Well, the two new back doors are installed now and it's pretty amazing how much more insulated the house is. No more cold drafts seeping in beneath the doors and one of them actually shuts.

The doors were installed Thursday. We had painted them, thinking that once they installed them, that would be it. It doesn't quite work that way. You see, the carpenter had to plane the edges and trim them so they would fit the frame. A frame that has been sitting in a 50-year-old home that has settled a bit.

The door off the den was pretty straight, but the one off the laundry room apparently is now shaped somewhat like the big water slide at Raging Waters -- a bit bumpy to say the least.

It took pretty much the entire day to install them, but the carpenter did a fabulous job. They fit beautifully. There are just a few marks from the planer and sander that need to be painted over. We'll also need to prime and paint all the edges to seal the door from the weather.

Now all that is left is the hardware on the kitchen cabinets, curtains and the stained glass for the cabinet doors -- that's delayed a little bit because of the artist's schedule -- and one small piece of trim around a window.

Meanwhile, we've been cooking up a storm. So far, I've made several batches of cookies, an apple pie, a cake, my mother's zucchini casserole, baked chicken, and all sorts of stuff on the stovetop.

I must say, though, my absolute favorite part of the kitchen is the dishwasher. I got to thinking the other day, and it has been 12 years since I have had a working dishwasher.

That was in our first apartment after we were married. We had a dishwasher in our apartment in West Texas, but the water out there is actually worse than it is here. It's more like brine that water, so you can imagine what it does to dishes. The one in the house we moved into next wasn't much better. It was a portable, and just too much hassle to actually hook up. So, it served as a liquor cabinet for the most part. Once we moved into our Ventura apartment, we were excited about having a dishwasher again, only to find out that it didn't work very well after about a dozen uses. Once again, it became a storage unit.