Great week coming up!

David came by yesterday to discuss our kitchen renovation.  Turns out he IS going to have time to handle it for us.  Yeaaaaa!  He'll be removing the double wall oven and installing the new (much larger) oven.  He's going to install the new kitchen/dining room flooring (~400 square feet!) first.  He says it will only take him today and tomorrow!  But the worst part will be removing the old flooring that was (oops) GLUED down when it wasn't supposed to be.  If he can get that old flooring pulled up in just one day I'll be amazed.  Fingers crossed.

  

We spent last evening moving things out of the kitchen so he could get to the flooring.  We emptied out the china storage cabinet -- all that stuff is stacked on the island -- and I moved all those boxes of ashes from pets who have been cremated out of that corner cabinet in the dining room.  Guess they shouldn't actually have been there anyway.  A dining room really isn't the most appropriate place for pet ashes, is it? 

 

Anyway, David is particularly good at making things looks great in the end, so once he's able to install the flooring, I'm sure he's going to do a FINE job of putting in the baseboards and trim pieces, many of which were never put in there to begin with, so the room will look appropriately finalized for a change.  Can't wait! 

 

The scary part is, he's going to be moving up to Ashville, North Carolina, I think it was, just ONE month from now!  Thank goodness he's fitting us in before he leaves! 

In fact, he SAYS he can also build all the (5) dutch doors for the stalls and put in the dirt and do the planting in those raised beds he built a few months back before he goes as well!  It'll be wonderful if he really can manage to fit all that in.  But if he just gets the kitchen renovated by the time he has to go I'll be tickled to death!  We've been thinking about doing that, but continually putting it off, for the entire 10 YEARS we've lived here.  By the time we both retire we won't be able to afford to do it, obviously, and that time is no longer all that far away.  So I'm really happy that David is going to be dealing with it NOW!  Such a relief!

  

The office assistant guys are over here in our office area this morning dealing with all the files we have to either throw out or move over to our new offices.  Both John and Jeanne are out of the office today.  John will be gone except for a day or two for the next few weeks - his Golden, Khay, is participating in invitational dog competitions all over the country!  So Julie is managing to decide what to pitch and what to keep, based on their instructions before they left.  We won't actually be moving our offices, per se, for two more weeks though - until John gets back.  Not sure that was the best arrangement -- after being gone all this time he's going to have a LOT on his plate when he gets back.  But maybe they'll be able to move his furniture AND his computer over night one night so he will be able to work full time even in the midst of the move.

  

As for me, I'm just considering how to decorate the new place!  I bought a giant (6-foot high) artificial tree this weekend.  The new office has one wall that's all glass, so I thought it would be nice to have the sun come in through a tree in the morning (the offices we're moving to all face East).  And there are curtain rods in place, too -- but no curtains.  Time to shop for curtains, apparently.  ;-D 

The best thing is, they're going to clean my rug before moving the rest of the furniture over there.  The thing has been here in my current office for about 7 years and has never even been vacuumed!  If I have to climb under my desk and plug something in I come out covered in dust and dirt!  It'll be good not to have to deal with THAT again. 

  

Anyway, I'm not concerned about buying curtains because when I finally retire I'll get to bring all that stuff home and put it all in my home office because just about everything in my office here at work except the file cabinets is my own. 

Oh, Mark really accomplished a lot this weekend!  He got out his DR power grader and smoothed out all the dirt in Duke's and Arthur's paddocks (Lizzie's is STILL too wet to deal with -- next weekend for hers).  Then he and Jerry put down "grass grids" around two sides of the barn and then put those rubber stall mats on top of the grids.

They suggest that you just lay them down and then fill them in with dirt.  But they put them down then pounded them into the existing wet dirt.  The grid is small enough that the horses couldn't get stuck in there, even if the grids weren't covered with the mats.  Each one is 20 X 40 inches so it's pretty easy to lay them out and hook them together.  Now -- if they'll just stay in place and not end up BURIED in the dirt when it floods out there again . . .

We HOPE with those grids under there that the mats won't slide all around and get unlevel, and the horses won't have to walk around in mud up to their ankles any more . . . we hope.  If the grids stay in place but the mats DO continue to slide, we'll just have to get some giant staple-shaped prongs about a foot or two deep and drill holes in those mats and pound those prongs through the grids down into the ground so the mats CAN'T move. 

We'll also be getting some of that builder's sand for areas like the gates and their paths from the gates to the barn.

  

We are trying -- really TRYING -- to see that all of us . . . horses, dogs, cats AND people . . . will be comfortable at all times once we have retired.

  

Sure hope it all works out!