Cooking with gas (and electricity!)

Monday 21 July, plumbers arrive early to commence connecting everything from dishwasher to downpipes, sink to stove. I have various appointments, so Peter is supervising. As a result, my message about not bothering with the shelf that the kitchen people have supplied with the sink cupboard gets lost, and the plumbers go to all kinds of trouble to fit the pipes through the shelf. However it is so good to have running water that I don't care. Peter organises a nest of powerboards and cords so that we can plug in stove and dishwasher, and for the first time in 9 months I cook a meal on the stove!
We have another communication disconnect, finding on Wednesday that the electrician has told the builder he is not coming until Friday (once again, after two days of being on early alert). The good news on Wednesday was that Bluestone delivered our recovered sofa and dining chairs, and they look great.
On Friday at 7am we greet electricians Chris and Jason who have all the wiring finished by mid-morning. At last, we can move the fridge and microwave, the last bits of the kitchen still residing in the middle room. The fridge (like us) is elderly, and when we try to move it into its new, snug-fitting cupboard, we discover that (like us) it has a lean to the left that seems beyond adjustment. We eventually succeed in getting it in place by propping up the back corner with a bit of wood, but it has taken the rest of the morning. In the afternoon, we make a sortie to Ikea to buy all kinds of drawer fittings and such-like to help organise our new spaces. We also buy a new thingy to put the TV on (our old cabinet, also Ikea, dates from pre-flat screen days and is excessively large), and two new lightweight chairs, as we've decided that the chairs from our old three piece suite are too heavy for the room.
Between Monday (plumbers) and Friday (electricians) I have been slowly escorting items from the old kitchen cabinets in the garage to the new kitchen cabinets. Over the weekend this continues, and Peter joins me to shift larger items on Sunday. So we now have just about everything back in the kitchen (plus a couple of boxes to go to the op shop), and in the rest of the living area a dining table and chairs, 3 coffee tables, a sofa and two chairs in flat packs waiting for us to get the strength to assemble them. Tomorrow perhaps.
From the kick-off, I predicted that it would take until my birthday to have a liveable house again. I'm about right (birthday is tomorrow), although there are still Things to be Done. But it's a short list now, and nothing to prevent us having a dinner party tomorrow night. Whoopeee!