistling.  They are equally as good at whistling as they are at singing. I realize that they have brought in a radio tuned to some kind of rock station, which explains the singing.

I have run out of coffee.

It is now 9:50am.  I only have to hold out for ten more minutes in order to achieve my goal of not getting dressed before 10am.  I just heard the back kitchen door close.  Are they gone?  Ah, nope. More whistling.  I want to take a peek at what the new paint looks like.  I hear the door close again and it becomes silent once more.  I walk gingerly up to the one door between myself and the men in the kitchen.  As I pass the dining room window, I see one of the painters outside, checking his iPhone. Maybe they are both outside. The cat cautiously approaches the door with me.  Do I dare?

I put my hand on the knob, slowly turn it, and open the door a crack.  And a bit more.

I take a peek.

Wow…it looks fabulous!

10:05am.  Time to shower.

Funny how the horror stories come out when you start talking about home renos.  We’ve been hearing all kinds of them from everywhere since we started talking about our kitchen reno…nobody tells you about the time something went perfectly and like clockwork…it’s always disaster.

One guitar student of mine relayed his reno story, explaining how their renos were so extensive that they moved their young family out to the in-laws while it was being done.  He decided to go to the house and check up the day after the demolition, only to find beer cans strewn about, cigarette butts and used chewing gum stuck to walls.  The door was left unlocked too.  What a nightmare!

The only glitch for us so far has been the timing of the cabinets, although that one glitch has changed everything.  We were originally expecting them the week of October 13th, and found out that they wouldn’t be arriving until the week of the 21st.  I had to re-book the delivery of the appliances for after the cabinet installation, which wasn’t a big deal. But there will be a bigger gap between the prep work and the cabinet arrival.  And that also delays the quartz counters, which are installed after the cabinets because the counter installers have to take a final measurement only after the cabinets are in. Then there’s another 1-2 week wait for them to be made.  And you can’t have a sink in until the counters are in, so we’ll only be able to use the kitchen in a half-assed way.

In spite of the cabinet delay, the kitchen demolition and re-design began this week anyway. Wednesday morning my husband and I stood in the kitchen, now completely stripped of everything except the cupboards and appliances, wondering how we were going to feel about the next month or two. ( I say “or two” because everyone tells you that whatever time you expect it to take, double it.)

Here’s one corner of the kitchen as it appeared early Wednesday morning:

And here it is at the end of the day:

The first thing that had to be done was to move the fridge into the dining room and the stove outside.  We have sold them to someone my husband works with, and at this writing the stove has already been delivered to him.  We’ll hang on to the fridge while we still need it. It took about 4 hours to tear down the old cabinets, counters and an old-fashioned pantry, along with the removal and clean up, which was pretty close to what our contractor estimated.

Day two, Thursday, was a little crazier, and certainly longer.  The electrician came in with his two guys and then the process of figuring out all of the bits and pieces that had to be done began.  The stove will be in a different place, the baseboard heater moved, new outlets, pot lights under the upper cabinets, decommissioning old outlets, moving old wires around or replacing them entirely.  Will this fit there?  What height should the outlets be?  Do you still need this here?  That there?  How many? The questions were coming at me fast and furious and after having not slept well for several nights, I was hoping I was answering them all intelligently.

Thank goodness for our contractor Steve, who helped me think through some of the choices.  For instance, do you lower the light switches to what is now a standard height?  He suggested that since the outlets in the rest of the house were still higher, it would make sense to keep them all that way.

As the electricians were working, Steve was on the phone talking to the plumber and drywaller. He had them come in and checking things out while everything else was in progress. The plumber did some preliminary work on the pipes for the taps, moving them from where they were, protruding out of the wall as old taps used to be, to coming up from below. At one pointed I counted six guys working in our little kitchen. This was just three of them, the other three were to the right, out of the shot:

On Friday morning before my husband left for work, we poured over the kitchen and all of the changes that had been made.  We still had some questions about the plumbing and drywall, so I made a mental note and when Steve arrived to do some work on his own, I bombarded him again.  We have some friends who had gone through their kitchen renovation in a more do-it-yourself manner, basically doing what they could on their own and hiring labourers for things they couldn’t do.  I think having a contractor has worked better for us simply because we don’t have the experience to know the process well enough.  If you have a misstep, you might have to back-track or re-do something you weren’t planning to.  Not that I expect everything to go completely smoothly, but there’s less of a chance of us screwing it up!

I found out that the ship carrying our cabinets had broken down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and that’s why they were delayed.  They actually had to send another container ship out to the broken down one, and transfer all the containers over.  That takes at least a week!  Can you imagine the logistics of that?  What a nightmare.

Anyway, besides that, everything has been relatively smooth.  The only inconvenience is our makeshift kitchen in the dining room.  It took us a couple of days to get used to the temporary configuration and we’re still tripping over each other a bit, but besides the mess and clutter, we’re just fine.  We wash our dishes in the bathroom sink with a neat little scrub brush that has a handle holding detergent in it.  I think it’s a camping gadget, but it’s perfect for our situation too.  Everything is washed as soon as it is used.  We got a cheap little hot plate and a used toaster oven so really, there is nothing we can’t do.

Except a turkey. Fortunately, we have generous friends who have invited us there for Thanksgiving 🙂  What more could we possibly need?

IJ

Many years ago when I worked in the Sociology Department of the Vancouver Public Library, I came across a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning”.  I never read it, never even took it off the shelf to get a sense what it was about.  It was just the title that stood out for me.  The idea of our search for meaning.

Not that long ago, I remembered the title and looked the book up online.  I was disappointed in some respects to discover that it was about Viktor Frankle’s experience in Auschwitz. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I had always assumed that the book was a much more general study on the perpetual hunt for meaning and sense in this life.  The reason I looked it up again was because of my own search for meaning over the years, and the recognition that this is a part of our humanness; to find meaning in our daily lives and purpose in our existence.  I wanted to know more about where that search comes from and why it is and I was hoping the book might give me a starting point.  The book is still amazing and offers great insight and wonderful thoughts about the meaning of life, don’t get me wrong.  It just wasn’t what I thought it would be.

When you are without a religious framework to explain your life on this earth, as I am, you are left wondering if your existence is anything more than just a random fluke.  And perhaps it is.  But that is a very unsatisfying conclusion to come to.  Human beings have evolved a consciousness awareness that no other creature on this earth has.  My cat doesn’t wonder why she’s here and what the purpose of her life is.  She simply lives it.  Oddly enough, sometimes I envy her.  So this past week when a member of my extended family passed away, it brought back those age-old questions;  why are we here?  What are we doing here?  Are we just born, live our lives and then die?  And even more importantly, what is the point of my being aware of all of this in the first place?

For years I would say to myself that everything has meaning, that every life has a purpose and we’re here for a reason.  And I believed it whole-heartedly.  I also believed in some kind of higher power, God, if you like, even though I didn’t belong to any particular church or religion.  So even though I didn’t have the answers to the big questions, I was satisfied that I didn’t have to.  But when I had a major paradigm shift in my beliefs back in 2000, that context was suddenly gone.  Once I caught my father hiding the Easter eggs in the back yard, I couldn’t believe in the Easter Bunny any more either.

For awhile I missed it.  The phrases that automatically came to mind like “there’s a reason that happened” suddenly didn’t fit my new model.  I didn’t even have a model, I wasn’t sure how to put life in context and I was always looking for something to fill that empty void.

I notice that about myself;  my mind is constantly looking for patterns, for connections, for underlying causes.  We all seem to do that.  When I wrote about my recent visit to emergency, I heard from all kinds of people.  Most of them were trying to figure it out for me, trying to possibly explain what might be going on with my heart.  Some of them had similar experiences, or knew someone who had.  And of course, I myself was on the hunt for some kind of explanation, researching symptoms, analysing what had occurred before the incidents.  What is something I ate?  Something I did?  Was it stress?

Biologically speaking, there’s a darn good reason why we are so analytical.  Our lives have literally depended on that since human beings began.  We had to think of new ways to survive, to eat if our source of food was suddenly gone, to protect ourselves from bad weather, to heal our physical wounds.  Either figure it out, or die.  We still experience the effects of “fight or flight” in stressful situations, where our bodies suddenly become acutely attuned to our surroundings, adrenaline kicks in, in case we have to run, blood pressure goes up, digestion slows or stops, among many other physical symptoms.  All so we can save ourselves from a potentially dangerous situation.

Homo sapiens survived because we figured out how to.  But are we only here because we got the combination right?  Yes I think so.  However, I also think it’s up to us to procure purpose or create meaning from this amazing gift we have been given.  The fact that we are here is literally awesome. How these bodies of ours survive, heal and even thrive is astounding.  The idea that we came into being only after eons of shifting, colliding and changing particles blows my mind.  I am the result of billions of years of trial and error.

So I don’t want to waste the time I have left, I want to make sure I experience every moment, good, bad or mediocre, and find new was to appreciate the very real miracle of life.

I’ll keep you posted 🙂
IJ