Well, the short version - not dead... - Sherlock

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What I Did this Summer...

I haven't been writing much this summer. Truthfully, I haven't written anything at all. My life for the past three months has been consumed by the most all-encompassing, mentally exhausting, and emotionally draining of first world problems...

Yep...kitchen remodeling...

Our house, and everything in it, turned 25 this year. Though the original hot water heater and furnace keep chugging away long past their life expectancies, the roof had already been replaced (twice!), the front porch rebuilt, and over the past few years the rotting windows, held in place for a few years by tension curtain rods, have all been replaced. I'd replaced drawer glides on some of the kitchen drawers, rebuilt drawer supports, repaired broken doors and retouched ever-fading kitchen cabinet surfaces. Time for a new kitchen...

Like most home improvement projects, the kitchen cabinet replacement grew in scope with every step of the planning. New cabinets meant, of course, new sink, new faucet, new microwave and new countertops. (Our appliances had already been replaced in the past few years.) Said kitchen was also surrounded by equally old vinyl flooring which snaked into the front hallway, powder room, laundry room and family room. Here, a large chunk of it had been removed years earlier during the replacement of the sliding glass doors and was successfully hidden under some carpet runner that had been cut to fit over what was now bare underlayment. As such visually neat fixes often do, it made us completely forget there was a major gap in our flooring. But when we forced ourselves to acknowledge the hole under our feet, kitchen remodeling now included a large area of new flooring which then somehow made the installation of a new toilet and new faucet in the powder room make sense...

Kitchen cabinet selection was relatively easy. We worked with a great craftsman who steered us toward a selection of beautiful styles of cabinetry. But what color? Our first challenge was to find a floor and cabinet color that would not do outright battle with the wood windows I had over-zealously stained some years before in what could only be called a shade of “aggressive maple”. Twelve stain swatches later, I decided on a warm shade of light maple that seemed to make peace between the window and trim color and the wood grain of the new vinyl plank floor. It would look absolutely beautiful on the cabinets but, as I was later to find, would make the choosing of backsplash tile almost impossible, “warm shade of light maple” not being a trending color. (My physiologically color blind husband begs out of all decisions involving color selection, which he finds “confusing”. I promised him the cabinets wouldn't be “hot pink”, which is how he perceives some of the grayer neutrals...)

Then there was cabinet hardware selection, bought and returned multiple times for multiple reasons. Styles we liked didn't fit the drawers. Styles that did never seemed to be stocked in quantities enough for all the cabinets, and any additional ones ordered ran the risk of having slightly different finishes. We found that kitchen sink drains have migrated off-center over the years, making it difficult to find a simple stainless steel sink that didn't require major replumbing to hook it up. Styles of faucets, kitchen and bath, are always changing, and we threw caution to the wind and bought the latest and the greatest in faucets, which were actually both a fun and functional improvement over our old ones.

The weeks of actual renovation were “inconvenient”, but only for us spoiled first world inhabitants who feel periodically having to wash dishes in a small powder room sink was “roughing it” and having no microwave, “primitive”. The days without a stove meant eating out, not really a hardship with Culver's just around the corner. A temporary countertop came and went, a temporary sink came and went. And then the new countertop decision. Formica or granite? The prices of each had been growing closer over recent years so we went with the granite. This decision led to what I can only describe as an opportunity for me to get in touch with my sin nature (but that's another blog post). The countertop had been installed with a shallow, four foot scratch in a very visible area. The granite people came back, in not a timely manner, to buff out the scratch, leaving a four foot smeared section in the otherwise reflective surface of the granite. Weeks and many phone calls later, the granite people returned, cut out the marred section of countertop and replaced it with a “cousin” slab of the same section of granite.

I was going to wait to start writing again when the Great Summer Project was completed, but it's the beginning of October, and I still don't see an end in sight. The new kitchen is functional, looks great, but I'm still waiting – for months now - to get an estimate on installing a tile backsplash. (Tilers must be the busiest tradesmen in the remodeling business, judging from the difficulty they have in finding time to schedule estimates and jobs. Want to learn a trade that will keep you gainfully employed? Become a tiler.) And the tile stores are full of tile samples, none of which play nicely with that warm shade of light maple of my cabinets. (It's a yellow/gray trending color palette out there at present. White and black are starting to look like real color options to me at the moment.) But, with only a hope of having a backsplash by Thanksgiving, or maybe Christmas, I'm declaring the Great Summer Project done. I'm back writing...

Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.

- Barbara Johnson