original little hellraisers

sorry about all the delays in updating… we’ve been working on the kitchen during these past two weeks to get it up to snuff so that we can start to think about selling the house. i’ve been helping wherever i can to ensure i do my fair share of the work. i’m all about the table saw now… i just don’t like doing any of the finesse work.

yesterday we hired this guy to come out and get the old oven out of the house… well… here’s basically how it all went down:

it’s about 2pm on a wednesday and thankfully it’s no longer raining. owen is asleep on the couch, phoebe at the foot. i’m installing cabinets to studs to ensure they don’t fall off the wall in an earthquake. kara went out to get her haircut.

and then the doorbell rings. at this point, phoebe (who used to be a perfect dog) gets up and starts barking uncontrollably at the door. of course this wakes up owen and freaks him out so he starts screaming for his mother. the guy at the door backs away with his dolly — i tell him to meet me at the garage.

when i look back at owen, he’s gotten off the couch and is standing in his own pee. his diaper got so full in his sleep that when he woke up (and continuing peeing presumably), it leaked out of his diaper onto his leg and onto the floor. he was, to say the least, pissed.

random ‘helper’ guy starts banging on the garage door, as if i don’t have enough to deal with. from there he works his way into the house, leaving all of the doors open while i am trying to calm phoebe down, calm owen down, change a diaper and answer the onslaught of questions this guy has. he gets the wedgewood on a dolly and starts manhandling it through the house. slamming it into the molding and in general, leaving a wake of paint chips and damage behind him.

at one point he asks me if i was sure they moved the oven into the house. you know, the oven you are trying to get out of the house right now? no, they must have built the house in 1939 around a stove from the 50s. yep. that must be it.

it’s about at this point i think i lost my cat. operative word, think. owen has calmed down by this point, but i’m starting to freak out because i cannot, for the life of me, find rumor anywhere.

stove-guy, you know, the expert, continues to manhandle my oven and my house.

about 30 minutes in, when the oven is literally half way out of the house, clogging two doorways and the entire hallway, the oven guy looks over and tells me that he has another ‘job’ to go to and that i had to disassemble the oven because that was the only way it was going to come out of the house… after which point, i can call him back and he can use his dolly to help get the oven out. i swear to you — i almost kilt a man.

what expert shows up without a tape measure? what expert of moving ovens doesn’t understand spacial awareness?

so, i basically gave up on the oven that we could have craigslisted because i needed to get it out yesterday so we could have the countertop guy in today to take measurements. i had no choice.

i completely disassembled the oven. i took off every door, every panel the entire upper backsplash, the insulation, etc. the oven we could have sold is now sitting in a pile in our garage. and no, i didn’t call the guy back, we just pushed it out there ourselves.

by the time kara got home, i think owen learned some new curse words…

in the next few weeks, we’re going to get the floors refinished, after which we can get the new oven into the house. once we have the oven, floors and countertops, our kitchen is pretty much done. then we have to plant a few things in the backyard, take care of the front and we’re good to go on the market…

i promise, promise, promise i will get kara’s belly photos up this weekend. i need to do some photoshopping first.

tiny, tiny, tiny photo update.