Side Trip!

Our kitchen is in total disarray, but we took off to go to a conference in Fort Worth, Texas! I had a number of presentations to deliver, and was particularly excited to get together with my grad school friends.

 

my friends Roy and Moxie - Justin took the picture.

That was the highlight - alas, I wasn't very impressed with Fort Worth. We did have good breakfasts at the hotel, however...
  

Texas shaped waffles! Yummy!

One thing that we did enjoy was driving to Dallas and visiting the 6th floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository -- a museum that details the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  It was an interesting visit.

So naturally I came back to being behind on my grading -- which I am still busy catching up with.  And then Dale pulled a muscle in his back at work, so he wasn't able to do any of the final crawling around under the house so we can finish that.  Instead, we focused on cleaning up the junk pile and getting our trash organized.  Not the most glamorous of duties, but a necessary thing.

In the meantime, we've been looking at ideas online for our beam, and I believe we are going to make a slight arch across the space, and build up the edges into some faux columns.  Something like this from Remodel-aholic:

 This is their 3-D model image - we really like the way they built a lot of character into a space that had none beforehand!  That's a similar challenge that we face - nothing remarkable about the bare space, and we like character.  So we're approaching how to adapt this idea into our space. 

In the meantime, we also went out and ordered our stove - we love the look:

And we are finalizing our plan for kitchen cabinets.  A trip to IKEA to talk with the kitchen planners and clear up some questions about particular cabinets.  We have to order in the next month so we can get 20% off during their annual kitchen sale. Score!

Hopefully, the next post will have some updates on our progress ---