Today, we get our kitchen back!

Hard to believe it’s been over a month since this happened, but today we get our kitchen back! Eventually! Since our dishwasher exploded in May, we’ve been without two things in our lives: a dishwasher, and a complete kitchen floor.

A dishwasher containing clean dishes
A dishwasher containing clean dishes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Monday afternoon, the first half of this puzzle was completed when our new dishwasher arrived. Not that spending a month of washing everything by hand wasn’t great (in a family of five, it’s amazing how quickly you go through things). What was surprising was that even with the water as hot as it could get, sometimes it wasn’t enough to kill and/or remove the remaining proteins of whatever Youngest is allergic to (probably her peanut allergy in this case). So for most of the last month, she’s been using paper and plastic to avoid direct cross contamination, and out of fear the rest of us have been avoiding anything that might trigger her.

Today, after some coaxing of the carpenter, we will have the flooring people out to put down new laminate. And then…a kitchen again! I know it must seem like a sad thing to be excited about, but before this incident in May, we had just become entrenched in our new eating habits. Fresh vegetables at every meal, either from our garden or the farmer’s market; a marked decrease in quick meals in favor of healthy meals; and the most dramatic switch for us, making our own bread every day.

Not being able to comfortably walk in the kitchen or risk spilling anything on the exposed wood somewhat curbed that. And in a “never saw that coming” way, the flooring is courtesy of Nationwide, our insurance company. This was one of those occasions where we buckled and admitted we just couldn’t handle such a large bill ourselves, not when time was of the essence. We thought we might be kneejerking, but it turns out that if you don’t get the floors drying within that first 24-48 hours, the bill is going to be even more astronomical. So, with a brief moment of hemming and hawing, we called in the big guns and actually used the homeowner’s policy we’ve been paying on all these decades. Possibly the only bright move we’ve made 🙂

And now in the not so bright move department, I’m off to take the girls to a matinée showing of the Lego movie. Because I’m dumb like that.