After living in our house for 30 years, I took a look at my cabinets one morning and casually mentioned to my electrician husband that I thought it was time for a remodel. Her reaction to him, unsurprisingly, was that he wasn’t doing any renovations on the house! And more, there was NOTHING wrong with the cabinets as they were.

Being stubborn, I pushed and pushed to see if he would be conducive to me hiring a contractor to remodel our kitchen cabinets. Depending on the mood, I was met with either silence or a brick wall of negativity, punctuated with the occasional moment of nonchalance. Unfortunately, their periods of indifference tended to occur when it was impossible or impractical to contact a renovator, and the windows of opportunity quickly passed.

Through the winter I continued my search, getting nowhere… fast… In the spring, I thought I had found a way out. One of my sons was hell-bent on starting a business and he had the ability to make me new cabinet doors. Using “he needs the job” as my excuse, I gleefully measured and drew up my new kitchen plan, discovering along the way that the carpenter who built our original cabinets was a master at correcting his measurement errors by making adjustments accordingly. at the opposite end of the work from him.

I started dismantling the kitchen in earnest, looking first at the upper porcelain cabinet that divides the kitchen from the dining room. My husband was not in favor of taking it down, but he agreed to help me check it out to see if it was practical and wouldn’t involve major structural damage to the roof. He pushed and pushed a bit, then left to get a ladder out of the garage to investigate further before committing. As soon as he was out of the room, my trusty crowbar slid under the edge of the first door and pulled it clean off… NO! of the hinge of it. When he returned, it was already too late to make decisions. All the doors were stacked on the ground and the frame was falling off. Fortunately, my haste didn’t lead to waste and the rest of the demo went off without a hitch.

Starting in March, I was hoping to finish before the summer, but everything that could go wrong did. My son’s business was too busy to do my doors, the weather was atrocious so I was chopping wood in my dining room. I am still (a year later) finding sawdust in cracks and crevices. I ordered doors from another company and patiently… YES, CORRECT! he waited for them to arrive. Let’s not discuss how much these doors cost me… by the way.

I have two electricians in the house, neither of whom seem to know how to work around the house. After several weeks of politely asking for the lights to be plugged in, I lost all patience and my temper took over. I assembled the light fixture in the dining room and then climbed up on the dining room table to try to connect it to the ceiling light box. Note here that you need to twist 2 wires together (twice) and then put a connector over the twisted ends of the wire. Not difficult at all if you don’t have to hold a 20 pound lamp. Here I am standing holding the light in one hand and failing miserably to twist the wires with the other. I wasn’t going to give up, I was going to win this battle, I was going to show those electricians that I didn’t need them! I searched the room for a solution to my problem, considering and discarding various ideas.

I finally had a moment of enlightenment! Appropriate actually, for the situation I was in…

I grabbed the lamp with both hands, balanced it on my chest, hooked the bottom of the lamp to the front of my bra, and then used both of my free hands to turn on the light. They say necessity is the mother of invention, now I know why. There can be no father of invention, he does not wear a bra! Imagine a 52-year-old woman, just over 5 feet tall, standing on a table, legs akimbo, with a lamp sprouting from her chest! She’s not exactly the statue of liberty, but definitely an enlightened woman.

Siding and door installation continued, not fast, but definitely steady. Every day it was done a little more, with a few steps forward, a couple of steps back. We ate more takeout than I care to admit, with the sink and stove unplugged life just wasn’t the same. I used a microwave and a hot plate, hoping the uninspiring diet might inspire some offers of help to speed things up, but to no avail. So I went on alone. He ate more sawdust than food, his hair was dyed with drops of wood stain, and his skin gleamed with layers of varnish. But I prevailed.

Each stage I completed renewed my faith in my stubbornness, if not my ability. The placement of crown molding led to challenges beyond imagination. How can you measure an angle at one end of a 12 foot board, when you have to hold the other end in place? It’s not easy, but again, just like the lamp, I stood my ground and more or less won. Duct tape, you say?

When it came time to top off my new cabinets with countertops, I was faced with a myriad of options, some expensive, some more expensive, and some scarily expensive. Money wasn’t the only consideration, but she dreaded spending large amounts of precious money on a dark granite countertop and then finding out that she hated the dark countertop. I wouldn’t want to rip out a $7000 countertop just because I hated it! I compromised by installing porcelain tile in a granite/marble pattern, which was about the same look at a quarter of the price. And I love it!

I used epoxy grout on my countertop, and that led to a real comedy of errors. Nobody warned me that epoxy sets EXTREMELY fast, so I wasn’t prepared to be alone in the middle of grouting and having my tools encased almost solidly in a very expensive bucket of grout. It looked beautiful, but I had to order another batch of grout to do the second half. I didn’t even dare to take a bathroom break, I was in a race against time as I wasn’t getting a third batch of grout if I could help it. Those last 3 or 4 tiles were done at breakneck speed with one eye on the clock and the other on the hallway to the bathroom so I could warn those coming of the probability of death if they blocked my path as soon as I finished the last tile. . . Nobody darkened my door, luckily!

Once the tiling was done, all that remained was to install the sink, which my friend who is a plumber did. He wasn’t impressed with how little room it had left him to work with (he had moved the dishwasher to make room for a slide-out recycling bin) and colored the air with his adjectives, but he got the job done! It was quite entertaining to have him cursing and complaining all the time!

Putting the kitchen back together went relatively uneventfully, except, of course, when I got home to find my poor husband with the microwave partly in and partly out of the cavity he had so carefully measured, and it was stuck. . literally. ! After several tries we finally got the microwave out and replaced with just some swearing!

But I persevered, and now that the kitchen is exactly how I imagined it, I can laugh at the pitfalls and problems I encountered along the way!