Slowly but surely we are putting the house together post-kitchen remodel. We were able to get a couple rooms in order when we first moved in (namely, my office and our bedroom), but with all the kitchen stuff still in boxes, Jack's tools and the new and old appliances stuffed into the dining room, and the storage room and garage being used as cabinet staging areas, it's been hard to unpack, weed, and set up rooms until now.
The dining room is still the staging area rather than an actual dining room; it's home to the Donate and Toss piles, as well as the old fridge, which is for sale on craigslist. We'd happily give it to charity if we could, but so far we've been unable to find a qualified charity in the Philadelphia area to take it. If you have a suggestion, let us know.
The Sell pile has moved to the guest room, and all the boxes of food that need to be sorted and stashed in the pantry are in the middle of the kitchen. Meanwhile, I found a nice sisal rug to go under the yummy red couch, so the living room is starting to shape up. Well, at least the couch side is; there are still a few kitchen boxes in the opposite corner, and yesterday we found out that Al's huge TV was damaged in the move. (It worked for a couple months, but then stopped turning on; the repair guy showed us where one of the internal doodads had been knocked off its mounts. He said that the connections might've worked for a while—and might randomly work still, which has been our experience—but the thing is quite broken.)
Al is responsible for the now-organized Donate, Sell, and Toss piles, which I'll be adding to (and subtracting from, as I make trips to the dump and Goodwill) over the next week or so. I've also been cutting up boxes like a maniac and taking them for disposal/recycling (I'm not sure what it is that the city of Philadelphia does with them).
Oh! And yesterday I got to do my first baking in the new kitchen!—yay! A friend gave me the Moosewood Dessert cookbook over the weekend, and I used a recipe for sour cream coffeecake in it to make Jack and Rylan some cupcake-sized regular and blueberry coffeecakes. (Jack came by in the afternoon to look at our sponge drawer, which I thought was opening weirdly but which turned out to be perfectly normal, and to adjust the lock on the garage door.) There were a few extra coffeecupcakes, so I got to try a regular one, and there were four blueberry ones for Al.
