If You Can’t Take The Heat, Don’t Update Kitchen
It seemed like a simple enough project: a kitchen remodel. After all, how tough could it be to transform Brady Bunch kitsch to Country French chic? We the neophytes in the land of remodelers hell were about to find out.
A do-it-yourself project was never an option. My husband, the obsessive compulsive tool-person, approaches home improvement in the same serious way Gen.l Patton prepared for war. I, the more spontaneous one, rush in with a crowbar and ask questions later. These already prickly differences turn ugly when faced with anything remotely connected to The House. Better to let someone else do it.
We made an appointment with a resurfacing company that claimed to make old cabinets look like new. The salesman delivered his four-hour presentation between fits of coughing, sneezing and wheezing into bits of balled up tissue that fell from his pockets like slushy hailstones. The cost to resurface our old cabinets came to roughly what I had paid for my Honda. Next?
We went to specialty kitchen shops, kitchen and bath shops, kitchen and hardware shops and shops that sold kitchen spoons. We bought magazines with pictures of kitchens we liked and carried them around with us like a girl getting her first real haircut carries pictures of her favorite movie star’s style. Like the girl, all we really wanted was a trim. What we got was a buzz cut.
Our leap into remodeling was made with giddy expectations mitigated only occasionally by acute terror. We wrote out the down payment, signed the contracts and fell head first into the the abyss.
We landed in the nether world of dysfunctional contractors, not to be confused with functional contractors who do in fact exist but never work at our house. The mantra of this world is “I’ll need a draw.” It is repeated throughout the course of the project whether or not any visible sign of progress is made. In this world time really does stand still.
To our contractor, a cross between Timothy Leary and Eb from Green Acres, time was the sixth dimension. Every week we would ask him about the approximate completion date of some phase of the project. He would scratch his head, gaze slowly around the room and say, “Well, I see no reason why that can’t be done by Thursday.”
We thought Thursday meant the day after Wednesday of the week in question. No. Thursday represented any day close enough in the future to satisfy the question but far enough away to remove any pressure of completion.
The cabinet manufacturer was in the same altered state. The wrong style of cabinets were shipped. Twice. The wrong pieces were shipped. Three times. When the right pieces arrived, all of the cabinet doors had left-hand hinges. Everything had to be reordered. Gee, couldn’t we just keep the left-hand doors and wait for their mates to arrive? Nope.
Meanwhile, we were held hostage by our gutted kitchen. It mocked us each night as we came home from work with yet another greasy bag of burgers and fries. We could not go into the room without stubbing our toes, stepping on nails or causing chunks of plaster to fall from the ceiling.
My husband was convinced the room was haunted by the Ghost of Kitchens Past who would eternally torment us like photos from junior high. I didn’t believe him.
Finally the cabinet doors and all their corresponding hinges were scheduled for delivery. What arrived instead was a brown shag carpet remnant the size of a cow pasture. The contractor pondered the situation and deduced that there had been some kind of mistake. Then he asked for a draw.
In the ninth week of our 10-day project, the kitchen was finished. People say that it’s beautiful and we agree. From a distance. If you squint. We never found out who ordered the shag rug, but my husband’s guess is that it was some disgruntled ghost in a leisure suit. I believe him.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review