I miss my kitchen - badly! I've been without my kitchen for 2 weeks now. I've been creative with meals and am proud of myself for what I've done so far. However, stuff is everywhere. I've been using my microwave for most of our meals, which also has a convection oven which I'm grateful for. We've grilled, used the electric fry pan, used the crockpot and eaten out a lot too. William has been framing in the back porch. I've been helping him. We are enclosing it and will make it into a mud room entry with cabinets. You'll enter it before entering the kitchen. We were able to get the door installed tonight. It took a lot of time and patience! William has worked so hard on it. We found knob and tube wiring in our kitchen ceiling (we ripped down both the drop ceiling and the plaster ceiling) which is very old wiring which was still being used. So, we're getting rid of it. We've hired an electrician and he'll be working on it tomorrow. Here's some pictures (especially for our children):

The day has arrived! Our kitchen has been GUTTED. Oh, I feel so anxious to get a new kitchen. We have the new kitchen cabinets and appliances in our barn. The granite is in a shop right now. Everything is a HUGE mess right now. Our kitchen items are everywhere! I am so thankful that God gave us a tender mercy today. We asked a local teacher for help with gutting the kitchen. William wanted some strong young men to help him. Mr. Heuker at the school came over to look at our project. He said he probably could get his two sons to come help with the demolition on Tuesday night. Today, it rained and the roofing project that 12 young men (who work for Mr. Heuker) had planned for was canceled. And so, they came over to our home and began gutting the kitchen. They worked from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM and you can see for yourself the progress they made. I came home from taking two exercise classes and found the kitchen completely different! Wish us luck. This is the most difficult re-modeling project we've attempted! Here is the work William did on Saturday: (For those who read this besides our kids - our home is over 100 years old) Here is what happened today: (The workers found photos of previous owners behind pantry shelves and 1936 newspapers stuffed into the ceiling for insulation.

I am so relieved that my dance recital is over for the dance season. I felt really good about it and the girls did great. My theme was "Dancing through the Decades." We started with the roaring 20's and danced through each decade. I was told I had the elderly loving the older songs. I had a full crowd for all three recital nights. There's about 200 students at my dance studio. I use to teach all the classes, but now I have a ballet teacher, a tumbling teacher, and many student teachers. It really helps and they all did an amazing job. I'm really enjoying my break now that the recital is over. I don't even have to teach my exercise classes this week because the Y is on a one week break – so I am playing catch up with everything I didn't do while I prepared for the recital. Today I began taking kitchen items out of drawers and cupboards. We are GUTTING the kitchen this weekend. Oh, I'm dreading not having a kitchen. I already can feel the major inconvenience of it all. Here's some recital pictures that I downloaded from Facebook.