When do we get to open the presents?

The beginning of last week started with a delivery truck dropping off all our new appliances.  It will be a while until they are installed, but the carpenters don't quite trust what the spec sheets say in terms of the exact dimensions needed, and they want to be able to see them in person.  So a whole bunch of boxes filled up one corner of the dining room.  At the end of last week, all the cabinetry was delivered from the cabinet factory, also in boxes.  It was like two whole rooms full of Christmas presents!  Here's the dining room:

And here's the kitchen:

The kitchen is partly covered in plastic because we realized that this was out last chance to roll on ceiling paint and wall primer without the complication of having to go around the cabinets.  So that's what I did all weekend...

A bunch of trim work got done last week in between the deliveries.  The banged-up basement stair tread from the last post was replaced with a new oak tread.  Notably, the crown moulding around the inside of the tray ceiling went up:

It may not look too exciting yet (as white on white) but suddenly the room has a more finished look.  (and suddenly got harder to paint)  That piece of crown is going to be hiding a rope light which will give us an indirect glow off the ceiling when the mood dictates.

The last of the old bathroom floor and the last of the back hall floor went away.  These were the hard-to-cut-out parts, like the part wedged under the back door threshold.  I had no idea how they were going to get that out because it's hard to wedge a circular saw in next to the sloping metal threshold.  The guys got out a thing I hadn't seen before called a Fein saw, and once I saw it in action I knew this was an amazing tool that I need in my arsenal someday.  It worked like a sawzall but it could dip straight into the floor in exactly the way that a sawzall can't.  Another hard-to-get piece of floor was the chunk under the bathroom radiator.  They solved it by just hanging the radiator in mid-air, half a centimeter above the old floor:

The last thing you want to do is mess with unhooking and reconnecting a radiator that's already working just fine.  It seems that everyone who knows how to do that correctly is well past retirement.  Several years ago we had to have a radiator repaired, and the furnace guys called in their "specialist," an ancient and distinguished old gentleman who came hobbling into the house very slowly, leaning heavily on his cane.  I don't know if he still even makes house calls, so this radiator will hang there like that until the tile goes in.

The radiator we really weren't going to mess with was the big kitchen radiator:

We just left the original floor under it and put the hardwood up against the old linoleum.  In a couple of weeks we're going to be building a custom radiator cover to go over this, so you will never see this piece of old floor (unless you're fixing the radiator for some reason).  I've got a pile of images of arts-and-crafts style radiator covers, and we're designing something that will look good here.  Eventually a countertop will go over this, and it will become the breakfast nook part of the kitchen.

This week we get to open the presents!