Drumroll: The Kitchen, as it was in June.

Sample Ikea instructions and bits, laying on the stacked pile of walls and floor of a cabinet, before assembly.  Note the smile on the little man's face in the instructions, while he assembles the cabinet on a carpet. I wanted to stab the little smiling man with a Philips screwdriver after only a couple of hours of cursing assembly.

I have been ignoring the clamor to post photos and updates on the Kitchen, and I do apologize.  It's been so busy in my day-to-day life, and so much happened to it right after I left Portland, that it has presented as a combination overwhelming task to describe on evenings when I can barely function anyway due to the unfamiliar pressures of the ordinary workday.

First, a reminder of where we were when I left for the midwest -- which is that we had just finished applying, compressing and sealing the American Clay on 98% of the walls and ceiling.  The last weekend I was there, The Texan and I assembled the Ikea cabinets, attaching A to B and then clamping C for about 60% of the 250 boxes of things in the living room (the other 40% was drawer fronts and drawers and cabinet doors and hinges for doors).  I will show a photo of that, just for perspective, even though it's so distant in the past now that I might almost volunteer to assemble another Ikea cabinet again.

The Texan hard at work on one of the more difficult cabinets.

I didn't think to take a photo of the kitchen full of all the empty, topless (because the top is the countertop, of course) cabinets, stacked two high, away from the walls so the contractors could work there.  Here is the only after-photo I took, with Tasha as Vanna White.

Check in after another 24 hours -- tomorrow night, I plan to skip the in-between steps (I don't have many photos of them anyway) and show you the (almost) finished product.