Hammered and Nailed #14 -- Curtain comes down on kitchen project

   This week marks five months since contractors sealed off our kitchen and began ripping out and remodeling.

     Now, at last, they are finally done—or at least what we consider "done," undeterred by the fact that they are still here, from time to time, and still working.     

     But there are a few tasks ahead—an electrical outlet that doesn't provide electricity, a molding and wall to be painted, a threshold to be sealed—quite a lot, really, yet not enough to counterbalance our fierce, burning, animal passion to have this thing really finished.     

     Just as a hotel will conduct its opening ceremony and let guests check in, even as workers are still tacking down carpet in the lobby, so we're dusting our hands and calling it finito.     

     That said, one task remains: the credit. That might sound odd, but, quiveringly aware of the grunting boorishness of the average suburban homeowner, I have made a point to try to thank people, and this is my chance. If my kitchen were a stage play—and at times it seems that way, something by Ibsen or O'Neill, with lots of shouting and jolting truths uncovered—then the curtain cannot be rung down without the actors, who worked so hard for so long, returning to the stage to take their bows. As with the theater, we'll run them out in reverse order of their centrality to the plot.

     First onto the stage, someone whose appearance was buried in Act One, almost two years ago, is Susan Regan, the Evanston architect we hired to design the kitchen. She offered much insight, such as pointing out we probably didn't want to put the oven where its door would swing open to block the kitchen entrance.

     She curtsies, and gives way to Arne Aabey, our cabinet guy at Home Depot, who handled the numerous cabinet crises—both their fault and ours—with  aplomb. He does one of those quick head dips, and turns away.

     From the left wing comes our appliance guy from Abt—which is a name, it can't be pointed out too many times, not an abbreviation—and from the right, the electrician from Able Electronics. I fumble through the program for their names but give up and return to clapping.     

      They bow, part, take their places stage left and stage right, and are replaced by Jay Sackett, of RocheBelle, the stone company, who babysat us during the excruciating process of picking the three most lush elements of our kitchen—the slate floors, granite countertops and limestone backsplash, handling the transaction with far more tenderness than a person would expect from one's brother-in-law. ("Your brother-in-law is Jay Sackett?" a contractor once said to me, eyes wide in wonder. "He is a god, a god of stone!")     

      Jay is joined by Krasimir Armeykov, of Exotic Marble and Tile, the company that fabricated and installed the stone. The applause swells here, since the stone work was perfect—a word not heard much when the subject is remodeling. Armeykov spent several days painstakingly installing the thousands of little 7/8th-inch square tiles, with the quiet air of a piano tuner. Not one tile was  crooked. He did much to redeem the former Soviet bloc in my eyes, and, after he finished, came over for a solemn handshake that spoke of that elusive quality in this country: pride in workmanship.     

      Then, the stars. Out comes the trio from AMV General Contractors—Lynn Hildred, Marine trim, with his shaved head and his unlit stub of a cigar clenched between his teeth; then Matt O'Connor, tall and smiling, and, of course, the boss, Tom Mulcrone, big and bearded, looking to me vaguely like a Biblical prophet, though unfailingly polite, even when he and my wife were arm-wrestling over the bill. These guys were not only good, but we liked them, which I am told has never happened in the history of home repair.     

      The three join hands ("Eee-yew!" they're saying, squirming in their enormous, well-maintained South Side homes—one of the drawbacks of finding yourself in somebody's fantasy sequence) and bow deeply as the audience begins standing up.     

      The guys turn and fling their arms downstage, in a gesture of welcome, as, beaming, her arms laden with roses, my wife, Edie, sweeps forward—heck, let's put her in a gown and a tiara with a neck full of Harry Winston gems—who oversaw the year of preparation and six months of construction, who listened to my Howard Beale-like rants, and nevertheless pulled it all together into something beautiful.     

      The audience is roaring and  whistling. Edie does one of those dainty Shakespearian flourishes—a very Gwyneth Paltrow gesture—as the ensemble, exchanging glances, bows as one.         

      Someone in the audience cries "author, author!" and, feigning modesty, I allow myself to rise from my seat and jog happily up the aisle where, as the guy who bored you with all this for the past year and, more importantly, paid for the thing, or at least will, in about 20 years, I take my bow. The audience falls to a hush, and I make the obligatory pompous speech:     

      "If a house is a stage where we live our lives, then the kitchen is center stage in our domestic dramas," I begin. "And just as we expect a proper frame--this proscenium arch, these red velvet curtains--in the theater, so it's important to give the scenery of our lives as much pizzazz as we can. I am no better a person now than I was three years ago, when we stood in the ruined, warping hellhole of a kitchen of the house we bought and pondered how in God's name we could fix it. But we did, together. Now, grabbing tea from these maple cabinets, heating the water on this mighty Wolf stove, placing my palms on the cool countertops while it boils, I feel better, finer, and more worthy than I would in a crappy kitchen. And that's what home remodeling is all about."     

     The cheers erupt.     

      "Yes, the play of life is fleeting. Just as my wife and I stood in this kitchen, pitying the aged couple we were buying the home from, so we will someday stand in our own decaying kitchen, 25 years hence, our children grown and fled while we face life in some grim, ammonia-scented senior facility, and be in turn pitied by some smug young couple who eye our kitchen, gagging, and think 'Stainless steel? What kind of people bought appliances made of stainless steel?'"     

     And here, a ripple of laughter.     

    "That is inevitable, and the way of the world. All we can do is enjoy our moments between then and now, moments which will be enhanced by this swell kitchen, and warmed by the memories of the struggle to make it  real, and all the good work of all these professionals around me. Thanks to all of them, especially my wife, and to all of you out there in newspaperland. I hope you have enjoyed yourselves."     

      We step back, the curtain drops, and our remodeling drama comes to an end.

                                   —Originally published May 18, 2003  

Hammered and Nailed #13: Burned in the kitchen

     As always, when I returned from vacation last week, just before our car made the turn onto Walters Avenue, I conjured up the mental image of the smoking rubble of my home--the smoldering foundation stones--trying to brace myself for my worst fears being realized.

      Nope, there it was, roofline intact. Not only that but, trooping inside, we found that the workmen had crept in while we were gone, and installed the kitchen sink, a large, stainless steel bassinet without a divider of any sort (myself, I would have had one of those smaller produce sinks, set into the main sink, because they are useful and look cool. But my wife trumped me and, having scraped my share of big greasy pots into too-small half sinks, I saw her point. But I digress . . .)  

     I turned on the water. It flowed out. My wife and I looked at each other, smiling mightily. Progress, true progress! The pleasure lasted for all of two seconds. My smile froze as the whooshing sound of the water flowing into the sink was joined by another, fainter but unmistakable sound: water dripping, dribbling really, not into the sink, but under it.

     I shut off the water. I opened the cabinet under the sink. Water was cascading down, pooling inside the natural maple cabinet, seeping through pipe holes, gathering on the floor. Already, a puddle began at our feet and snuck under the cabinets. We scurried for towels.

     That sort of one-step-forward, one-step-back is an apt introduction to the start of the fifth month since work commenced on our new kitchen. Without a doubt, progress has been made--the stove, sink, dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer (in the laundry room off the kitchen) are all installed.

     But each step forward is attended with its own crisis--from the sink emptying out onto the floor (a leaky hose, which was repaired), to the stove and its anti-tip device not being installed (we decided to forget about it--our parents lived without anti-tip devices; then again, our parents lived without industrial stoves). The washing machine vibrated like a paint mixer (one of the bolts used to secure the drum for delivery left on) and the dishwasher didn't work at all (a wire jiggled loose).

    Our present, there-but-not-quite-there condition keeps reminding me of one of Zeno's paradoxes, and since this no doubt marks the debut of that ancient Greek mathematician in the Homelife section, I should probably explain:

     Zeno left several puzzles that have occupied philosophers for generations. One is a race between Achilles and a tortoise. To make the race fair, the tortoise, being slower than the mythological hero, is given a head start--say 50 meters, or rods, or whatever they used back then.

     Zeno claimed that Achilles, swift of foot though he may be, will never catch the tortoise, since by the time he reaches where the animal started, it has moved on, albeit sluggishly. And when Achilles reaches that second point, the tortoise will have again moved farther, and so on, the tortoise always remaining a hair, or a fraction of a hair, ahead.

     That's where we are now, kitchenwise. Every day, it seems, the workers finish half the work that remains--trim, knobs, hardware, appliances. The next day--or whenever they come again--they do another half of the remaining work. And then another.

     The amount of work left dwindles, but remains. Progress is constant, yet not only don't I see them finishing anytime soon, I can more easily conjure up a Twilight Zone hell of work continuing forever (perhaps, to continue with the classical allusions, it would be better to evoke, not Zeno's paradox, but Penelope at the loom in the Odyssey, the progress of the day unmade every night or, in the case of the kitchen, progress forward perfectly counterbalanced by new problems uncovered).

      There have been milestones, which I should mention, lest this column become an unrelieved catalogue of woe. We cooked something on the stove--on April 1, history should note. My wife, only the night before, had announced that she would wait, until everything was complete, then stand back in a shimmering moment of cleanliness and perfection, and only then cook something.

     I almost pointed out that I had thought the same thing about the bathroom, then gave it up and joyfully took a shower before it was done. But events proved this for me. The very next morning, our oldest boy expressed a desire for Rocky Mountain toast, and we snapped into action as only people who have not eaten a hot egg in four months can.

     Suddenly I was rummaging through dusty boxes in the basement, searching for a pan, while my wife cleaned away construction debris upstairs. Of course there was a setback. The plastic wrap used to protect the stainless steel of the mighty Wolf could not simply be peeled back. That would be too easy. No, it had been applied by some kind of pernicious cement that could only be removed, it at first seemed, by vigorous rubbing with the pad of my thumb, labor that I'd still be at had not my wife come up with a bottle of stainless steel cleaner.

     Finally, glue banished, we stood around the stove. I reached for one of the massive red knobs, gave a twist, and a burner ka-fwumped into life with a sound like the Hindenburg going up.

    That wasn't the highlight, however. As satisfying as it was to enjoy the first cooked egg served in our home since Pearl Harbor Day, even more--infinitely more--satisfying was to take the plate (an actual plate, itself a rarity, as opposed to paper) befouled with egg yolk and bread crumbs and red splatters of Tabasco sauce, and set it in the sink, then wash away the mess with a gushing river of water, none of which ended up on the kitchen floor.

                                 —Originally published April 13, 2003

Hammered and Nailed #12: Missing safety strip could tip sanity scale

     'Step on the oven door," my wife said. I looked at her, blankly incredulous. We were standing in front of the mighty Wolf stove, in our nearly-but-not-quite-yet-completed kitchen. The stove was brand new, finally in place and hooked up to gas.

     I had just turned one of the deep red knobs and fired up one of the awesome 16,000 BTU burners, which ignited with a dull "whump," like a gas refinery exploding, and burned like a dozen blow torches until my wife pointed out that there was still plastic wrap around the vent hood, and it was beginning to curl up in the heat. I shut the burner off.

     "I'm not stepping on the oven door," I said, regarding her, our faces inches apart, practically in the oven. "I don't care if it's designed to be stepped on. I don't care if it's a trampoline. I'm not stepping on it."

     This discussion originated over something called an "anti-tip device." An anti-tip device is a long metal bar--think of a black steel ruler bent in half along the length. It is designed to screw into the wall and, apparently, keep the oven from tipping over if a full-grown man steps on the door and hops up and down while it is open.

     Now I have never, ever, in 35 years of reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV 24 hours a day, ever heard of anyone, ever, being crushed to death by a stove. My boys are capable of spectacular acts of folly, to be sure, but even they would not bounce on the open oven door and topple it over on themselves. 
     Would they?

     We had just spent a few desultory minutes with the fabled Tom and his crew. The kitchen was nearly done. Several guys whipped out cameras and were taking photos--for a second, I thought it was for insurance purposes, for the lawsuits certain to come. But then I pondered it further and realized they were proud, and wanted to document their work before my family and I got our meat hooks into it and ruined it.

     Now they were gone. My wife had noticed the enormous yellow warning sticker on the stove, advising you to install the anti-tip device before you even dream of using it. Which led her to look for said device and find it, wrapped in plastic, still inside the oven. Overlooked.

      The guys were gone. They wouldn't be back until the stone men had been there, installing our peacock verde bullnose granite countertops. Countertops, it seemed clear to me, that would be wrecked by dragging the stove back out to install the anti-tip device.

     "Maybe," I told her, "you can get the counter guys to install the anti-tip device." She looked at me as if I were an idiot, which perhaps I am.

     "The countertop people aren't going to touch the stove," she said. "I'll be lucky if they speak English. I'll call Tom."

     So a desperate call was placed. I left for work. Somebody has to pay for all this. Eventually my wife called me. The entire thing was moot, she said, because she realized that, if dragging the stove back to put in the anti-tip device had any effect, it would merely scratch the stone and the stainless facing each other, which would be hidden when the stove was shoved back.

     That sounded optimistic to me. I pictured the stove, being moved back by sweating peons, somehow skewing, a corner of the battleship plate metal rising above the counter as they muscled it out, then coming crashing down upon the granite. The stone, quarried in Brazil (or China, or the Moon, or whatever exotic spot it hails from) shattering with a sickening crack. "We're sorry," the stone guys will say, shrugging, "but that was the last slab. You'll have to demolish your entire kitchen a second time and begin again . . ."

     I got a good grip on the Wolf and tipped it--which was rather like trying to tackle a mailbox. But it did move a bit. "Install the device," I said. But as the day progressed, I had second thoughts. We had already vowed that we--unlike our parents--would move our stove and refrigerator back once a year and clean behind them. No more dust logs.

     I called my wife, poised to say, "Tuck the device away--it's insurance we'll pull the stove back in a year. We can install it then."

     "I called Tom and apologized," she said. "I hope you don't mind, but I blamed you, 'My husband is crazed about safety,' I said.'"

     That was a lie, of course, but so unmoored are we, I didn't particularly mind. I was more concerned about the counters--so they were in. This was a week ago Friday.

     "They're in," my wife said.

     "And . . . ." I asked, like a new dad, asking for the gender of the baby.

     A pause.

     "They're very dark," she slowly said.

     "Dark?" I asked.

     "Dark," she said. "Almost black."

     "Black?" I said. "I thought they were supposed to be green."

     "They are green," she said. "But they look black.'

     "Maybe it's too dim," I said. "They'll look green in the light."

     "No," she said. "It's sunny. They're green. But they look black."

     "Bad black?" I asked. "Too black?"

      "No," she said. "They're beautiful. You'll love them."

      I'm not sure if that was a prediction or a command. But as soon as I'm done typing these words, I'm hurrying home to take a look. Probably I will love them because, really, what choice do I have at this point?
               —Originally published March 30, 2003 

Hammered and Nailed #11: The Knob Odyssey

     During our first year in the house, we slept on a mattress on the floor, using cardboard boxes as dressers, while searching for a bedroom set we both liked and could afford. The overall rat's-nest effect was not pretty. "We live like drug addicts," I told my wife, "without the benefit of drugs."

      That phrase returned to me this week, as we marked the third month since workmen arrived and sealed off our kitchen. Things are starting to fall apart. The dining room looks like those rooms in homes where a tornado has taken off one wall--a jumble of boxes and dirty dishes and plastic bread bags and clutter. We've stopped taking things that don't absolutely have to be refrigerated to the refrigerator in the basement, 19 steps away. I don't know what happens to natural peanut butter when it goes bad, but I have a hunch we're going to find out.

     I almost wrote that work has been going on "three months, with no end in sight," but the truth is worse than that. The end is in sight, right there, tantalizingly close, like a platter of food left just out of reach of a prisoner starving to death. The cabinets are in. They look great. The appliances are in, if not quite in their proper spots. The mighty Wolf stove looks fantastic--I've never been so happy to toss money away on extravagance--sitting in the middle of the kitchen, like a god.

     It seemed as if everything was about to wind up. A week, maybe two. Then it didn't. The workmen stopped coming. ("There isn't enough for them to do," my wife said, and I made a little guttural animal noise and swept my hand toward the unfinished kitchen).

     We're waiting--for the granite countertops, which should be ready any day, unless of course they're not. For the frame that was supposed to arrive with the window, but didn't. And for the knobs . . .

     Cabinets need knobs--drawer handles, something. We've known for months that, at some point, we'd have to pick out knobs, but we were in denial. We just didn't do it. Now, having gone looking at knobs, I know why. There are a million kinds of knobs--no, a million billion zillion--made from every material known to man. Wood, stone, ceramic, metals from gold to iron.

   We were in this one store, Designer Kitchen Something on Touhy, that must have had 2,000 knobs on display, and my wife spent so much time looking at them I considered slumping to the floor and dying of exhaustion and hopelessness.

     Knobs also cost a bundle--who knew?--and since we need 37 of them, for our various drawers and cabinets (and that's with deciding that the 14 top glass cabinets won't need knobs, since we're not using them except to display all the expensive stuff we got for our wedding and never use because it's too nice to be pawed over by the likes of us and our friends) every dollar spent on a better knob is multiplied by 37.

     I would have happily bought 37 of the brushed nickel football shapes that Home Depot was offering for $3.99 a crack. But no. The search--through numerous stores, in the suburbs and city--reminded me of the hunt for an engagement ring, when my wife-to-be, in what would enter family lore, managed to visit every single jewelry store in the city of Chicago, examining every single ring set, at least in my perception.

     I had only two convictions, knobwise. First, nothing cute. No tiny forks and spoons as drawer handles, no sunflowers, no teddy bears. Cute, I learned long ago, is what you get sick of before the cashier finishes ringing up the sale. And second, no new colors. My wife was ogling some copper knobs, which were indeed quite pretty, but since nothing else in the kitchen is copper, I put the kibosh on them. Maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part.

     Now that I begin to set it down, the Knob Odyssey is actually too lengthy and involved to present in a column--it would fit better in a Moby-Dick sized novel. Though I feel bad withholding my racing to Home Depot to beg a clerk to unscrew a certain handle from the display so my wife could see it in situ in our kitchen. He did, charging me $50 ransom to guarantee I'd bring it back, a figure that is not really all that Draconian, since the handle itself costs $20 (and $20 x 37 is. . . .)

     There was one bit of progress this past week, which I almost blocked out for reasons that will become clear. The lights were hooked up. Installed by a crew of extremely malodorous Russian electricians, who followed another Slavic crew (apparently, only Russians are allowed in the electrical trades in Chicago) who installed the countless electrical outlets that Northbrook code requires.

     They did the typical fumble-thumbed, fine-for-Smolyensk-but-not-so-hot-here job. The electrical outlets don't all match—they're different types, as if they grabbed whatever was handy. Not a big deal, but when you're pauperizing yourself you tend to notice these things. And worse, to me, the light switches don't toggle the same way. Meaning, that on the pair of switches by the door, toggling one up turns a set of lights ON while toggling the one next to it up turns its lights OFF.

     "They've got to change that," I said to my wife, my eyes watering from all the BO that had been vented into the kitchen like radiation off Chernobyl. I actually worried that we wouldn't be able to eat there—that the smell of armpits that haven't been washed since Gorbachev retired would corrode the stainless steel and seep into the crevices. We'd have to have the place fumigated.

     "You should have smelled the other crew," my wife said, in the flat, 9-yard-stare tone we use now to discuss kitchen matters. "They were worse."

     So there's where we are now. Plagued by body odor and near enough to the end that at first, giddy with optimism, I predicted completion in two weeks. Now I'm thinking more like two months. Maybe.
                                        —Originally published March 16, 2003 

Hammered and Nailed #10: Writer may be done (in) before kitchen

     After I am found crouched, naked and screeching, clawing at my face in the ruins of our shattered kitchen, which I've broken apart with the same axe I've just used to murder my family, investigators will no doubt pore over this column for subtle signs of impending breakdown.

        "Of course it's plain in retrospect," a solemn Northbrook police official will intone, trying to suppress his pleasure at doing a real news conference, as the TV stations run, again and again, that same five-second clip of me being manhandled into the back of a van by six sheriff's deputies, looking very much like Quasimodo tied to the whipping post.

      You see, the kitchen ...

      No, no, I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet. A bit of background first. If you remember, two weeks ago, our contractor had begun putting up our beautiful maple cabinetry, only to find the main cabinets were too short, by 10 and 3/4 inches. Quite a lot, really.

     We left off just as the home improvement store was being big-hearted about correcting the error they had inflicted upon us, and I was grateful to have the problem remedied with only an additional two-week delay

     So, mirabile dictu, the cabinets, Round Two, actually arrive when the store says it will. They start to go up and, over the weekend, my wife and I—again—re-enact those mutual fund TV commercials where the young couple stands in the construction site, making goo-goo eyes at each other and marveling at the progress of the work. Except, of course, we are middle-aged and our kitchen isn't the Taj Mahal Kitchen those TV couples always build, despite being about 22 years old.

     Anyway, we're standing in the dim kitchen, on the thick rose-colored paper protecting our slate floors. And the thing seems like it's getting DONE. Yes, I just wrote about how it is disastrous to be optimistic, to even for a moment let yourself think, "Smooth sailing . . ." 
     But still, I mean, it isn't as if the cabinets could be screwed up TWICE, right? I mean, it couldn't happen AGAIN. That's impossible. Right?

      Ah, hahahahahahaha . . .

      It was about 11:20 a.m., Monday. I was working upstairs. It was Presidents Day, no need to go downtown to work. I had started the day working on my own overdue work, when work called with some work work I needed to work on immediately (cue the guys from "Monty Python," chanting "work work work work" and you will begin to understand the tenor of my life).

     Our two boys, joined by two additional boys called up by my wife from Central Casting, as if we didn't already have boys aplenty, tore around the house awhile until, finally, my wife herded the bunch out to an animal show (talk about coals to Newcastle). There was a moment of hot coffee and quiet, the kind of "ahhh" moment when people whose lives aren't a skidding train wreck from hell can sit back and think "Life is good."

     I sipped the coffee, sat back, and got as far as "Life is . . ." when a voice called from downstairs. The workmen beckoned me into the kitchen. I wish I could quote them verbatim, but here my memory blurs, rather like the drug scene from "Easy Rider," all solarized close-ups of mouths moving in slo-motion and screeching bad trip music.

      The gist was: The cabinets were wrong again. Not too tall. Give the store points for variety. Now they were . . . everyone shout it together: too WIDE! And not all of them. Just one little cabinet, about the size of a bread box, that is supposed to sit way up, by the ceiling, where one wall meets the other.

     Too wide. By an inch and a quarter.

     They said this would stop things cold. I mumbled something like, "Um, can't you put in the rest of the cabinets while we figure this out?" and the answer, again approximating for shock, was something like, "Gosh, Mr. Steinberg, this is the centralo-keystone cabinet. All the others line up against it. And the lower cabinets, if we put them in first, our ladders would grind them to flinders when we put in the uppers."

     I don't think I pressed my palms tight against my ears and fled, but I did walk out of the kitchen saying, "Let's wait for my wife to get back."

     One thing I'm certain of is it's not our fault. I doubt we said, "And this cabinet--the tiny one that goes up by the ceiling. Make it an inch and a quarter too big."      

     So now, with the column due, we're in limbo. The store said a more involved version of "Tough." We considered a series of nonsensical solutions. My wife giddily ushered me into the kitchen. "See," she announced, her eyes glittering, "we can put a wine rack there. No need for a cabinet. Sure, it'll be odd to have wine bottles near the ceiling, where the heat rises, but nobody will notice." I suggested a stereo speaker, a granite cornerstone, and other DOA ideas that would also look horrible.

     Our only hope is that our contractor, Tom the Flexible, can cut down the cabinet with sufficient finesse so that the result won't haunt us for the rest of our lives. "Ooh, nice kitchen. And what a funny little trapezoidal cabinet!"

      You know, when construction began on the kitchen, on Dec. 9, I knew the work wouldn't be done on schedule, by Jan. 31, but I figured, it would be done by spring. Now I'm not so sure about that. What I am sure about is, the way we're going, that I'll be done long before spring. Done as in "finished. Kaput." Let this be a public warning.
                                                     —Originally published February 23, 2003 

Hammered and Nailed -- #9: Kitchen a recipe for disaster

     Bob Schmitt built the suburban tract house where I grew up. It might seem odd to know his name, but Bob Schmitt Builders built everybody's house—all the houses on our cul-de-sac, all the houses for blocks around. The Bob Schmitt houses were all similar, alarmingly so. Modest, rectangular shoeboxes. In later years, Bob Schmitt built fancier developments, with fancier homes, including his own monster tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, straddling an artificial waterfall. We'd ride our bikes over to goggle at it. 

     But in my neighborhood, it was a constant variation on a theme, and that theme was just-enough-and-no-more. The dining room was a bulge on the living room. The kitchen was a brief hall with appliances--a "galley kitchen." Sometimes the garage was on the left, sometimes on the right, and the rest of the features were reversed, as if Bob Schmitt (somehow, his two names are fused together in my mind) printed his blueprints on clear plastic and, every other house, flipped them over. It was disconcerting to step into a neighbor's house—something I did a lot, as a paperboy—and see your own home, in reverse.      
     My father watched our house being built, on his lunch hour, and at times had to intercede, such as when they put the roof on wrong, and had to tear it off and put it back the right way. This sort of thing instilled in my father a certain disdain for the quality of the construction. "If there's ever a fire," he'd tell us, years later, "kick your way through the wall and run out." The materials certainly weren't fancy—rough cedar boards, outside, set on a concrete slab base. Inside, gray Armstrong tiles and a ceiling of raised white points that would take your skin off if you ran your hand over it. Our closets were lined with pegboard, a joyful thing for a child. I remember sliding open my closet doors to reveal an entire arsenal, artfully displayed on hooks: water pistols and cap guns, rubber knives and my pride and joy, a Winchester Crackfire Rifle. 

     There was not, I recalled this week, a single square inch of Peruvian limestone. Nor jasper. Nor onyx. Nor porphyry. The counters were not a fantastic swirling galaxy of deep green Brazilian granite. They were Formica, white, speckled with flecks of gold—fake gold, I hasten to point out—which struck me at the time as fancy. Yet somehow we survived. I kept reminding myself of that, half despairing, half marveling on the sea change in culture, which somehow infused my wife and me with the conviction that if we didn't order stone for the kitchen, we might as well just cover the floor with sheets of old newspaper. I spent a recent Sunday evening wandering through a variety of showrooms and warehouses, examining enormous slabs that would crush me like an egg.  I admit, at one point I considered doing just that, pulling one of the slabs over on myself and being done with it. It would be faster, and probably less painful, than trying to settle on something for the floor, something for the counters and something for the backsplash. 

     Doesn't the word "backsplash" make your skin crawl? It does mine, and neatly sums up the mincing sense of out-of-scale aesthetics, of opulence gone mad, that afflicted me as I trooped after my wife and our stone man. I didn't know what a backsplash was a year ago (it's the area just above your counter--you want some thing easily wipeable, so that if you cut off your finger with one of your razor sharp Heinkel knives, the blood won't stain the wall).  
     Our intention, based on previous quests, after dragging home immensely heavy boxes of samples, and placing them here and there and treading over them, discussing and analyzing and agonizing and arguing until our heads were ready to explode, was a light greenish slate floor, dark green granite counters and--well, I had never thought about a backsplash before, but my wife seemed to like tiny stone tiles, about Chiclet-sized. 

     Now that we were at the point of ordering, I began to have doubts. "The slate," I said, "is sort of rough. I'm in my bare feet a lot." "You could hone it," said our stone guy. "But it would get scratched." "I always wear slippers," chimed in my wife. The whole evening passed that way. I'd pause in front of a beautiful swirl of marble, and begin, "Hey, this is nice . . ." and be cut off with, "That's marble--if you spill a Coke on it, it'll eat the finish." Marble, apparently, is only for ceilings.         

     The most common response of our stone expert to my liking something was either to ignore the comment, or squeeze out a curt, "You could do that . . ." the unspoken second part being, I gradually realized, ". . .if you were an idiot."

     Eventually I dropped out of the conversation and busied myself playing with the little stone samples, stacking them up, feeling their roughness against my hands. I felt like I was 9 years old again, fidgeting in the women's lingerie section of Higbee's while my mother yabbered on with the friend she had bumped into. My wife and our stone guy worked everything out, anew. Did we say a light green slate floor? Make that brown sandstone studded with fossils. Dark green granite countertops? Of course not. Try a taupe granite that looks like dirty Wheatena mixed with confetti and sealed in glass. And the backsplash—well, we don't know what we are going to do yet. I pointed hopefully at a broken tile sort of thing with different colors and sizes jumbled together—it was sort of cool. "I like that," I said. My wife at first didn't like it—naturally—then we all talked about it, then took another tour of the enormous warehouse, then returned and discussed it some more, my wife finally admitting that yes, well, perhaps, maybe, it could possibly be OK with her. Then I looked at it again and said, "I'm tired of it already." 

      Hey, no rush. The workmen don't arrive until Dec. 9.
                                 —Originally published Dec. 8, 2002

Hammered and Nailed #8 -- Stirring kitchen dreams

     December. They begin work on the kitchen in December. I've been repeating that, like a mantra, the way prisoners anticipate the day of their freedom. December. Lovely December. Dee-cember! 

      Note the vague plural "they" in the above paragraph. As if the federal government or Amish neighbors were remodeling my kitchen next month. But in truth, I don't know who's doing it. I've never met the fellow--a Tom somebody. A South Sider. He was recommended. My wife called his references and actually went to see a kitchen he had done, to confirm that it wasn't constructed of Play-Doh and contact paper.
     "Do you trust him?" I asked, trying to get a sense of the situation. My wife gave me a strange look, and I realized I had asked the wrong question. As an attorney, she trusts nobody, including me, certainly not a random stranger with construction skills. His brief, jotted estimate--which we were to initial to begin work--was recast into a very specific and detailed contract. You see why I leave these things to my wife. My role is that of the Greek chorus, standing in the background and moaning words of caution. With November dribbling away like slush through an hourglass, it struck me that we should, oh for instance, actually buy the objects that Tom would soon install in our kitchen. 

      "Shouldn't you order the cabinets?" I said to my wife, gingerly. She had not, she said, ordered them yet, because she didn't want them sitting around our garage for months while we tried to hire somebody. I thought that far-fetched; a far more likely scenario is our hard-won contractor drifting off to jobs whose customers actually possessed the materials he was supposed to install, while our cabinets were still in a steel box lashed to the deck of a container ship inching its way around the Cape of Good Hope. 

      "I've got an appointment tomorrow," she said, which I did not find significant. We've run through an infinity of appointments--at kitchen showrooms, at design outlets, at Home Depot, a place we do not visit, but rather we attend, regularly, the way others attend church. Many times, my wife has toddled off to the old H.D. to, I thought, buy the cabinets, only to return needing something: a measurement, a blueprint, a thimble. This week, however, something happened that shocked us both. She did it. She bought the damned cabinets. It came as a surprise, to me and, I believe, to her as well. You'd think with all this foreshadowing--the hiring of an architect, the production of drawings, the signing up, and subsequent release, of two previous contractors, the endless visits, we'd have seen this coming. We didn't. Each of us took the shock differently. My wife acted as if she had just handed $10,000 in cash in a brown paper bag to a stranger who said he'd invest it in Nigerian diamond mines. She was awake all that night, contemplating our ruination as a family, picturing us huddled on a piece of cold cardboard while our boys twirled for tossed pennies. Myself, I slept like death, content, at long last, that some kind of progress was being made. Not that I buy the palpable lie that the Home Depot people gave my wife in return for a swipe of our near-molten credit card--the claim that the cabinets will be ready by Dec. 17. 

     "Did they say what year?" I almost said but, measuring her fragile state, thought better and held back. And frankly, I was in too good a mood to fight.  Just the prospect of the unseen Tom—a Paul Bunyan figure in my mind by now—striding into our kitchen somehow next month and shattering that miserable counter with a single stroke of his mighty sledge—is enough to keep me happy. 

      Seeking to distract myself with numbers that didn't have dollar signs in front of them, I did the math. We bought the house in June 2000. Work on the kitchen commenced in December 2002. That's 30 months, or roughly the span between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the D-Day invasion. That seems about right. The actual buying of the house wasn't precisely a surprise attack—I mean, we knew what we were signing. But the repercussions certainly were unanticipated, with wave after wave of repairs and set-backs and projects sweeping over us, while we dove behind barrels and tried to get our pathetically inadequate remodeling forces off the ground at Hickham Field. 
      Yet we recovered. Marshalled what energies and spirit we had left after the initial shock. And now the liberation of the kitchen is about to commence. The might of Home Depot, harnessed to do our bidding. Armies of workers, mobilizing. Sleek stainless steel appliances on their way from distant factories. We began moving boxes--sealed boxes of kitchen stuff we had moved into the pantry in June 2000--down into the Stygian netherworld of our basement, in anticipation of The Beginning. I'll probably be at work when they arrive--someone has to pay for this, or try to. But I wish I'd be there, to see the workmen as they file in, led by the mythic Tom, all toting their pry bars and 4-pound drilling hammers. They would stand, in flanneled glory, waiting for the word. I'd cast a final glance at the old kitchen, from its yellow, worn linoleum floor, up through the horrific, warped counters, to the splotched walls and stained ceiling. I'd leap on a stool, twirl my finger in the air dramatically and, trilling my "R's" like a bad Shakespearean actor, shout: "RRRRRRRR-Rip her out, boys!"
                                      --Originally published Nov. 24, 2002