Dust on the Fridge

Remember that beautiful song by Kansas ... "Dust in the Wind." It looks like that inside our house right now.



If you've watched "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" on TV, you know that demolition is the FUN part of the process. They turn it into a party and everyone smiles and oohs and aahs and there are hundreds of people running around in blue shirts to help. Well, it's not like that here!

Hubby rented a Demo Hammer to break up and remove the white tile throughout the house. In addition to the flying tile fragments and jackhammer loud noise, the dust floating through the air kept setting off the smoke alarms. Since they're hard-wired into the house with our alarm system, you can't just take out the batteries to make them stop. The neighbors probably think I'm the worst cook in the world after two days of this.



Hubby blasted out and shoveled tile and made numerous trips to the city dump. I helped with a little shoveling and carting tile. I was better with the shop vac, cleaning up in his wake. He is a one-man tasmanian devil when it comes to stuff like this.

You know they love their manly tools. A few years ago, I came home from work on a Saturday afternoon and he called me into the back yard. "Honey, come look what I got today." He's standing there with a chain saw -- on an extension pole -- to trim the tall Queen Palms in our yard. Big grin, pulling on the start cord and revving the engine. Scary and cute!

So now we're cleaning the dust off of everything. Finally got the kitchen back in working order yesterday and needed a little comfort so I baked a bundt cake last night. It tasted great -- no tile dust!

We're planning to get all the baseboards painted before the new tile is laid and, fortunately, we won't be doing that part ourselves. We have real, honest-to-goodness tile guys coming in a week to do that. Yay!

So when I was a teenager, I babysat for a family in our neighborhood. The mom was always so much fun to talk to, I'd go hang out with her even when I wasn't sitting. I remember she climbed on a chair to get something from the cupboard over her refrigerator once. She gasped in outrage and said something very unladylike. Her husband had written the date (quite a few months earlier) in the dust on top of her fridge and a note ... Clean Me. Still makes me laugh!