Bitchin' 'Bout the Kitchen: An Update

• By: Mo Morrissey
• On: 09/24/2008 21:00:37
• In: Personal

Oh man. We’re coming up on our second week in survivalist mode. It was kind of fun and exciting at first – “Oooh, we’re getting a new kitchen!” all that. It was funny to see the few cabinets we had ripped out and all the work having been started. Yeah, well that was a couple of weeks ago.  Not so much fun now.

Everything is piled up in our dining room. We still have our Roberts & Mander stove sitting in our living room (know anyone who wants an antique stove??). Boxes of subway tile and our new garbage disposer at the bottom of the stairs. Light fixtures randomly placed wherever. Cabinets ready to be, but not yet installed. It’s a gargantuan mess.

You’ll notice early on, I was happy to show you pictures of the updates – “OOOH! Lookit that! There’s a cabinet on the floor over there! Hooo hooo!” Yeah, well, those updates have been few and far between lately, simply because we’re just getting so worn down from having the house in such disarray. 

It was novel washing our dishes in the small bathroom just off the kitchen. Now, not so much. When I can’t wash my hands because now all the dishes are piled up in the bathroom sink, you know it has to end. And it’s not that there’s a lot piled up – I mean there’s three of us, one of whom is age 3. We do the dishes every night, but it’s a small sink with limited space. 

Oh, and the doing dishes by hand thing? Look, I know. People all over the world walk for miles to fetch potable water and here I am bitching about having to wash a couple of drinking glasses and a sippy cup by hand. Fact is, though, that I’m a spoiled rat and I want what I want. I really want clean dishes and I think that washing them by hand with a ratty sponge  IN A BATHROOM isn’t the best way to get them there.

Anyway, we’re almost at the end – so close we can taste it. I’ve taken you through the beginning stages, the cabinet installation, and of course everything we should have had ready before the cabinets were installed but didn’t.

Yes, tomorrow we hit that point called “The beginning of the end.” The countertops are coming tomorrow! The sink gets set, the countertop gets placed, and the faucet installed. Friday, the plumbing gets connected and we can again have nicely machine washed dishes AND, get this, have a kitchen sink WITH RUNNING WATER and a garbage disposer (we connected the house to sewer but never updated with a disposer until now). I tell you, our home DOES have the most modern of conveniences. 

Also, as it happens, when you buy a gas range, you’re really supposed to get a “conversion kit” if you’re going to be using, say, Propane gas instead of natural gas. Yeah, seems LP requires a tad more…regulation. When you click that burner on and it sounds like Eddie Murphy’s description of his fathers’ barbeque grill being lit after having been drenched in gasoline  – <HWWOOOOPH!> “NOW THAT’S A FIRE!!!”- you’d think it would register, “OH…it would seem something is a little amiss.” Especially when the flames start shooting out of the oven burners.   Yeah, not good. Something bad. Must fix.

Our vastly overpriced Pottery barn hardware has also arrived - 28 knobs and 15 pulls and the only way I will describe that budget overage is that selling our old refrigerator financed MOST of it.   

This all should be going down on Friday because the cabinet that couldn’t be installed because IT WAS WARPED!! is being delivered Friday as well. Hopefully, the hardware goes in, the cabinetry gets cleaned and we can actually use our kitchen. 

After Friday, then, the only “TO DO” remaining will be the installation of the beadboard panel on the left side of the fridge (the original panel met with a rather unfortunate end when one of the contractors mistook it for the wainscoting we were having installed elsewhere in the kitchen, D’OH!), the subway tile installation and the piece de’resistance the PAINT! 

It’s so hard to gain sympathy when you’re going through 1) self inflicted misery, and 2) you’re coming out the other end with a shiny new kitchen, but if anyone can whine better than can I, I don’t know who that person would be.