The Kitchen Sink - Nancy Cech

Years in the making. Hours pondering over door pulls. The debate of top or bottom freezer. A kitchen remodel can take its toll.

It all started when my son and I pulled up to the house and there on the sidewalk was our little apartment stove. Yep, four burners over 20 inches, nobody even has a TV that small anymore. But there it was kicked to the side of the curb. “Whets going on?” my son asks. “Looks like dad started remodeling the kitchen.” I say. Yes we had talked about it for years. Yes there was a gigantic Viking Range in my dining room that has just been waiting for this very day for over a year, draped in a tarp in the effort to pretend there wasn’t a giant stove sitting in the living room for over a year. My son started to cry, he’s only 4 and something is going on with his nest. “Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” I look over and think. Yes, why didn’t we know, but I smile and say “lets go see what daddy’s up to.”

We step inside to a house that is gutted; plastic tarps are stapled to the ceiling creating walls of plastic in an effort to keep the dust in one area of the house. The refrigerator is in the hall; there is no stove, no counter tops, and no kitchen sink. What is there is a kitchen made of foam core. That’s right. A foam core kitchen. Music is blaring and there the boys are, Herb and Bill, creating a fashion mansion kitchen out of cardboard.

The design takes weeks. Bill realizes that the floor isn’t strong enough to handle the weight of the stove so they build a platform for the kitchen. The kitchen is now on a stage, but it works, it sets it off from the rest of the room. I pick out pavers at the tile store. I love the look of old worn Mexican pavers. The clerk says “You know they won’t look like this at first. They don’t have any character out of the box, this takes years of wear. Well unless you’re a bad housekeeper, then they can get like this in months.” Don’t worry I smile. We shop for drawer pulls. How can there be so many choices. There are stores that carry nothing but drawer pulls. Singles are purchased to bring home to mount on the foam core kitchen - trying to imagine what it would be like to open the cabinet every day for the rest of your life using this object. Trips to ikea for cabinet doors, discussions over dishwashers. A fight over me not wanting to spend extra money to have a freezer on the bottom. My desire for a big farm sink despite the fact this kitchen is the size of most peoples bathrooms. This goes on for weeks, months. Bill is doing this job when he has the time. A year goes by. I cook on a camp stove, wash dishes in the bathtub, zap the microwave in the hall.

But when it’s all said and done it is amazing. Every inch well utilized. The drawer pulls just right. I should have gone with the bottom freezer though, I stoop a lot to look into the fridge. My sister comes to visit and asks my son “So what do you think of your new kitchen?” “Well, it’s a step up” he says. She glances over at me with this look on her face that says what a little snot, such a snobby thing to say. And I say “Yes it is a step up, at least 8 inches.” And I step up into the kitchen to turn the stove on for tea.