Not only is 2007 gone, but so is everything that once stood as a barrier between the kitchen and the dining room. Specifically, the eating bar, both of it's support beams, the storage cabinets (such as they were) underneath and the foot of "wall" coming down from the ceiling which divided the two rooms.

When The Hub started his demolition this morning, he noticed that that part of the wall (from which K-Bird's swing used to hang, over the bar) had been added on at some time in the past, probably by the people who owned the house before my folks bought it.....

This house, as far as we can tell, had a pretty good design when it was first built. I don't know why the Kelly's - the original owners - made such a mess of it. And my poor mother was so traumatized by the kitchen remodel she had done in the house they owned in The Land That Time Forgot, that she only allowed very minimal renovation in the kitchen, even though the bizarre layout of the thing drove her crazy the whole time she lived here.

For instance, she replaced the pepto-pink-with-gold-metalic triangles formica counter top - complete with metal edging which was coming apart - with a nice looking butcher block, and added extra storage under the eating bar in the form of a long shallow cabinet, which stored a surprising amount of stuff. It was also a lot easier to find anything in there than in the cavernous bottom shelves which are as ugly and inefficient as anything ever designed by humans.

But the home made cabinets in the kitchen are more crappy craftsmanship than bad design ( though they're bad design too. That just comes in second to the crappy craftsmanship). The real design sin the Kellys committed was taking out the wall oven and replacing it with a broom closet, making the only place to put a stove right beside the refrigerator - a move clearly made in the days of low electric bills. That brilliant move resulted in almost no counter space, which nessecitated the building of the peninsula, but did NOT cause the need for the faux wall, support collumns and wooden shutters which, I suppose, were added to screen the kitchen from the dining room. I have a really hard time understanding how anybody's mind was working when they essentially distroyed the useful function of that kitchen. The only thing I can guess is that Mrs. Kelly must not have liked to cook.

And I'm sure that she didn't like it any better after the "remodel" because it would have surely gotten a lot harder. After all, I LOVE to cook and I just about can't stand to work on that kitchen for too long the way it is now. This is probably the only project that I was as excited about starting as The Hub was.

Of course, it's been awhile since we've done any major home renovation stuff together. The problem we always used to have was that he would often want to renovate something which was functioning just fine because he could see a way to make it more attractive and I was always very willing to put up with older not-so-great-looking ("it has character!" I'd say earning me a baffled look from The Hub) stuff rather than endure the hassle of living in a construction zone. To The Hub, there is no finer place to live than in the middle of a project.Nothing makes him more anxious to move than a house with no projects awaiting his attention. One of the best things about his handyman business is that he could endulge his endless bursts of creativity, design know-how, and finely honed skills in somebody elses house. Somebody who was equally happy to have him there: hell, even willing to pay him, while I sat home content with my slightly askew bathroom tile and dodgey plumbing.

I never quite got over the concept that home improvement involves a great deal of screaming and cussing. If I wanted to hear that, most of the time in the past, I could have just stayed at work.

Anyway, this kitchen project is not renovation-as-hobby. This is more like home improvement justice - taking something which is only barely functional and turning it into a space where you'd actually want to spend time. For that, I'm willing to put up with a little bit of screaming and cussing, though to be fair, The Hub has a much greater hold on his temper than he did before he started the business. Besides, he doesn't yell so much now that he knows it upsets the birds.

We were concerned that K-bird was going to react negatively to all the noise and dramatic changes especially in the demolition stages of the project (this is a project in stages, where one whole part is going to be fully complete before we start another part, thereby making the kitchen usable throughout the entire renovation) Instead she has been watching the process from the corner of her cage with avid interest, bobbing up and down and making encouraging noises. We think she's in there thinking "Hmm. Look at that. Pop's playing with one of his 'destroy toys'. There's no way he'll get mad at me for chewing on the shelves near my cage now, cause that whole area is GONE"

She seems to take the whole idea of home improvement pretty well....but, after all, Senegals are cavity nesters.