The Story of a Kitchen

Obviously, the kitchen was the most, shall we say, distinctive room in the house.

I took this picture at the open house. It's the only one to preserve the memory of Harriet's custom curtains.

It's hard to tell, really, with everything else that's going on here, but this room was also filthy. The cabinets and the molding around the floors were not good. Still, I stood in the kitchen talking to a realtor who clearly was trying zero percent to sell this house - I guess realizing that anyone who wasn't already all in could not be persuaded - and I thought, "this won't be so hard to fix."

It's also worth noting that many weeks later, at the post-offer inspection, I noticed these walls were painted wallpaper. Maybe a little harder than anticipated.

Right after we signed the paperwork, I went to the house and started cleaning. I wiped down all the cabinets inside and out, scrubbed the refrigerator, etc. There was probably not much point to this given that all of the surfaces were going to be replaced, but it made me feel better.

The kitchen was sort of the nerve center for the whole renovation.

At the end of a long day of painting, we decided to see how much trouble it was going to be to pull off the wallpaper. It turned out to be much easier than we anticipated - for the most part, anyway.

Here you see what Harriet was dealing with when she decided a nice pink-orange was the perfect shade for her kitchen.

So, after we got all that wallpaper off, they also came and ripped out the floors, and the whole scene was feeling pretty grim. I had a hard time on this day, having to look at and spend time in this room.

Finally we got the walls in decent enough shape to start painting - and the difference was huge and immediate. It was shocking, actually, to see how suddenly it began to look like a normal place.

And then we started covering up the green and I almost cried with joy.

When you are renovating a house with Ben you don't take shortcuts, so he took all the doors off so we could paint everything properly. I don't even know how many coats were required to cover up the green. At least four, I'm guessing.

Then everything had to be reassembled, which took seven full hours. There are a lot of cabinets in this kitchen.

The range head had been ancient and filthy, and replacing this was also a huge easy way to improve the situation. You can see here how nothing quite lines up properly. This is what we call Character.

I spent a long time scrubbing the kitchen and the appliances once we were done with the paint. I discovered almost everything was in pristine condition - even the cooktop, which is clearly very old, cleaned up to look great.

This was the very first light fixture we replaced in the house.

We ordered new stone countertops from Home Depot, and had to go to a warehouse on the outskirts of town to pick the slab. This was starting to seem real!

Ben also took out the filthy, broken, humongous ceiling fan in favor of a regular boring light fixture.

On moving day, this place was seeming pretty much like a normal room.

Even with the old counters and faucets, I was feeling like I could stand to live here.

A couple weeks after we moved in, it was finally time to have the countertops installed. When we took the old cooktop out, it became apparent why that corner of the kitchen always vaguely smelled like burnt wood. I'm not sure how she would have managed this with an electric stove.

Farewell, ugly thing!

The installation of counters went smoothly, which was somewhat of a shock. When Home Depot came out to do the templating, the guy mentioned that our cabinets were not exactly level, and if the installers deemed the slope too much, we would have to get them leveled (?) and then make another installation appointment. I think we both assumed it was a foregone conclusion that of course it wouldn't work out, but it did.

And they are beautiful.

We still had no gas line so the cooktop wasn't hooked up. But: progress.

A plumber came out and installed the faucet. At this point we were growing tired of doing everything ourselves.  Papaya is a big fan of these countertops.

We got a rug (and some roses from the yard).

And then at long last, after hiring a gas person and also an electrician to get the stovetop set up, we were good to go.

I agonized over curtains for days until I found these. The rod over the window needs to be moved up a few inches, but we'll deal with that some other time.

We have a NORMAL KITCHEN.

Papaya approves.