Happy New Year

To all of my baseball friends, I wish you all a Happy New Year. May the year be filled with fun, exciting games.

Let's play ball!

Nationals Park

A few weeks ago, after being shut out of Opening Night tickets (they sold out in 6 minutes while we waited on hold and in an online ticket "waiting room"), we decided to buy a 40-game season package for the Washington Nationals. For $10 per seat, per game, including Opening Night, it seemed like a good deal. The package included 6 Mets games, 6 Phillies game (easily sellable to a good friend who is from Philly), and 13 games which are on Friday/Saturday nights, that's already half the package. And considering that we both work in offices with 100+ people, we figured it wouldn't be difficult to sell tickets to games we can't go to. And to prove it, even before the season started, I was able to sell 10 games to fans in my office spanning the first two months of baseball.

While Opening Night was last night and we spent a good 3 hours at the stadium, we didn't get a chance to walk around and actually look at the detail and take it all in, mostly because of the sheer number of people walking along with us. We figure we'll get the chance to stroll leisurely before another game, when there will definitely be less than 40,000 other people with us. But my initial thought of the stadium is that while it's brand-spanking new, it's unfortunately not that exciting. Perhaps there are a few things they could have done differently to make it more fun, but it's just difficult to build a new stadium for a team to call home when the team just doesn't have much history to build around. Many of the new stadiums these days focus on modern architecture and how they can best display snippets of the team's history along the concourse walkway. The Nationals really didn't have option. Hopefully one day they will be able to replace some of the displays of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle with images of Ryan Zimmerman and some other to-be Nationals Great.

Just for fun, here's my Mastercard commercial from last night:

15 minute Metro ride from Foggy Bottom to Navy Yard: Surprisingly painless.
90 minute wait on line to get into the stadium because Secret Service only set up 3 metal detectors at the first base entrance: Unshockingly excruciating.
30 seconds of boos as the President strolled to the mound to throw the "ceremonial" first pitch (which was way high): Priceless.

Inevitable

I left DC last week on Wednesday, believing that by the time I would get back late Sunday night, the kitchen would be 99% complete. The plan was to finish installing the faucet and other water stuff around the sink (water filter, instahot, etc) and finish tiling the floor.

Instead, we got a phone call on Saturday night from a good friend of ours who was crashing at our place for the weekend. He proceeded to tell us about how when he arrived home after Friday night dinner at 1am, he noticed water running and 1.5 inches of water on the floor of the kitchen. NOT GOOD. To make a long story short, turns out one of the hoses from the water filtration unit came undone and instead of filling the tank with filtered water, it tried to fill the kitchen. It didn't quite make it to the auto shut-off level, I guess thankfully so. He quickly ran and got the front-desk man who called the building manager to help out. They shut off the water from the under the sink and then raided our linen closet to mop up all the water.

As I quietly listened to him tell this story, I thought to myself: Isn't that inevitable? 3 weeks go by in what could otherwise be described as one of the most perfect and mostly on-time kitchen renovation projects in the history of man; something was bound to go wrong at some point.

While we did have a wedding at 4pm Sunday afternoon in NY, I couldn't shake the feeling that we had to go back- if only to check on things and assess the situation before 2am Monday morning (when we would have gotten back after the wedding). My brain knew that everything was ok- things were drying, didn't seem like anything was damaged, and water wasn't leaking anymore. But my heart told me that we should go back, that it was irresponsible to leave the apartment empty (our friend was on an early morning Sunday flight to New Orleans), just in case something else went wrong. So we decided to skip the wedding and drive home early.

The plumber came on Monday morning and fixed the hoses. Turns out there's something wrong with our faucet, though that wasn't connected to the Friday night flood. Kohler is sending us a new faucet. And hopefully today, we can get the floor finished.

Suffice it to say, I am extremely thankful that we let our friend crash in our apt, despite the mess, dust, and boxes all over the place. If the apartment were empty, who knows when someone would have noticed that our kitchen (and rest of our apartment!) was flooding- probably not until our downstairs neighbor would wake up the next morning and notice his ceiling leaking. And by then, we would be dealing with something totally different and far more disturbing.

More kitchen

Two more pictures uploaded to my Flickr account. The countertop has arrived!

I'm leaving to NY today, so I won't be able to see the progress in the kitchen until I return early Monday morning. It's too bad, but hopefully when I return, I will be pleasantly surprised. Things should wrap-up by Friday! Yay!

Kitchen pictures!

Well, sorta...

Apparently Blogger really really SUCKS when it comes to uploading more than one pic to a post. So instead, the pictures have been uploaded to my Flickr account with some captions so you see the progression. Start from the bottom... :)

Enjoy!

Kitchen renovations

I've been meaning to post thoughts and pictures of the progress of our kitchen renovations, which started on Monday, February 25, the day after we got back from New York after my grandfather's funeral. I made sure to take the pictures mostly every step of the way, but haven't yet quite gotten around to actually uploading them. They will come soon, I promise.

In any event, here's some narrative:
Some of you know that we've been planning on renovating the kitchen since we moved in last year. The kitchen was quite old (~25 years) and hadn't been updated since the condo was originally built. It's a classic L-shaped kitchen, with a wall on the other side. There were a few issues with this:

1. There were only 2 drawers in the entire kitchen. Any normal kitchen should have more than two drawers; otherwise you end up wasting counter space for nick-knacks, other utensils, etc.
2. Cabinets didn't maximize the actual space of the kitchen. With at least two sets of everything, we need as much storage space as possible. Thus is the life of kosher.
3. My baking sheets did not fit into the wall oven. 'Nuf said.
4. The wall on the other side of the kitchen was empty. It could be used for more storage!

So we thought about it for a while, and with one of us not having a job at that point, we couldn't really pull the trigger on any work yet, so thinking time was good. During the 9 months between when we moved in and when we decided to get our butts in gear, we decided (with the help of a mom or two) to knock down the wall on the other side of the kitchen and expand. What's on the other side of the wall, you ask? None other than a 1/2 bath. In a one-floor, 2-bedroom condo, is a 1/2 bath really necessary? Especially with the second full bathroom off the hallway and easily accessible to guests? It's a nice luxury, but an even nicer luxury is a larger kitchen. :)

We spent a whole bunch of time visiting kitchen renovation people, and once we decided they were outside of our budget, we visited Home Depot and Lowes, who offer free design services, and the cabinet lines they sell are pretty good. We decided to go with Home Depot, which ended up being a bit cheaper than Lowes on the cabinets, and we found our own contractor, Oscar, who happens to be terrific (If you live in the DC area and need one, please don't hesitate to contact me for his info; he needs referrals to get back to school and he does excellent work!).

Work started in earnest on Monday, February 25th. Oscar knocked down the wall and started priming the kitchen for a full gutting. Our appliances were delivered ON THE DAY THEY PROMISED, Monday, March 3, and our cabinets also were delivered ON THE DAY THEY PROMISED, Thursday, March 6. Oscar started installing the cabinets this passed Monday and hopefully by tomorrow, 90% of the kitchen will be complete!

We spent a good chunk of the first week packing up the kitchen in preparations for the total gutting. Everything- food, dishes, utensils, gadgets, etc.- were packed into boxes and moved into the living and our bedroom. Oscar spent that week tearing up the floor- you'd think that removing a floor would be easy. Nope. Turns out the floor wasn't tiled, but instead was a thick sheet of marble that they cut lines into to make it look like tile, which forced Oscar to buy a jackhammer to pry it all off. The jackhammer then caused more dust than we anticipated, which got sucked into the ventilation, and spread throughout the apartment. This didn't make me happy, but what choice did we have? Though it turns out I'm kinda allergic to this stuff and it has caused major throat irritation for the last two weeks. Not fun.

Then the appliances and cabinets came. In anticipation, we moved everything in the living area to the far side of the room. Little did we know that the all the cabinets would come in 50 million boxes. No joke. OK, maybe not 50 million, but there were A LOT of boxes. So many boxes, that they took up THE ENTIRE ROOM. I have pictures to prove it. We were forced to live in our bedroom for the last week, with no entertainment but our laptops, some books, and each other. We've taken to watch the previous night's Daily Show and Colbert online to sorta make it seem like we can watch some TV.

So far, though, there are no regrets. Yes, we've had a bunch of little things come up, like marble floor, trying to move the water line for the sink to the corner and discovering a building pipe in the way, finding out that the pantry gets in the way of vent on the ceiling, etc. But, so far at least, things are going relatively well, and I'll be pleased if we move back in by next week. (And now that I'm making all this public, watch something happen to totally screw us over...) I'll also be pleased to have my living room back so that I don't have to eat and work on my bed. But even more so, I'll be happy to stop going to Home Depot every other night.

Pictures will be forthcoming, I promise.