In Which Our Heroine Gets Her Happily Ever After (But It's Only The Beginning!)
So, as I'm sure pretty much all of you have seen by now - 2016 is going to be a VERY intense year in Ashleyland! Let's recap for posterity, in reverse chronological order:
* Wedding Bells!
We have finally, officially set our wedding date - September 3, 2016. It should still be beautiful weather over in Wenatchee. Hopefully no wildfires! When we did our site visits in August, the Chelan fires had been going strong for over a week, and our ceremony venue is in an Alpine garden up on a cliff, and it was SO smokey! The people there said they'd had 2 weddings scheduled for the weekend, but they'd cancelled on account of the smoke. Our reception venue can possibly be a backup indoor venue, but we'll be pushing it (the max capacity is 50 people, and we're looking at 60-70. Our ceremony reception max is 85, and David would like to keep it smaller than that, ha).
The ceremony will be at Ohme Gardens (pronounced like "OH me"). It's one of the prettiest places in Wenatchee, and has some gorgeous views of the entire valley, the Columbia River, and it's got a rather interesting history. To wit:
In 1929 Herman Ohme purchased 40 acres of land for an orchard. Included was a craggy, dry, desolate, rock-strewn bluff with a breathtaking view of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and the shimmering Columbia River valley. Herman and his new bride, Ruth, loved to stand on the bluff and dream of flourishing alpine meadows, shimmering pools and shady evergreen pathways where the hot, relentless summer sun allowed only sage and scrub desert growth. They set their minds on achieving that dream.
Small evergreens were transplanted from the nearby Cascade Mountains, native stone was hauled to form paths and borders, desert sage gave way to low-growing ground cover, and pools took shape adjacent to massive natural rock formations. It was hard work, done mostly by hand, and truly a labor of love. In the beginning, sustaining the Gardens meant hauling water in five gallon buckets from the river valley below, but eventually the Ohmes constructed an elaborate irrigation system that pumped water to the site.
Initially intended as a private family retreat, the interest of friends and community members prompted the Ohmes to open the Gardens to the public. The Ohmes continued to perfect the Gardens for 42 years, until 1971 when Herman died at the age of 80. The couple's son Gordon and his family then assumed responsibility for the Gardens, and in 1991 Washington State Parks and Recreation purchased the Gardens and surrounding property. The Gardens are currently owned and managed by Chelan County.
It's really convenient in a lot of ways - there's a waterfall that will be behind us as we say our vows, tall evergreens, lots of wildflowers, a little open cabin thing where we'll probably have some light snacks and water for people. Our guests will be able to get into the gardens for free, and tour before or after the ceremony. Because it's so full of natural beauty we won't need to decorate hardly at all, unless it's to do a bit on an archway they may set up for the bridal party to walk through. Saving on time AND decor costs! They do all the setup of the chairs (nice ones, plastic but with arms! No folding chairs!) and take down as well.
Our reception venue is - incidentally, the same place my sister had hers - at The Wells House, which is a very hidden little gem of a Tudor Gothic style house about 5 minutes from my parents house. It too has a bit of history:
The old mansion was deeded to the Wells House Committee in the mid-1970s when the state fire marshal ruled that it was unsafe for classrooms and the college determined that repairs were too costly.
Wells House was built in 1909 by pioneer promoter W. T. Clark and became known as “Clark’s Cobblestone Castle." Mrs. Clark designed the house, including the leaded, stained-glass apple windows and the thick walls of hand-hewn stone from the Columbia River.
In 1919 A.Z. Wells purchased the house and resided there with his wife, Imogene, until 1949, when they agreed to deed their estate for the Wenatchee Junior College campus. In 1973 the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, community volunteers have spent thousands of hours repairing and maintaining the building.
The college, the Wells House Committe, and the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center are exploring options for Wells House with the goal of preserving the house for future generations.
It's going to be a fairly casual reception - not a sit-down, catered meal, but a British, high tea inspired style with lots of finger foods, several varieties of sandwiches, and one entire room dedicated to sweets - the cake(s) that David's mom will make, scones with jam and clotted cream, and about five varieties of our favorite British cookies (ahem, "biscuits," haha). It will also be a DRY reception, which we've had to tell my mother twice, since she was pretty sauced the first time we told her.
Speaking of mom, we've already come to battle over the wedding a couple of times with her. She's incredibly enthusiastic, and wants to be helpful, but she wants things done in a Certain Traditional WASP-y Way, and we are just not doing a lot of them - either they aren't who we are as a couple, we can't afford it, or it's just not something we've thought about because the event is a YEAR AWAY. The woman practically had the vapors when I told her we probably wouldn't be renting linen napkins, as we are just fine with nice paper ones. She was simply appalled, and seriously, I don't think people will care what they are wiping their face with - and if they really do care that much, they can bring their own linen napkin and shove it where the sun don't shine, lol! She nearly came to tears when she asked about transportation, and David said that other than a surprise he's working on for me and 3-4 others in the wedding party, we figured most people including the wedding party (who are ALL coming from out-of-town) would just drive, as the venues are about 8 minutes apart and nobody would likely be offended. It was an absolute travesty to her senses, and she got all butthurt and made it about her, and marched off to bed that night in high dudgeon. OH BOY I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT YEAR OF THIS YAAAAY.
I called my sister the day after that whole thing went down, and she started laughing, and said "yup, it's Donna Drama!" Even I knew it was to be expected, and it's probably not the last time, but it was nice to commiserate with my sister on that score.
But in the end, it will all be fine. My priorities for the day are as follows:
- Firstly, show up to lovely venues, with David. Get legally wed.
- Secondly, to have as many of our closest friends and family there. I would like them to have a good time and eat some tasty food. I'd like us to look nice and reasonably put-together. And that we don't go into debt for this ONE DAY in our lives.
- Thirdly, everything else - napkins and all! - is tertiary to all of that above.
* Baby Gianninotti!
Now, we may seem totally crazy (AHEM, WE REALLY ARE), but David and I have been feeling very ready for a baby. You might remember me posting something about this earlier this year (January, I think?), and we decided to start trying this summer. We had a lot of reasons for trying to time it - and of course, knowing full well you can't always control these things! - especially since we were also setting the wedding date. I was very clear that I wanted to be well past giving birth, so it had to be at least 3 or more months after a baby, so with a September wedding that put me with an April, May or June due date. David wanted a summer (or at least late spring) baby, and we wanted to try to make it convenient for his parents. It's not cheap to fly across the pond all the time, and we either needed to have a baby and a wedding in the same year (crazy...) or delay one of them until 2018, which is when his parents would next be able to afford the trip. We REALLY (and I cannot stress this enough) did not want to wait on either a baby OR a wedding, so we decided to try in July, August and September of this year. In the event I had difficulty conceiving, we would have waited until next year to start trying again as I refused to be ready to drop that calf in the aisle, haha. So it was kind of a now or much, much later kind of choice.
I know it sounds crazy, and it kind of is. It's going to make an already intense year even MORE intense. David is hoping that all the stress factors will just fritz out my brain's stress centers, like an overload on my circuits. He's... probably not wrong, you guys. But financially, we were in a pretty good place, decent employments, a solid place in our relationship, in the right house - all the boxes we wanted to check in order to be as prepared as you can for something you're ultimately totally unprepared for, were checked.
So it took us exactly one try, because my family is fertile LIKE WHOA. The baby is due in April, and so far everything is going normal. My first appointment is next Monday, the 21st, and I'm hoping for an ultrasound and not just a dopplar. I'll be at 10 weeks, which is the earliest they wanted to see me. Mostly, I just feel like complete misery round the clock. This nausea is no joke! I can only hope it's a first trimester thing only, and it won't last the whole nine months. On a scale of 1 (am I pregnant?) to 10 (miserable vomitous mass), I'm generally running around an 8 or higher.
THIS MAY BE AN ONLY CHILD, GUYS. ;P LOL JK. Maybe.
Anymoodle, we've started getting the baby's room looking more like a room and less like "oh, look at all the crap we threw in here after the move!" Lots and lots of purging, properly organizing, storing in the back room of the garage like adults. We'll probably do a lot more once we find out the sex, as we'll skew it slightly one way or the other. Base colors for both are blues and greens, and a girl will have some lavender. I have LOTS of thoughts for a nursery decor, some gender-neutral. All of this is terribly shocking, I know. ;P
I told David about the baby with a scavenger hunt that led him all around the house (mirror to cat dish, to computer, to dog kennel, to his car, to the firepit) and ending in the baby's room with a gift-wrapped home pregnancy test waiting in the cradle my dad made for me when I was born. He was TOTALLY shocked and delighted - he grabbed me and cried and then had to sit down because he was feeling faint! It was the best surprise everrrrr. I've never really been able to surprise him with anything before, and may never again, but if I was going to do it once, this was the time. It was perfect!
Okay, this nausea can stop now! PLSKTHX.
* Holiday Across The Pond!
Less to say on this topic at the moment, but we will be in England for the winter holidays - Christmas, New Year's AND my 33rd birthday! It's going to be an awesome start to the year. I'll be travelling towards the end of the second trimester, so hopefully I will be past the first tri yuckiness and not quite into the third tri "beached whale" feeling. MY GOD, I HOPE IT WORKS OUT LIKE THAT, haha.
David's family does an amazing Christmas dinner (there's 2 rounds of desserts!) and I get to eat for two by then. Yayayayayay! If I get to have all my wishes, it will also snow and we will get to have that idyllic English countryside Christmas like a freaking Culver & Ives painting. Hey, I've gotten all my other wishes this year... ;)
It will also be a rare chance to spend New Year's and my birthday over there. I really do enjoy David's family (his mom is the polar opposite of mine when it comes to stress!), and it should be good. We also don't have a 9 hour layover in Reykjavik this time, so that will be nice. Cross all fingers for no weather-delayed travel!
We are trying to figure out what to do with the pet(s) as usual. The dog will likely go stay at my parent's house for a month - we asked them about coming over the weekend we fly out, and taking the Bear back with them to Wenatchee, and then we'll come visit after we get home and bring him back with us. The cat, though, is going to be far more difficult. David really doesn't want to board her for 3 weeks - it would be CRAZY expensive ($28/night), and she'd have no access to the outdoors which she really loves. Ideally, someone could come stay at the house, and we'd pay for that. Let me know if someone has family coming to town for a long holiday and would want to avoid a hotel fee! :D
Now, to start on all the Christmas gifts... 100 days to go!
* Kitchen / Bathroom Remodel!
We had started talking about doing a kitchen remodel this fall. It was really the only major upgrade the house needed (now that we've done electrical, security, the back fence, etc.), and aside from a re-roofing due in about 5 years seemed financially feasible. We started talking to contractors and getting some ideas about what to change.
Well a couple of weeks later, we noticed a really, really bad smell. Seemed to be coming from the garbage disposal, but you could smell it from the bathroom sink / tub that's on the other side of the wall from the kitchen (they share a wet wall). We tried running baking soda and vinegar to do a natural cleaning, as we didn't want to damage the pipes. We knew they were old, galvanized pipes that would have to be replaced, but it turns out that our worries were far, far too late.
We had a plumber out to check the garbage disposal, in case it was warranty to what we had put in last December. Nope, not the disposal! He checked the crawlspace, and sure enough there was a decently large puddle coming from he determined to be a broken drain line. So all the water from the sink was just dripping down in there, and any food gone down the disposal had just sort of caught on the broken part and was stagnating. Hence the REALLY foul smell! We had a restoration man out within the hour, and he confirmed that it was going to be a major issue, and incidentally, we were going to get a kitchen remodel out of it! Assuming it was covered by our homeowner's insurance (SPOILER ALERT: it was).
Because the subfloor was soaked, they'd have to pull all the cabinets and open up the wall to get everything dried out. Once the cabinets go, they can't just be replaced willy-nilly, they have to be all redone, AND the upper cabinets, which weren't technically an issue, have to be pulled out and redone as well because it needs to match. Because they had to tear up the parquet floor, which covers the kitchen AND the dining room, the flooring also all has to be replaced. Then, once they opened up the wall, the damage was more extensive than they thought, so they also had to come through the bathroom wall, which was pretty much all tile, and now we get a bathroom remodel out of the mess, too!
The rest of this year (travel, baby, wedding) looks easy by comparison!
So in some ways, we're very lucky. And I'd have been PISSED if we'd done the remodel now, and the leak popped up in a year. The restoration guy said he'd never seen two people so delighted to hear their kitchen was going to be ripped apart, since most are happy with their current kitchen. But it's a huge, huge amount of hassle. Whereas a planned remodel was going to take about a week for demo and installation (it's construction, so add in a week or two extra, ha), and we wouldn't have started until the cabinets and countertops were ordered and ready on hand, this restoration had to start immediately. The first few days, with the heaters / fans going was fucking miserable. All four of us, dog and cat included, absolutely hated it. I'm not feeling great now (thanks, first trimester!), so I was extra crabby and David was even worse. But it was only for 3-4 days, yay. While there's work to be done in the interim, we are without a kitchen for 4-6 weeks:
- week 1: demo and water remediation
- week 2: finalizing remodel plans and orders
- week 3: plumbing repairs
- week 4: walls reframed and drywalled, taped, mudded, painted, etc.
- week 5: hopefully cabinet installation?! Plus appliances, etc.
- week 6: countertop installation (if not done the previous week)
It means a LOT of eating out, because we had virtually no time to plan food prep. I'd originally thought to do a bunch of soups and freeze them, and some crockpot meal prep in gallon bags and freeze them, but there simply wasn't much time since we threw a housewarming party in the middle of it all. With my stomach so queasy, all of this eating out is getting really hard to handle, and it's getting kind of sickening, to be honest. I miss making a simpler meal at home and leaving restaurants for a special night out. Fortunately, this is ALSO covered by insurance for anything above what we would have normally spent on food per week.
And when it's all done, it will be a gorgeous, bigger kitchen with smarter appliances, a fancy induction cooktop, quartz countertops, pendant lights, the works. And other than a roof replacement in about 5 years, it's the last major thing to do to the house, and we'll have it done well before having the baby or trying to finagle the wedding, so that will be a huge relief. Just gotta get through the next month!
Okay, so that is a LOT of updating. WALL OF TEXT, yo.
* Wedding Bells!
We have finally, officially set our wedding date - September 3, 2016. It should still be beautiful weather over in Wenatchee. Hopefully no wildfires! When we did our site visits in August, the Chelan fires had been going strong for over a week, and our ceremony venue is in an Alpine garden up on a cliff, and it was SO smokey! The people there said they'd had 2 weddings scheduled for the weekend, but they'd cancelled on account of the smoke. Our reception venue can possibly be a backup indoor venue, but we'll be pushing it (the max capacity is 50 people, and we're looking at 60-70. Our ceremony reception max is 85, and David would like to keep it smaller than that, ha).
The ceremony will be at Ohme Gardens (pronounced like "OH me"). It's one of the prettiest places in Wenatchee, and has some gorgeous views of the entire valley, the Columbia River, and it's got a rather interesting history. To wit:
In 1929 Herman Ohme purchased 40 acres of land for an orchard. Included was a craggy, dry, desolate, rock-strewn bluff with a breathtaking view of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and the shimmering Columbia River valley. Herman and his new bride, Ruth, loved to stand on the bluff and dream of flourishing alpine meadows, shimmering pools and shady evergreen pathways where the hot, relentless summer sun allowed only sage and scrub desert growth. They set their minds on achieving that dream.
Small evergreens were transplanted from the nearby Cascade Mountains, native stone was hauled to form paths and borders, desert sage gave way to low-growing ground cover, and pools took shape adjacent to massive natural rock formations. It was hard work, done mostly by hand, and truly a labor of love. In the beginning, sustaining the Gardens meant hauling water in five gallon buckets from the river valley below, but eventually the Ohmes constructed an elaborate irrigation system that pumped water to the site.
Initially intended as a private family retreat, the interest of friends and community members prompted the Ohmes to open the Gardens to the public. The Ohmes continued to perfect the Gardens for 42 years, until 1971 when Herman died at the age of 80. The couple's son Gordon and his family then assumed responsibility for the Gardens, and in 1991 Washington State Parks and Recreation purchased the Gardens and surrounding property. The Gardens are currently owned and managed by Chelan County.
It's really convenient in a lot of ways - there's a waterfall that will be behind us as we say our vows, tall evergreens, lots of wildflowers, a little open cabin thing where we'll probably have some light snacks and water for people. Our guests will be able to get into the gardens for free, and tour before or after the ceremony. Because it's so full of natural beauty we won't need to decorate hardly at all, unless it's to do a bit on an archway they may set up for the bridal party to walk through. Saving on time AND decor costs! They do all the setup of the chairs (nice ones, plastic but with arms! No folding chairs!) and take down as well.
Our reception venue is - incidentally, the same place my sister had hers - at The Wells House, which is a very hidden little gem of a Tudor Gothic style house about 5 minutes from my parents house. It too has a bit of history:
The old mansion was deeded to the Wells House Committee in the mid-1970s when the state fire marshal ruled that it was unsafe for classrooms and the college determined that repairs were too costly.
Wells House was built in 1909 by pioneer promoter W. T. Clark and became known as “Clark’s Cobblestone Castle." Mrs. Clark designed the house, including the leaded, stained-glass apple windows and the thick walls of hand-hewn stone from the Columbia River.
In 1919 A.Z. Wells purchased the house and resided there with his wife, Imogene, until 1949, when they agreed to deed their estate for the Wenatchee Junior College campus. In 1973 the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, community volunteers have spent thousands of hours repairing and maintaining the building.
The college, the Wells House Committe, and the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center are exploring options for Wells House with the goal of preserving the house for future generations.
It's going to be a fairly casual reception - not a sit-down, catered meal, but a British, high tea inspired style with lots of finger foods, several varieties of sandwiches, and one entire room dedicated to sweets - the cake(s) that David's mom will make, scones with jam and clotted cream, and about five varieties of our favorite British cookies (ahem, "biscuits," haha). It will also be a DRY reception, which we've had to tell my mother twice, since she was pretty sauced the first time we told her.
Speaking of mom, we've already come to battle over the wedding a couple of times with her. She's incredibly enthusiastic, and wants to be helpful, but she wants things done in a Certain Traditional WASP-y Way, and we are just not doing a lot of them - either they aren't who we are as a couple, we can't afford it, or it's just not something we've thought about because the event is a YEAR AWAY. The woman practically had the vapors when I told her we probably wouldn't be renting linen napkins, as we are just fine with nice paper ones. She was simply appalled, and seriously, I don't think people will care what they are wiping their face with - and if they really do care that much, they can bring their own linen napkin and shove it where the sun don't shine, lol! She nearly came to tears when she asked about transportation, and David said that other than a surprise he's working on for me and 3-4 others in the wedding party, we figured most people including the wedding party (who are ALL coming from out-of-town) would just drive, as the venues are about 8 minutes apart and nobody would likely be offended. It was an absolute travesty to her senses, and she got all butthurt and made it about her, and marched off to bed that night in high dudgeon. OH BOY I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT YEAR OF THIS YAAAAY.
I called my sister the day after that whole thing went down, and she started laughing, and said "yup, it's Donna Drama!" Even I knew it was to be expected, and it's probably not the last time, but it was nice to commiserate with my sister on that score.
But in the end, it will all be fine. My priorities for the day are as follows:
- Firstly, show up to lovely venues, with David. Get legally wed.
- Secondly, to have as many of our closest friends and family there. I would like them to have a good time and eat some tasty food. I'd like us to look nice and reasonably put-together. And that we don't go into debt for this ONE DAY in our lives.
- Thirdly, everything else - napkins and all! - is tertiary to all of that above.
* Baby Gianninotti!
Now, we may seem totally crazy (AHEM, WE REALLY ARE), but David and I have been feeling very ready for a baby. You might remember me posting something about this earlier this year (January, I think?), and we decided to start trying this summer. We had a lot of reasons for trying to time it - and of course, knowing full well you can't always control these things! - especially since we were also setting the wedding date. I was very clear that I wanted to be well past giving birth, so it had to be at least 3 or more months after a baby, so with a September wedding that put me with an April, May or June due date. David wanted a summer (or at least late spring) baby, and we wanted to try to make it convenient for his parents. It's not cheap to fly across the pond all the time, and we either needed to have a baby and a wedding in the same year (crazy...) or delay one of them until 2018, which is when his parents would next be able to afford the trip. We REALLY (and I cannot stress this enough) did not want to wait on either a baby OR a wedding, so we decided to try in July, August and September of this year. In the event I had difficulty conceiving, we would have waited until next year to start trying again as I refused to be ready to drop that calf in the aisle, haha. So it was kind of a now or much, much later kind of choice.
I know it sounds crazy, and it kind of is. It's going to make an already intense year even MORE intense. David is hoping that all the stress factors will just fritz out my brain's stress centers, like an overload on my circuits. He's... probably not wrong, you guys. But financially, we were in a pretty good place, decent employments, a solid place in our relationship, in the right house - all the boxes we wanted to check in order to be as prepared as you can for something you're ultimately totally unprepared for, were checked.
So it took us exactly one try, because my family is fertile LIKE WHOA. The baby is due in April, and so far everything is going normal. My first appointment is next Monday, the 21st, and I'm hoping for an ultrasound and not just a dopplar. I'll be at 10 weeks, which is the earliest they wanted to see me. Mostly, I just feel like complete misery round the clock. This nausea is no joke! I can only hope it's a first trimester thing only, and it won't last the whole nine months. On a scale of 1 (am I pregnant?) to 10 (miserable vomitous mass), I'm generally running around an 8 or higher.
THIS MAY BE AN ONLY CHILD, GUYS. ;P LOL JK. Maybe.
Anymoodle, we've started getting the baby's room looking more like a room and less like "oh, look at all the crap we threw in here after the move!" Lots and lots of purging, properly organizing, storing in the back room of the garage like adults. We'll probably do a lot more once we find out the sex, as we'll skew it slightly one way or the other. Base colors for both are blues and greens, and a girl will have some lavender. I have LOTS of thoughts for a nursery decor, some gender-neutral. All of this is terribly shocking, I know. ;P
I told David about the baby with a scavenger hunt that led him all around the house (mirror to cat dish, to computer, to dog kennel, to his car, to the firepit) and ending in the baby's room with a gift-wrapped home pregnancy test waiting in the cradle my dad made for me when I was born. He was TOTALLY shocked and delighted - he grabbed me and cried and then had to sit down because he was feeling faint! It was the best surprise everrrrr. I've never really been able to surprise him with anything before, and may never again, but if I was going to do it once, this was the time. It was perfect!
Okay, this nausea can stop now! PLSKTHX.
* Holiday Across The Pond!
Less to say on this topic at the moment, but we will be in England for the winter holidays - Christmas, New Year's AND my 33rd birthday! It's going to be an awesome start to the year. I'll be travelling towards the end of the second trimester, so hopefully I will be past the first tri yuckiness and not quite into the third tri "beached whale" feeling. MY GOD, I HOPE IT WORKS OUT LIKE THAT, haha.
David's family does an amazing Christmas dinner (there's 2 rounds of desserts!) and I get to eat for two by then. Yayayayayay! If I get to have all my wishes, it will also snow and we will get to have that idyllic English countryside Christmas like a freaking Culver & Ives painting. Hey, I've gotten all my other wishes this year... ;)
It will also be a rare chance to spend New Year's and my birthday over there. I really do enjoy David's family (his mom is the polar opposite of mine when it comes to stress!), and it should be good. We also don't have a 9 hour layover in Reykjavik this time, so that will be nice. Cross all fingers for no weather-delayed travel!
We are trying to figure out what to do with the pet(s) as usual. The dog will likely go stay at my parent's house for a month - we asked them about coming over the weekend we fly out, and taking the Bear back with them to Wenatchee, and then we'll come visit after we get home and bring him back with us. The cat, though, is going to be far more difficult. David really doesn't want to board her for 3 weeks - it would be CRAZY expensive ($28/night), and she'd have no access to the outdoors which she really loves. Ideally, someone could come stay at the house, and we'd pay for that. Let me know if someone has family coming to town for a long holiday and would want to avoid a hotel fee! :D
Now, to start on all the Christmas gifts... 100 days to go!
* Kitchen / Bathroom Remodel!
We had started talking about doing a kitchen remodel this fall. It was really the only major upgrade the house needed (now that we've done electrical, security, the back fence, etc.), and aside from a re-roofing due in about 5 years seemed financially feasible. We started talking to contractors and getting some ideas about what to change.
Well a couple of weeks later, we noticed a really, really bad smell. Seemed to be coming from the garbage disposal, but you could smell it from the bathroom sink / tub that's on the other side of the wall from the kitchen (they share a wet wall). We tried running baking soda and vinegar to do a natural cleaning, as we didn't want to damage the pipes. We knew they were old, galvanized pipes that would have to be replaced, but it turns out that our worries were far, far too late.
We had a plumber out to check the garbage disposal, in case it was warranty to what we had put in last December. Nope, not the disposal! He checked the crawlspace, and sure enough there was a decently large puddle coming from he determined to be a broken drain line. So all the water from the sink was just dripping down in there, and any food gone down the disposal had just sort of caught on the broken part and was stagnating. Hence the REALLY foul smell! We had a restoration man out within the hour, and he confirmed that it was going to be a major issue, and incidentally, we were going to get a kitchen remodel out of it! Assuming it was covered by our homeowner's insurance (SPOILER ALERT: it was).
Because the subfloor was soaked, they'd have to pull all the cabinets and open up the wall to get everything dried out. Once the cabinets go, they can't just be replaced willy-nilly, they have to be all redone, AND the upper cabinets, which weren't technically an issue, have to be pulled out and redone as well because it needs to match. Because they had to tear up the parquet floor, which covers the kitchen AND the dining room, the flooring also all has to be replaced. Then, once they opened up the wall, the damage was more extensive than they thought, so they also had to come through the bathroom wall, which was pretty much all tile, and now we get a bathroom remodel out of the mess, too!
The rest of this year (travel, baby, wedding) looks easy by comparison!
So in some ways, we're very lucky. And I'd have been PISSED if we'd done the remodel now, and the leak popped up in a year. The restoration guy said he'd never seen two people so delighted to hear their kitchen was going to be ripped apart, since most are happy with their current kitchen. But it's a huge, huge amount of hassle. Whereas a planned remodel was going to take about a week for demo and installation (it's construction, so add in a week or two extra, ha), and we wouldn't have started until the cabinets and countertops were ordered and ready on hand, this restoration had to start immediately. The first few days, with the heaters / fans going was fucking miserable. All four of us, dog and cat included, absolutely hated it. I'm not feeling great now (thanks, first trimester!), so I was extra crabby and David was even worse. But it was only for 3-4 days, yay. While there's work to be done in the interim, we are without a kitchen for 4-6 weeks:
- week 1: demo and water remediation
- week 2: finalizing remodel plans and orders
- week 3: plumbing repairs
- week 4: walls reframed and drywalled, taped, mudded, painted, etc.
- week 5: hopefully cabinet installation?! Plus appliances, etc.
- week 6: countertop installation (if not done the previous week)
It means a LOT of eating out, because we had virtually no time to plan food prep. I'd originally thought to do a bunch of soups and freeze them, and some crockpot meal prep in gallon bags and freeze them, but there simply wasn't much time since we threw a housewarming party in the middle of it all. With my stomach so queasy, all of this eating out is getting really hard to handle, and it's getting kind of sickening, to be honest. I miss making a simpler meal at home and leaving restaurants for a special night out. Fortunately, this is ALSO covered by insurance for anything above what we would have normally spent on food per week.
And when it's all done, it will be a gorgeous, bigger kitchen with smarter appliances, a fancy induction cooktop, quartz countertops, pendant lights, the works. And other than a roof replacement in about 5 years, it's the last major thing to do to the house, and we'll have it done well before having the baby or trying to finagle the wedding, so that will be a huge relief. Just gotta get through the next month!
Okay, so that is a LOT of updating. WALL OF TEXT, yo.