Panic in the Pantry

Fun in home renovations! This week: our first real, blip in the design. It was bound to happen, and here we are. Today, Drew ran over to the house and took these pictures. When you read the rest of this post you should pretend you were me seeing them on the camera for the first time. Here's how it went:

Ooh! Look, stairs again. They make me smile. Upstairs they put the rafter things in, so the hallway/play space is coming together.

Walking down the stairs. This is what it will look like when you come down the stairs and head toward the living room and kitchen. This is our dining room. Oh look, a nice dining room.

Hey, wait. Thats my favorite part of the house on the left. You can see the doorway, and wait. hmmmm... what is that? What the F*** is in my pantry?! Why are there two HUGE ducts taking up the total east wall of my pantry?!?! Why don't I know about this? Who the hell put that there without telling us about changing the plans.

I need my whole pantry. Not half a pantry.

UGH!!!
(Imagine me getting progressively angrier and angrier as I try to fathom why NO ONE from our build team let us know about this change or asked us what we wanted to do....)

Okay. Relax. Enjoy the pictures. Calm down. Look, we have a fantastic new house. Okay, here's another view from the bottom of the stairs on the main floor into the dining room, but you can see the bathroom on the right here.

Small devil on left shoulder: BUT WTF!!! MY PANTRY!

Okay, flipping back to my calmer side. Here's my fun office! (to the left). That silver thing, its just some sort of insulation stuff covering the door to keep the heat in. Its like -20 here.
Seriously.
Freeze the snot while its in your nose cold.
I'm not joking about that either.
It really happens. Come to Minnesota and see for yourself.

Anyway, moving away from the pantry panic, here is the office again, but you can also see the stairs going down to the basement a bit. They are covered with insulation too, but at least they are there now.

Never mind. I can't take it. I have to look again. WTF. Why is that giant duct work in half of my pantry. That far east wall was supposed to be all open cupboards in the pantry. Now its 3/4s duct work and will be 1/4 cabinets. SO IRRITATING. On this side its a closet into the dining room. Its possible that closet will be removed now to make the pantry bigger. I'm not really sure.  We'll see what the builder (Jim) says when we meet on Monday. About 15 minutes after seeing this monstrosity I sent a brisk email to our builder Jim, who normally we love, and who we are giving a break, because his mom just got put in hospice. But, nevertheless what he said was "that was the only place for the duct work to go." Not exactly a satisfying answer.

Okay, calming down again. Here we are next to those giant awful ducts in the pantry. At least I'll still have the full pantry on the right side (west side). When you walk through the pantry you meet our lovely kitchen. It takes me to a happy place. I can almost forget about the disaster in the pantry.

Just kidding. I can't forget about it. Its KILLING me.

Hi again, now we are in the kitchen. Standing over in the south east corner. Looking toward the living room (you can see the new fireplace) and the open space into the dining room.

Look! our new fireplace!

Now, from the southwest corner (standing sort of next to the fireplace). If you look up you can see the spot for the balcony and where the peek through and door for the upstairs bedroom over the kitchen is. The balcony will probably be open often (it will have a railing), but when someone is in that room we'll have three big barn doors on a track that close over the space to make it a closed room.

On to the basement. Notice I didn't stop to be miserable about the pantry. BUT I'm still really mad about it. Just so you know.  The basement is a disaster. We have stairs that go down and then you can see what the plumber has been up to- putting in all the main lines. Drew is standing in the new mechanical room to take this one.

Thats a giant hole where the old bathroom used to be.

This photo is taken from where the new opening into the new basement will be, next to the new bathroom.

Speaking of bathrooms, here we are up on the top floor now. You can see the boys bathtub in the boys room. It doesn't belong there, but they seem to have left it there for the weekend. Hopefully next week it will end up in the bathroom where it belongs.

Okay, so all in all, lots of new improvements. But I am panicking about the pantry. With any luck, we'll be back on a road to happy house renovation next week!