As most of you know, we purchased a house exactly 3 years ago. Those of you who have seen this house probably noticed that it is rather classy, except for the neglected 1970s kitchen. Now, I have to give our previous homeowners props for attempting to update it...they replaced whatever wondrous flooring may have come with the home with some cheap pink tile. Then they had the brilliant idea to paint the inner kitchen wall blood red. Or, when blood red is paired with pink tile, the resulting color is hot pink. So...yeah. They tried. Oh, did I mention the cheap, laminate counter tops are pink as well? Like baby pink. And it's peeling.
The kitchen layout is open, spacious, and other than that, kind of unusable. It is enclosed from the living room and dining room so at parties everyone is segregated; the cabinets are custom plywood with no adjustable shelving so we've resorted to putting odd-shaped, modern cooking ware on top of the cabinets; and it came with the original doorknobs which are engraved with buffalo. These are rather endearing items and we are brainstorming a way to keep them active in our post-remodel decor.
And here are some pictures to give you visuals for the story.
Now most of you know that we have resolved to fix this once and for all. So, without further ado, I give you the first day of
Kitchen Re-Creation.
We had deliberated for about 1 1/2 years on what to do with the cabinets. Long story short: we decided to get new ones. As Mark kindly put it 'painting the damn things won't fix the fact that they're completely non-functional'. Well put, good sir. After briefly pricing the crap at Lowe's and Home Depot, we decided to order cabinets through IKEA. Which is where our story really begins.
Sunday, October 4, 2009: We climbed the IKEA escalator to the showroom labyrinth, a 20x20 slab of porcelain tile to match with a veneer color as our only weapon of reason. Lucky for us, we hit the 10% off cabinets sale. Good. The savings will pay for a real kitchen table after the remodel.
Finding solace in the tile choice and changing our cabinet colors back to our original color from 3 months ago, we placed the order. Then the stress hit. It wasn't the credit card receipt (REI dividend, baby!!!) that did us in but the fact that we don't own a truck and we were going to have carloads of cabinet pieces in an hour.
After sitting in the furniture pick-up lobby raking our brains of who could come help us drive a carload of majestically flat boxes back to our place, Mark had an epiphany: He works as a delivery truck driver. He has keys and access to a box truck. Brilliant. A little late, but brilliant.
An hour later, we made it back to IKEA, and after procedural mayhem, the truck was loaded.
Well now, this is just too convenient having a box truck around on a weekend. So we headed over to Home Depot and picked up sheet rock and lumber for the fireplace (which deserves a few posts of its own so just hang on to your panties, folks).
In summary: Beer truck saved the day. And this weekend, if anyone wants an upper body workout, come on over. We have cabinets to tear out and install.
