Just thinking about all the work Jim has done in his kitchen with such great results and about Vicki wishing she had a new kitchen/other flooring.

Just an idea, Vicki, but one really easy solution (providing your present hard flooring is level and not having big rips or holes in it) is 'click' type laminate flooring. Lots of different qualities of it but each is so easy to install and most rooms can be done in less than a day from start to finish (no gluing required so furniture can just be pushed to one side of the room and then immediately placed on top of the area completed).

Easier to maintain that a solid wood flooring, far kinder to feet and objects than tile and much easier (and more sanitary) than carpeting. Anyway, as I said, it's just a wee thought.

I forgot to ask Jim if they ate strictly take-out during his reno or somehow struggled on cooking during the midst of the chaos - eep!

No, we didn't have take out. We managed to shuffle the furniture around each night so we were able to live in the place while we did the renos. A bit like camping really, just with better facilities.
The kitchen itself was all done in one day apart from the island bench. They started at 7am removing the old and the new just went together like a big jigsaw puzzle.

Takes great organization to pull that off - good for you!

For myself, the very worse part of any renovation is the dust - yuck! This time, when we moved in here, we decided to have professionals lay the wood floor through the entire apartment - and threatened to beat them with a wet noodle if they didn't use the magic saw with an attached vacumn bag plus clean up behind themselves - huge gentle grin.

One always dreads feeling like a "displaced person" during any kind of remodeling. You were fortunate in that it didn't drag on for days and weeks. Or longer.
Z