Muddling Through Midlife: Itchin' for a Kitchen (Remodel)

“On this day, 15 years ago,” a Facebook memory reminded me on Jan. 22, I had shared my status of “is excited to see her countertops go in today!” (Sorry, I used to post in third person for some reason.)

I screenshotted the memory and texted it to Josh.

“Would that make remodeling a kitchen a 15-year itch for you?” he replied.

Ha! As if I would ever remodel the gorgeous kitchen we created out of a gigantic dining room/bedroom in the George Street house! (see photo at the end of this post)

No, dear friends, in my blogging silence over the past three years, Josh and I sold the beautiful 1921 foursquare we had completely renovated and maximized every square inch of, including the murder basement transformation of 2018, and we have moved to a lovely but kind of dated 1991 home on the other side of town. (The side without hypodermic needles in the gutters and adults who threaten to beat up 9-year-olds. Not their own 9-year-olds, mind you, but other people’s children. Though I suppose it doesn’t matter whose kids they are threatening to beat up — you get the point.)

Josh and I toured more than a dozen homes over the four years leading up to the sale, and made offers on two that we got outbid on. We even courted the owners of a GIGANTIC HISTORIC HOME that I was gaga over because it was actually two semi-attached houses that someone had combined into one mammoth home decades ago, and had two of everything: two front living rooms, two dining rooms, TWO KITCHENS (the owner was fabulous, she walked us through and when she explained that one was her everyday kitchen and the other was her PROJECT kitchen, I nearly swooned). The house was a full four floors and completely like something out of a British novel about orphaned children who go to live with a mysterious aunt and uncle in Westminster that they had never met before… but I digress. The home had no central air, a heating bill four times higher than we were used to, about 3,000 square feet more than we needed, and owners who thought they could get $200,000 more for the home than they eventually did, after we bought our house. It was the right decision to not pursue it, but boy would I have liked the opportunity to combine those two kitchens into a mega kitchen that would have measured 20 by 40 feet!

Back to our new west side home. At the time that we toured our new house, we determined the 30-year-old kitchen was definitely ready for a remodel and that the flow of the first floor could be greatly improved. Josh made me promise to give it a year or two before we rushed into a major renovation, but when we hit the 20-month-mark in August, I started asking for a timetable of when we could start. At first I pushed for Summer of 2024, but then I realized that meant the kids and I would be home a ton and in the way and without the use of most of our first floor, so I pushed it back to April. Josh sort of went into panic mode, but after talking with our friend who is going to help us, it sounds like he will be available during the end of April, so it is a compromise.

In those 20 months, I was able to put to words what it is that really bothers me about the existing U-shaped kitchen: we’re all in each other’s way. I may be the only cook, but we have four eaters and as 3-day-a-week homeschoolers who are home 5 days a week instead of 2 days a week like most families, one of the four of us is always eating, or preparing food, or trying to empty the dishwasher while someone else is trying to reach the tea in the cabinet blocked by the dishwasher door when its open, etc. We also have two blind corner cabinets, with only one, long but skinny shelf in them, so only about the first 18 inches of the 42-inch deep cabinet is actually useful. These two cabinets make up 84 inches of our storage space and they are only mildly functional!

Another weird aspect that might not bother some people is that we have this really big deck off of the dining room, but the way to access it is through the great room, which means you have to do a big C around the kitchen peninsula and through the great room to get to that door. Clearly not the end of the world, but say you’re having people over and grilling: there are a bunch of back and forth trips around the two rooms for all the plates and sauces and washing of hands and tools, and the guests who are lingering in the kitchen can’t see me or help open the door or even realize that’s where I went sometimes.

After several plans were thought up, a few drawn up on graph paper, and even a walk through of a neighbor’s remodeled kitchen of the same house model we have, Josh and I feel that the idea we had during our first walk through of the house when it was on the market is still the best floorplan change. I did the timetable walking backwards from April, and determined that meant we need to order cabinets in February, which meant we should have all of January to ruminate on a formalized plan and specifics before we order, which meant we needed to meet with our kitchen designer in December. And so we did, on Dec. 7! But this blog post is long enough, so I will pick up there in my next posting!!

We said goodbye to this kitchen: