A Startling Chain of Events

I bought my wife an espresso machine for her birthday. That seems like such a simple thing, but that's how it all started. Doesn't that sound ominous? It all started with the espresso machine...

So, anyway, I bought my wife an espresso machine. I thought it was just a simple thing. Not that an espresso machine is a simple thing, but it's a thing she's always wanted. Sort of. Actually, the thing she's always wanted is more complicated than that and has more to do with the actual coffee than the machine, but that will be for another post. For simplicity, we'll just say that she's wanted an espresso machine for a long time, and we finally got to the appropriate time for that to happen. So I bought her one.

She didn't know where we were going to put it... Oh, yes, I told her about it ahead of time, because I wanted to make sure I got something she would like and that would do the things she wanted it to do, so we looked for it together. Lots of research. She likes research, though. Anyway, she didn't know where we were going to put it, so I spent the day it arrived rearranging and clearing counter space so that it would have a place to be.

This is the place that I made for it to go. Sort of. There was actually a bread machine in the corner there that the espresso machine initially sat next to. As you can see, neither thing is there now. Now, it's just a big naked spot. Of course, we haven't really had much counter space in our tiny kitchen, so the big naked spot has been good. But how did the naked spot happen?

This is where it gets... interesting. Yeah, let's say "interesting." See, once we had the espresso machine and it was set up and everything was working fine, my wife informed me of two things:
1. We were going to be painting one of our walls.
2. We had to buy a thing to put the espresso machine on.

To the left is the color of the rest of the room and the color the "blue" wall used to be (the color of the "blue" wall is actually Mexecali Turquoise); to the right is the new color of the accent wall. The red thing is the thing that goes under the espresso machine. Here, you can see it better:

And here's the whole thing:

The wire mesh is part of, well, I'll call it an art project, because that's what it is, an art project for art, which is mostly non-existent at this point. We're not all the way finished.

So the espresso machine led to
1. Painting a wall, which involved testing colors and all of that jazz.
2. Buying a thing from IKEA, where I had never been before. Neither had my wife. There will be a post on that trip.
3. Building the thing that came from IKEA which, again, was more complicated than you would think, because we modified it.
4. Several trips to Home Depot, both for the modifications to the thing and for the materials for the art project.
5. There will also be a lamp project in order to replace the ugly reading lamp you see there on the end of the thing.
6. And who knows what else...

All because I gave my wife an espresso machine.

But, well, you know, if you give a mouse a cookie...

Oh, and hey! The coffee is great! It's totally a thing now. Every morning. Yeah, I'll explain some other time.