This morning, I pushed the kitchen table out of the room and arranged the black IKEA chairs by the back door. I squinted at the diagram from the kitchen dude and mapped out the new layout in blue tape on the kitchen floor. I am a little worried that Steve and I are going collide when cooking.
Yes, we're getting a new kitchen. Class marker, alert! And it's a rather large class marker.
When I started this blog four years ago, we lived with a cockroach-ridden, galley kitchen in a four floor walk up. We had made the room slightly more usable by getting two cheap-o cabinets from IKEA and resting a slab of butcher block on top, without any supports or braces. After a while, the whole business began to list to the side. The kitchen was also our laundry room.
Then we bought this fixer-upper by the railroad tracks. Our original
kitchen had two different kinds of brown, floral wallpaper. It had
nasty, colorless linoleum and appliances from the Johnson
administration. It also had rubber, press-on molding. We dealt with
wall paper and the floor with buckets of paint, but we couldn't do much
about the old appliances and the cigarette burns in the Formica counter
top.
The cardboard, drop ceiling is sagging because of a slow water leak from the bathtub upstairs.
So, we're gutting the place in a few months and expanding into the mud room in the back. We're also fixing the adjoining power room, which is actually more god-awful. Press-on tiles and a rusting, metal shower.
We can afford it and, by most standards, this is one ugly kitchen. Still, I am really worried that this is a silly way to spend money. Everything works and there are no bugs. A few years ago, we were really pleased with not having to walk down four flights of stairs to get rid of the garbage. And now, we're shopping for counter depth, stainless steel refrigerators with an ice-maker.
When are they going to offer prizes for the "Most Neurotic Blogger"?
