Photo by Pete McArthur; Models: C.E.S.D. Talent
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Bless Our Contractors!
By Martha Weinman Lear, March & April 2007
Our kitchen redo went horribly wrong—and we couldn’t be happier
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Once upon a time, when our hearts were young and gay—four months ago—we decided to renovate our kitchen. I do not know why we decided to renovate our kitchen, since, as anyone who has been through it can tell you, you have to be nuts to voluntarily do such a thing. True, our kitchen was no longer shiny or state-of-the-art, but it was cozy and comfy and we loved it, the way you love an old shoe. We just wanted to spiff it up. That is what we said to the kitchen-renovation man: “We just want to spiff it up.” When he said, “You will have a lovely new kitchen in two weeks”—get this—we actually believed him.
Still, we have chosen to look on the sunny side. Whole new horizons of life and love have opened up to us as a result of this two-week renovation, which is now in its 16th week, or possibly its 16th month, I no longer remember which.
First, there is the matter of my microwave. It and I have never had a good relationship. Everything I fed it, even for ten seconds, came out looking like nothing you would ever want to put into your mouth. But now, with our kitchen ovenless and stovetop-less, I have had to coax out the microwave’s little tricks, and they are amazing. The greenest, most perfectly al dente little broccoli florets I have ever seen. Adorable chicken breasts. Steaks, no, but nothing is perfect. The point is, I am now totally in love with my microwave, and I don’t care if the kitchen doesn’t get finished until next Labor Day, as the kitchen man has now promised, or did he say Labor Day of 2009?
Next, the cabinets. In our old kitchen I had to strain to haul out those two-ton cast-iron skillets. For the new cabinets, we ordered roll-out shelves, which thrilled me. The only trouble is, the hardware is so bulky that there is no longer room for all those skillets, and it is weird to end up with a new kitchen with less storage space than the old. But why quibble? The shelves roll beautifully. It is so satisfying to roll them back and forth, even though we can’t put much of anything on them.
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By the way, the cabinet doors are the wrong size, but the kitchen man says replacements will be here next week, and though he has been saying this for 14 weeks, I just know everything will look spiffy when and if we get the right doors, which I believe are currently being hewn from lumber in a lumber camp in northern Estonia.
Then, the utility bills. Without a kitchen, our bills have dropped by two thirds! This is a perk we never anticipated, and I would like, in a spirit of gratitude, to suggest to kitchen renovators that it is a superb selling point. When they’re running years late on a job, they could tell the customer, “Think of all the utility costs we’re saving you!” My husband and I are finding all kinds of rewarding ways to spend the savings, such as ordering takeout.
When he said, 'You will have a lovely new kitchen in two weeks'—get this—we actually believed him.
Since the kitchen is now no place you would want to sit in, even if you could, which you cannot, we have been eating our takeout at a bridge table in the bedroom. One day the electrician—who was five weeks late but who’s counting?—came to work in the kitchen and cut a cable he wasn’t supposed to cut, which we learned after dark, when we had no light. Rather than dine in total darkness in the bedroom, we broke out the Sinatra (the power was still on in the living room) and a good bottle of wine and dined by candlelight. Well. Talk of new horizons! It is really amazing what a kitchen renovation and a clueless electrician can do for the tired libido, and that dinner was just so nice that we have decided to keep dining in the bedroom periodically even after the kitchen is back in operation, assuming we still have libidos by then.
On to the sink in the guest bathroom. This room backs up to the nonexistent kitchen. The sink faucet has leaked as far back as I can remember. Because we never used the guest bathroom, it never inconvenienced us, only our guests, so, naturally, we never got around to fixing it. But with the kitchen sinkless and us having to wash all our dishes in that bathroom sink, we could see what a problem the leak was, even if our guests had always been too polite to complain. So we called in a plumber.
The plumber was very simpatico. He said we needed a new faucet. Unfortunately the old one was so old that in the entire market of bathroom-sink faucets there was only one kind of replacement that would work, and it happened to be the most expensive, but what can you do?
So the new faucet was installed, and we were glad, if poorer, to have that done. But the next day, when I went to wash the breakfast dishes, I found that the guest bathroom had morphed into a steam room, due to hot water gushing from a pipe below the sink, due to the plumber having not tightened something or other. This water ruined the guest-bath carpet. So the carpet, which I had never liked anyway, had to be replaced, and now we have a nice new carpet, which never would have happened if we had not been renovating the kitchen. So you can see what a lucky break that was.
More good news: When that damage was being repaired, we learned that the longtime leak had caused extensive rot behind the tiles of our bathroom shower, which backs up to the guest bathroom. And the plaster man and the tile man and the new plumber, each of whom gave us estimates for reconstructing the shower, all assured us that it was just so lucky we had discovered it now, because these things only worsen with time, and if the situation had gone on much longer, which it certainly would have if we weren’t renovating the kitchen, we might have ended up with mold that we could never get rid of. I mean, how lucky can you get?
I’ll add only that when our kitchen project began, back in ’89, I think it was, a friend had said that anyone who gets through a kitchen renovation without a divorce is well ahead of the game, and I am pleased to report that, so far, we are holding our own. I try not to think about tomorrow.
Martha Weinman Lear is the author of the forthcoming book Now Where Did I Leave My Glasses? (Warner Books).
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