Curb Alert

If anyone is wondering where I’ve gone to, I am putting in a new kitchen in my townhouse.  The old cabinets were the originals.  I had replaced the doors and painted them a few years ago and updated my laminate.  It was a quick cosmetic facelift.  Cheap and I could live with it.  But these are different days indeed and who knows when the house will need to go on the market?  So, I’m putting in a new kitchen.

I ripped out the old cabinets today, as well as the laminate countertop, with the help of someone, also laid off, underemployed and overeducated in a STEM field, who is very good at this kind of stuff.  (Thanks, sincerely, that was very productive and saved me a lot of money)  Dry wall and spackel followed.  The kitchen was a disaster area.  After tomorrow, hopefully less so.  It will take me a couple more days to get a new countertop and plumbing reconnected so I am on paper plates and take out Thai food in the meantime.

Anyway, my house is a mess.  I’ve got so many projects going at one time, it’s hard to keep up with it all.  There are blue plastic bins all over the place, schlepping from one room to the next in a fruitless search to find a final resting place.  After I cleaned out all of my kitchen cabinets, the plates suddenly looked really old, chipped and shabby.  I’m contemplating replacing them with a new fresh set of white dinnerware from someplace like Target (pronounced Tar-jhay among the cognoscenti).  New plates are cheap.  Should I or shouldn’t I?

There is a nice pile of old cabinets at the foot of my driveway.  I need to get rid of them toot sweet or the association will start to complain.  The cabinets are not in great shape.  It’s a good thing they are being replaced.  The sink base disintegrated as we were removing it.  Shocking!  But the doors are pretty nice.  They are Shaker style doors that I ordered a few years ago to take the place of the laminate doors with oak strips at the bottom that came with the house when I bought it.  I could never figure out what to do with those doors so I bought some door replacements and updated the red oak cabinets with refreshing white paint.  Anyway, the cabinets are crap but the doors are in nice shape.  The bin handle hardware and brushed chrome pulls are worth more than the cabinets.  Some of them have glass inserts to show off pretty dinnerware.  There’s also a nice L shaped length of black granite-esque laminate and a sink with faucet with pull out spout.  I’m hoping that someone on craigslist will want them.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to while the market crashes and takes my hard earned deferred income 401K contributions with it.  What can you do?  Well, in retrospect, I might have been better off putting less into the 401K account and more into paying off the principle on my home…

Oh, and if I have a fairy godperson, I would really, really, REALLY like a Public Bike with a sweet basket up front.  In the mixte model.  In orange.  Three speed.  Yes, I know I am dreaming.

{{sigh}}

It sucks to be unemployed…