| Sunday, June 6, 2004 |
21:17 - Expensive week
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So this past week, short as it was, marked the doing-at-last of a piece of renovation that the house has demanded for more than a year.
Hint: It's what Stephen Green is also doing right now, though it certainly sounds as thought my HELOC (which I got as a standard part of my mortgage, through E*Trade Mortgage, a company that—judging by Green's horror story—I now realize is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend) has involved a whole lot less heartache.
The only kind I have is the kind that accompanies a near-depleted bank account. But ah well. It was worth it.
Here's why:
 
That's what the kitchen looked like upon move-in, one year ago. Who in Almighty Bob's name thought a light blue kitchen could possibly serve any purpose but to nauseate its occupants?
Right away we knew it needed to go, somehow, fast. So we took off all the doors and drawers and painted the cabinets green, and there it sat for a year. Sure, it was less than convenient, and not a little ugly. But the horror of the memory of the blue cabinets was enough to make it worth it.
  
But now those are just "before" pictures. Behold the finished (well, almost) product!
  
I swear, it's like being on a different planet, especially after a year of the green door-less cabinet skeleton.
Remaining work includes: repairing the jagged edge of the countertop tile above the dishwasher (we had to break the edge to get the machine into place, as it was just a mite too tall to squeeze in on top of the hardwood floor and under the tile lip); some final baseboard sanding and painting; and this:
When this is all done, it'll have a butcher-block countertop, a mirror (or mirror-tile) back face and sides, and a wine-glass rack attached between the hanging cabinets. True, it doesn't provide as much storage space as the pantry which used to inhabit this nook; but it'll hold lots of 2-liter bottles, and frankly we need the liquor-cabinet configuration a lot more than we need dry-goods storage space (especially if we manage to keep ourselves from accumulating crap we don't need).
It's a small kitchen, but that just means we get the fun of working in a space budget. And now it can hardly be said that this kitchen is an unpleasant place to be, eh?
Ow... my wallet hurts.
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Brian Tiemann
