Coming along

I have been remiss in not reporting that our kitchen has arrived--mostly. Two very energetic fellows showed up on Monday, right on time, with a truckload of boxes containing the various parts of our Ikea kitchen. They set to work putting it all together with amazing speed.

When I took this they were just getting started. They did an amazing job, including a lot of little fixes to compensate for the fact that the room the kitchen is in, like the rest of the building, is just a few centimeters off kilter. That took a lot of extra time. 

But as they were finishing up, we all realized that Ikea had sent the wrong countertop AND the wrong backsplashes. We'd ordered a butcher-block counter for the "dry side" of the kitchen, and plain green backsplashes. Ikea had sent a formica counter and kind of hideous gray=marble=pattern backsplashes. It was very frustrating for all of us and meant that the kitchen could not be completed that day. Argh.

Still, it's pretty far along. This is looking into the kitchen from the dining room. 

And this one is looking from the someday-a-second-bathroom toward the dining room. 

The butcher block counter goes there, next to the fridge. The space between the lower cabinets is because Danny wanted a place he could sit while he chops onions. 

I know at the moment our kitchen looks pretty soulless and Ikea-ish, but once we crap it up with all our stuff I think it will be a bit more accogliente (which Google Translate tells me is the Italian equivalent of gemuetlich.) And it will certainly be easier than to work in than our present arrangement, where the stove and fridge are in one room and the sink and larder are in another.

Rodolfo the plumber is coming tomorrow to hook up the new sink and the dishwasher, which will mean that the kitchen will at least be functional, if not aesthetically perfect. Meanwhile, we went back to Ikea today to try to straighten out the countertop-backsplash mess. 

The fellows who work in the Ikea Parma kitchen department always seem delighted to see us, because they know they're going to have a chance to practice their English. I still have to get through a phone call with the Ikea warehouse personnel, but it sounds like the backsplash will be delivered sometime next week. The countertop is back-ordered, so we might not see it before we head back to California at the end of the month. But we can live with the temporary counter they put in, if we have to, and have them deliver the butcher-block once we're back here. 

Of course while we were at Ikea we also took the opportunity to drop a few more hundreds of dollars on baking pans, chairs, drawer inserts, a table to put on the balcony, a few more rugs, and about a thousand other things. Pam had offered to give us a lift home from the store, and for a moment it looked like we weren't going to be able to get everything into her little station wagon. I had to ride in the back with all the goods, since the space available back there was too small for Danny. It was a tight squeeze for me, for that matter. 

Meanwhile, I've had two significant revelations this week.

The first is that the obvious solution to the problem of what to put on all these huge white walls is to take some of the big paintings we have back in El Cerrito off their stretchers and bring them here. We'd rejected that idea initially, because it's a pain getting pictures on and off the stretchers (all those staples). But the ceilings are high here and stopgaps like posters are going to look ridiculous in these big, empty white spaces. We have paintings by my mother and Danny's brother that we really like and have no room for in California, and they'll look great here. This is one I'm hoping to bring--a picture my mother made years ago of Max and me and one of her dogs.

The second realization is that I have to do a better job of getting enough sleep, or I might as well give up on learning Italian (...she writes at 12:56 a.m., when she has a plumber coming in seven and a half hours). I've been going to bed too late and getting up too early, and the consequences of this were borne home to me when I went out for coffee with Franca yesterday and could hardly understand anything she said. It was as if she were speaking some other language, one I'd never encountered before. And I realized it was because when I'm really tired, the parts of my brain that process Italian are the first things to shut down. So I have to stop doing what I'm doing right now, and go to bed.