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

Hammered and Nailed # 7 -- Slava, you're fired!

     This is episode #7 of "Hammered and Nailed," the 2002 horror story about home remodeling that ran in the Sun-Times.

      'Hey Slava, you're fired!" That wasn't so hard, was it? In fact it was easy. And fun. So much fun, I'd like to do it again. "Hey Slava—so long! Dos vedanya, buddy! Go find some other house for your ham-handed greenhorn pals to practice on."
     Sure, I can do that here. But in real life? It just doesn't come out. My mouth opens to say the words, and instead "Oh yeah, great, great," tumbles out. Pathetic.
     Faithful readers might recall when last we left the bathroom project, at the end of August. Having finally girded what loins I have, I explained to Slava that the cheapie pasteboard shelves they put in were no good and they must do them again—with something called wood, wood that had been primed and painted. I even trotted over to Home Depot and bought $35 worth of fancy trim, to put under the shelves, so they wouldn't have to bother replacing the crudely sawn brackets holding up the shelves. They could hide them! Always considerate—Neil Steinberg, the contractor's pal.
     With the shelves on their way, I was emboldened to actually christen the new bathroom. That isn't my way. My way would be to wait until it was absolutely done, finished, complete, then stock it with new towels and pristine soaps and savor some kind of sublime moment of existential joy in perfection before inaugurating the bathroom's 20-year slide into decay, filth and ruin.
      But with new shelves coming, I was energized. I figured we're home free. Celebrate! I bought a thick, new, white towel—somehow, taking your inaugural bath with a threadbare Big Bird beach towel doesn't quite do it.
     Everything except the shelves looked great. I squinted, happily superimposing in my mind the rotted, ruined, broken apart, mold-ridden, creme yellow shell of a bathroom that had once been there over the sparkling, white tiled splendor. Hmmm, nice. The chrome shower curtain rings, with the little ball bearings, gave a hugely satisfying "shrick" as I pulled the white curtain aside. The shower head—one of those big, saucer-sized shower heads that dribbles down rain--was in an unexpected position: above my head. Until that shower, I had never really noticed that most shower heads are about eye height. You sort of have to do a bunny dip to wash your hair. This is a result, I assume, of the gradual shrinkage of houses, along with 7 1/2-foot ceilings and hollow core doors. Not here, not anymore, no sirree Bob!
     My heart was filled with joy. I didn't remember ever telling Slava to put the shower head way up high. But he did! Good old Slava! It wouldn't be long until, guided by my subtle American concern for quality, that all would be set right. Then, on to the kitchen! This was early September. You might recall, all last month, there was no column rejoicing the redone shelves. Instead, I drew the veil. Wrote about sump pumps. Wrote about trees. These were smoke screens. I was ashamed. The truth is: I couldn't bear to think about the bathroom. I still can't. But at some point the truth must be told: Heading toward the fifth month, the bathroom's . . . still . . . not . . . done. Aiiiyeeeeee!!!!!! (Does that convey in print? Think of the undulating scream that warriors waving scimitars make as they plunge into the bottomless pit in those Sunday afternoon "Sinbad" movies). 

     Sure, I got the Russians to agree to fix the shelves. "No problem," Slava repeated, though not really paying close attention—I realize now--to what he was "no probleming" about. We pestered them to get the shelves done. Hope bloomed. I had forgotten one vital element: These were the same guys who had screwed up the shelves to begin with. And you know what? The second time was screwed up more—my nice, considerately-bought Home Depot maple trim? A slapdash paint job, Old Mr. Wood peeking through. Artlessly hung at nowhere near horizontal, affixed by nails driven right through the facing of the trim. It looked like hell. And the thing of it is, the hot shame that I'll carry to my grave, is when he showed me the second botched job, I mumbled "Oh yeah, great, great," squinting and trying to tell myself it was great. I did not, as I should have, grabbed him by the shirtfront and screamed, spittle flying off my lips, "You bumbling Belarus bastard! You call that improvement? This isn't the john in some crumbling Stalinesque concrete apartment block back in Oostkaminagorsk--this is my HOME!" 

     But I didn't say that. I waited for my wife to come home and then showed her the bathroom, like a remorseful husband revealing the tattoo he got on a Las Vegas bender with his buddies. 

     Still we clung, pathetically, to the hope that these guys could still do our kitchen—the plan had been for the bathroom to be a dry run, a test, before they embarked on the kitchen. We didn't really think they were going to fail. 

     "OK," I said. "So they can't put up woodwork and they can't do plumbing—is that so important in a kitchen? The floor will look nice." But our hearts weren't in it. We knew we'd have to start looking all over again. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. 

     At least the Russians were gone. Or were they? While this was going on, autumn had arrived. We fired up the radiators. Soon they were hot and radiating away, except—and you saw this coming, didn't you?—the radiator in the bathroom. Cold as a stone. So it seems that Slava will be coming back—at least to fix the radiator, though, if history is any judge, he'll find a way to make it worse ("Yup, oddest thing—this one radiator here removes heat from the room . . .") 

      And, like exhausted circus ponies returning to the miserable ring, we begin again. The first contractor we got to go through the kitchen was a class act. So classy, in fact, that his bid was exactly twice what we could conceive of paying in our wildest dream of profligacy. I took that as a good sign. When we finally find somebody, he'll be the third person contracted to do our kitchen. Perhaps the third time, as they say, is the charm.
      —Originally published Oct. 10, 2002

Hammered and Nailed #6: Oft-delayed kitchen takes the cake

     This is Episode #6 of Hammered and Nailed, the series that ran in Homelife in 2002 and 2003, and is being featured here. The Saturday "Where IS This?" contest returns in two weeks. To begin at the beginning, start at Monday, Aug. 4.

     Why did I not realize it before? "This Old House" is pornography; porno for people like me. A fantasy for owners of old homes with as much basis in reality as a stag film. The odds of a squad of competent workmen in flannel shirts, tool belts and beards showing up at my home and speedily, say, framing a new porch, are about the same as the odds of the meter reader turning out to be Traci Lords in a breakaway dress.
     Here I was trying to pick up practical tips. What a fool. It was like was watching "Horny Housewives in Heat" hoping to learn about actual human behavior.
     And you know what's the most deceptive thing about "This Old House?" Not the calm, quiet skill of the workers (my workmen are as jittery as Lucy Riccardo moonlighting on an assembly line; I have a feeling that if I spoke to one, he'd shriek and toss his tools in the air). Not the way the TV guys carefully discuss their every step, guided by established rules of Yankee carpentry. (My crew seem to figure out what to do next by a lot of shouting, shrugging and hand gestures).
     No, the most deceptive thing about "This Old House" is the sense of time compression. One moment Hank is showing the host how he's nailing down those hand-cut cedar shingles. The host nods gravely, they cut to a commercial—a commercial for door handles, for shop vacuums, not the kind of ad you'd normally see on television—and then Bob (or whoever; they keep changing) strolls back to Hank and says, "I see you're about finishing up that roof. . . ."
     Ha! Not in my world. I glanced at my 2002 planner the other day and noted, under May 20, the scribble: "WORK STARTED ON BATHROOM." I like to think it was a bray of triumph, but something tells me that I knew, in my heart, they'd still be at it now, more than three months later, and I wanted to give myself a mnemonic aid when groping to recall a time when the bathroom wasn't under construction.
     Yes, they're still at it. Or rather, not at it, since if today is an average day, the workmen are at another job or visiting their relatives in Kyrgyzstan or doing something else somewhere that isn't our house.
     "A lot of that is our fault," says my wife, all Sandra Dee perkiness, when I brought up the subject (not in words, but by taking my hands and raking my fingernails over my cheeks, letting out a loud, quavering moan. She knows what I mean when I do that now).
     She's wrong of course. Yes, work was suspended for a few weeks while we struggled to get a few boxes of hexagonal white tiles. But even if it took an entire month, that still means they spent two months (and counting!) on a job that Slava swore with his hand on his heart and tears in his eyes would be done in two weeks (leading me to the awful fear that there is a kind of remodeling code: merely substitute whatever your contractor says with the next higher unit of time measure: if he says the job will take two days, figure two weeks. Two weeks? Figure two months. And so on).
     After the bathroom is done, the kitchen is on deck, and has been, for two years. Two years! My wife is beginning to come unhinged. After spending hours picking out appliances for the third time, since all the appliances we picked out the two previous times are no longer manufactured, my wife immediately announced that perhaps we shouldn't remodel the kitchen after all, seeing as how we can't actually afford it.
      "It's cheaper than a divorce," I said, in a flat, emotionless voice, pressing my fingertips to my temples to keep my head from exploding. Two years.
    "OK, we'll remodel it then," she said. "Or maybe we shouldn't. It'll be expensive. So let's not. Except of course it looks horrible. So we will. But not now, unless of course we do, because prices will only go up. So why not. . ."
     She might have continued in this vein, perhaps fluttering a finger over her lips, but I was already backing away, eyes bulging, shaking my head back and forth like an extra in a sci-fi flick about to be eaten by the alien.
     This sense of horror crops up in unexpected moments. Take last Monday--our 12th wedding anniversary. We have a tradition ... I'm a little reluctant to share it, lest it shatter the crusty, unpleasant, middle-aged-man-going-out-of-his-mind persona that I so carefully develop in this space. But it, like the persona, is true. We do have this ritual, on the day of our anniversary, where we take the cigarette-pack-size piece of our wedding cake out of hibernation in the freezer, place it on the good china, kiss, take a picture, savor a tiny bite, read the love notes we jotted for each other last year and tucked inside the wrapping, write something sweet and hopeful for next year, then return the package to the deep freeze.
     The notes really are the best part. Dripping with hearts and nicknames, scribbled over the past dozen years--we keep them all in the cake package--they quickly trace the progress of a marriage, from the heady honeymoon days, to the time when babies loomed on the horizon (identified as "?") to, well, maybe I better just reveal my note from last year.      Looking ahead to my fondest hopes, I wrote: 
     "Dearest love: Happy 12th! Together in our new old home.  Thank you for all your work getting the kitchen done, finally."
     Ha! Double ha! I had expected the kitchen would be done in a year. Had assumed. Naturally. How could it not? How pathetic.
     The mood couldn't have changed faster had I dashed the wedding cake to the floor and jumped on it. I suppressed the urge to write: "Happy 13th--if the kitchen isn't done by now I'm divorcing you." Instead I wrote something pleasant and positive. One must be positive. I made no mention of the kitchen being done. A guy has to learn from his mistakes.
                              —Originally published September 8, 2002 

Hammered and Nailed #5--Insanity reigns

      It being August, I'm re-publishing excerpts from my 2002 series on remodeling, "Hammered and Nailed." To start at the beginning, go back to Aug. 4. The inexplicably-popular Saturday "Where IS this?" contest will return Aug. 23.     

     Sometimes I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what . . ."
     Gosh, that has a strange ring to it. "Once the remodeling is done." Sort of sounds like, "After the Earth crumbles to dust."
     Sorry. I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what is this leading to?"
     Yes, a shiny new bathroom and a shiny new kitchen, to start. But what are they for? What will we do with them? Throw lots of big dinner parties with money we no longer have for friends who drifted away once we moved to the suburbs? Take long, luxurious baths in our gleaming white bathroom, eyes locked on the pristine, schizophrenic order of the hexagonal tiles on the floor?
     Frankly, I can't picture it. Right now, the only end I can really, truly imagine is myself, eyes wild, hair in disarray, running madly through the house, gas can in hand, pouring fuel everywhere, then standing amidst the flames, head thrown back, shaking my clawed hands at the ceiling and laughing hysterically as the house goes up around me.
     Sorry (again). Thursday is still weighing on my mind. The day had been so pleasant. The workers, I knew, were putting in the final touches on the bathroom--the toilet paper holder. The towel hooks. The little sproingy thing that keeps the doorknob from carving a circle in the wall. I love those little sproingy things.
     On the train I was relaxed, happy. I strolled home, prepared to savor the new bathroom. Perhaps, thought I, a celebratory bath might be in order. I had not taken a bath in the main bathroom, I realized, in the two years we owned the house. Why would I? It would be like bathing in a scummy pond.
     I opened the front door to a scene of madness. Water was pouring as if from a hose, directly from the center of our kitchen ceiling. The boys were running and shouting. Cats flew by, mewing wildly. My wife was screaming, and a heavy man, naked to the waist, wearing white painter's pants, sneakers and suspenders, was for some reason there too. The only thing missing was the Marx Brothers with flappy paddles and seltzer bottles.
     I should have turned and bolted, but I went inside.
     "The water!" My wife shouted, nobody knew how to shut off the water. This was odd, I realized, later, when I had time to think. Very odd, considering these guys were plumbers, supposedly. But lost in the moment, I merely hurried to the basement and turned a few big valves that seemed connected to the water pipes—even I know how to do that—then headed back upstairs to see the cascade had diminished to a trickle, being examined by the half-naked man, who turned out to be a workman.
     "What's going on?" I said. Drawing a blank stare, I dredged up my college Russian.
     "Shto etta?" I asked, pointing at the water. ("Shto etta?"—"What is this?" are the first words they teach you in Russian class. I almost automatically followed with "Etta capusta"—"This is a cabbage.")
     Concealing my rusty, etiolated Russian had seemed a good idea—I got to eavesdrop on the workers, and knew that showing it off would be a form of cozying up, a social breach akin to those junior executive idiots who pause to pal around with the bums on the bridge out of the mistaken belief it makes them into hip, happening kind of guys.
      But this was an emergency. The workman—he was a painter of some kind—praised my language skills, and said that nothing could be done until the bossman showed up. We waited.
     Finally he arrived, declared that nothing could be done until tomorrow, and then set to chatting with me in Russian.
      Soon the bathroom was forgotten, and he was inviting me to visit Belarus with him and hunt women. (At least I think that's what he said.)
     Four days passed. They finally came back, the problem was located. It seems they forgot to actually bond a pair of pipes, but merely shoved one into another and—gee, guess what?—it leaked.
     Somehow, the bathroom being so close to completion, then having success yanked away, started to affect my mind.
     "We could just keep the water off, use the other bathrooms and look at this one," I suggested to my wife, in all earnestness. "We wouldn't have to worry about cleaning it then."
     One thing vital to surviving home remodeling (practical tip alert! pay attention here) is to inculcate a certain hardness. After the leak crisis, the built-in shelves were installed. We praised them to the bossman then, after he left, actually looked hard at them. They were a kind of pressboard, already showing through the paint, held up by wooden brackets artlessly sawed. I delivered the ultimate criticism.
     "I could have done that," I told my wife.
     We agreed that I should place the call, thus giving the demand the bass and authority of the male. The shelves, I said, in my best butch voice, were no good. They would have to be ripped out and done again.
     "No problem," he said.
     I hung up, amazed. Not so much that he agreed so readily—we'll see what Shelves Part II look like—but that I had delivered the bad news with a minimum of hives and Barney Fife trilling. I thought I was having a bathroom and kitchen built, but it seems they're also constructing a hardened personal shell in the bargain. Imagine that, something extra for free in home remodeling. A miracle.
                                      — Originally published August 25, 2002 

Hammered and Nailed #4 -- That sinking feeling when desires die

    The feature normally in this space, "People Far Richer Than Yourself Show off Their Mega-Mansions as If You Could Possibly Own One in Your Wildest Dreams of Avarice," is on summer sabbatical. In its place, we present a continuing saga of remodeling an old house when money is not just something stuffed in walls for insulation.

     You know what I think makes a kitchen really elegant? A little round sink—not the main sink, mind you, but an auxiliary sink, say, set in a freestanding island. That way, if the main sink is filled with dirty dishes (and really, when is it not?) and you want a drink of water, no problem! You turn, hold your glass under the delicately curving stainless steel swan's neck of a tap and slake your thirst.        
      Fancy!
      Many times, I've fantasized about using such a sink: to rinse brightly colored summer fruit, to pour cool water on my dusty hands, to ease some complex cooking task, standing back-to-back, romantically, with my wife working at the main sink in our brand-spanking-new kitchen.
     You would think this desire would mean that the plans for our new kitchen would include such a little sink. The island is there. The pipes are there, somewhere. But no little sink, and herein lies the tale.

     First, let's back up a bit. Any construction effort, be it a spare bathroom or the Taj Mahal, is a compromise between imagination and practicality, between the fever dreams of the bountiful trappings we know we deserve and what our pocketbooks and spouses will let us get away with.
      Usually, unless we are toward the Taj Mahal end of the spectrum, those constraints are considerable, and a good thing, too. When you see the sprawling monstrosities that the rich tend to throw up (and I use that term aware of its dual meanings), it seems that a few restrictions are beneficial. I mean, as much as we would like Bill Gates' billions, did anyone look at the photos of that enormous hotel-like construction he calls a home and think, "Gosh, I'd love to live there"? Nobody.
      OK, that's a cop-out. Having lots of money would be great when it comes to remodeling. I can't tell you how many times we've noticed something we really like, just to later realize that not only can't we afford it, but we can't believe there's anyone in the world who can afford it.
     Take the stove. We surveyed the stoves available and settled on a Heartland, based entirely on the fact that it had a cute semicircular window. I could see myself peering through that window for the next 25 years, at bubbling pies and browning turkeys. It would make me happy.
     Turns out a Heartland stove costs about $5,000. A lot of money, considering you can get a perfectly good stove for about a tenth of that.
     So we set our sights lower. My wife selected a stove that would do the trick and set us back only about a grand and a half.
     But I had a problem with it. For $1,400, it just, well, it just didn't look cool. I wasn't expecting a round Heartland window. But I wanted something. At least the knobs should be nice. Hefty knobs. Industrial knobs. I scanned the store, and found one I liked. It had big, solid, black, hand-filling dials, knobs that would control the nuclear missile launch in a James Bond movie. The stove costs $3,000.
     Both stoves worked equally well. (Actually, the more expensive stove worked less well, because it had powerful, industrial burners designed to bring 10-gallon stock pots to boil. The thing literally couldn't dial down to low, so it came with a round metal plate you had to put over a burner if you wanted to approximate a low setting, a major pain if ever there was one). I knew, in my heart, it was insane to spend an additional $1,600 for knobs on a stove that demanded you insert a special blast plate whenever you wanted to simmer a can of soup. But that wasn't how I viewed it. I viewed it that you could spend $1,400—still a lot of money—and get some chintzy, Oreo-knobbed, nothing stove. Or you could spend a bit more—and what is $1,600 in the money furnace that is remodeling an old house?—and get a mighty-knobbed stove.
     My wife convinced me this is madness. Which brings us back to the little sink. Features she wants—such as an extra wall oven for Thanksgiving and the other two days a year when we might need lots of cooking room—are vital elements intrinsic to any basic, minimal kitchen. Simple expressions of practicality, on par with church key can openers and straw brooms. You can't live without them.
     The elements that I want—the oven with the hearty knobs, the little round auxiliary sink—are wasteful, fanciful frills that need to be trimmed away to stick with the budget and avoid bank-breaking financial ruin.
     I know this makes me seem henpecked, and I've tried dozens of times to argue. "Why," I ask, "do you dismiss what I want in the kitchen as a needless expense?" She, of course, denies it. "Lots of things in the kitchen were your idea," she says. "The floor—you wanted a floor, and you have one. Or stainless steel appliances. We're getting those."
     I try to point out that she, too, wanted stainless steel, and that I'd happily switch to something else—red is popular nowadays—to prove my point. But somehow the point is never made and I sigh and let it drop, while the little round sink drifts away on the gentle breezes of regret, off to that misty land of sports cars and summer homes and all the luxuries that life hands to the select few but forever denies the rest of us.

                  —Originally published July 14, 2002