 Ten years ago, my husband and I refinished all of them, stained them
and refitted them with new hardware. They looked much better, but
that was before we needed a new floor. Now they looked homemade …
and not in a good way.It always bugged me to look at the one
whole side of a cabinet that we had forgotten to varnish. That just
happens to be the one that the trash can resides next to. In a
family with children, this means that instead of scraps getting
scraped off plates into the trash can in an orderly fashion, they
get catapulted off the plate with a butter knife from three feet
away. This leaves a cabinet looking like the inside of my microwave
after a ravioli explosion. It makes an unvarnished cabinet decidedly
harder to clean.
It would be a shame to have a new floor and still have to look at
those cabinets. Of course, new cabinets means new countertops. New
countertops means a new backsplash. And while we're tearing the
kitchen apart, why don't we get rid of this wall here? So you can
see the logical progression of my thoughts, can't you?
Still, when a woman's kitchen gets ripped apart, there is some
anxiety. Not a separation sort of anxiety -- I was quite willing to
be separated from my old kitchen -- it was the sort of anxiety one
feels when one imagines workmen with dirty boots carrying large
appliances, boards with nails and disintegrating drywall through my
perfectly good living room. This was a living room I did not wish to
be separated from. The carpet was only two years old, or maybe three
… four? I don't know, but it was perfectly good.
When I voice my concern, the contractor will say, "Don't worry,
ma'am. We can do your living room for another $5,000."
"Really?" I'll ask, momentarily distracted.
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 "Ye…ah. But… yer bathroom will prob'ly take a hit." I'll decide
against it and ask if it were possible for them to take their boots
off when they come into the house, and I'll offer them all a wet
wipe and hand sanitizer.
I don't imagine they'll be very cooperative.
We had talked about the kind of cabinets that don't quite reach
the ceiling. My sister-in-law has cabinets like that, and I always
admired the ceramic cookie jar collection she displays up there.
Unfortunately, I have only one cookie jar, and it's made of
stainless steel -- a necessity in a house full of cookie monsters.
Besides, our cabinet liaison (aka sales rep) said that we can use
the extra cabinet space to store things like a tortilla and salsa
serving tray shaped like a sombrero. I nodded knowingly. I didn't
have a sombrero tray, but there was that gigantic plastic turkey
platter on which was depicted a giant cartoon cornucopia and tiny
little Pilgrims.
Plus, I could use those higher cabinets to place things I don't
want my children to see or reach, like the cookie jar ... or my
stash of chocolate.
There's one thing about a new kitchen that our kitchen liaison
didn't warn us about, though. He didn't tell us how bad the rest of
the house would look when the kitchen was finished.
[By LAURA SNYDER]
Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist,
author and speaker. You can reach her at
lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
or visit www.lauraonlife.com
for more info.
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