My kitchen is gone.
A nice man showed up at our door, sat down for a chat, then busted out some power tools and proceeded to beat our kitchen into small chunks.
Then he hauled them off to God knows where. Because we asked him to.
The kitchen remodel we've talked about for over six months is finally rolling and we've finally begun asking ourselves the hard questions:
What do we do with all the crap we keep in the kitchen?
How are we going to eat? Wash dishes?
More to the point, What the hell were we thinking?
I'd had the impression we weren't going to start until the second week of August, so the contractor calling last Friday got me flat footed.
You ready to start on Monday?
Uh…..
How's eight o' clock sound?
Uh…..
I check with E and call him back.
Monday's good.
Okay. See you then. I'll bring paperwork and start the demolition.
Uh….
That was the starting gun for our remodel. True to form I did absolutely nothing for the next six hours.
The word "demolition" stuck in my brain.
He means to break things. Like…our kitchen.
*ZZzzzT!*
Hey! We keep a lot of stuff in our kitchen….
Dramatic music
I like our stuff…
*Cue the camera zoom to my horrified face-*
We have to move our crap out of the kitchen!
AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAH!
---
So we get cracking. Kinda
Saturday, I'd convinced myself that I'd get space ready for storing all the stuff we'd have to move. No sense in moving it all ad hoc. We needed a place to go, then we'd start moving stuff for real.
Some half assed surface clearing later – it becomes evident that this is a very big deal.
Furniture must move. Demo will take place in two rooms, so two rooms will have to be emptied. Our new dining room table is right next to ground zero.
Appliances! Crap, no dishwasher, no stove!
Calm, down – none of this is news, you just-
No dishwasher.
Oh, and all our dishes need to move – and our pots & pans. We have a lot of dishes.
-and pans. And cleaners, and spices, and oven mitts, and produce, and baby bottles and…
Holy crap.
We're gonna need a bigger house.
---
Sunday. We actually don't need a bigger house. We just need more hours in the day. Our house is big enough to absorb all our crap – we just don't have the shelving.
*Light bulb*
So, that's why kitchen have so many cabinets – to hold all that crap!
Lose all your cabinets – you have a massive shortage of surface area to hold things.
Our basement shelves are full to overflowing with kitchen stuff, we have tubs of pots & pans. We don’t go all the way to trash bags, but it’s a very near thing.
At the end of the day we have sore backs, a disaster of a house – and a blessedly empty kitchen.
Until today when the nice man showed up and blew it to kingdom come.
---
I'm still waiting to see what horrors were lurking behind our walls, but we have learned the following:
1) The wiring behind our stove was not up to code, and would never have passed inspection.
2) The trap in our kitchen sink had oxidized to the point where our contractor could (and did) poke a hole in it with his finger.
3) The upstairs tub trap has been leaking for some time and has damaged the drywall
4) The sofits above our kitchen sink contain pipes which will have to be moved to put in cabinets. It will cost extra.
Day one and we've already added $1,500 bucks to the final bill.
It beginning to dawn on me why people hate this kind of stuff.
1 comment:
But it's kind of exciting, too! We can now answer some age-old questions, like,"Can you really bake a cake (or pie!) in a Nesco roaster?" and "Can you use a grill to boil water for pasta?" Something about the whole idea of having the kitchen in the family room just feels like an adventure to me. It's kind of fun trying to work out how to do things.
The dust on the other hand, is Not Fun. I dislike it. But oh, well! The die is cast! (Let the dice fly high?)
Post a Comment