Kitchen Remodel 101---Or How To Utilize Your New Mental Health Insurance

If I haven’t been posting lately, it’s because I realized that the time was ripe for remodeling my kitchen!

So I haven’t been cooking as much as I normally do.  In fact, last week I discovered that the take-out Chinese place across the street from me (I don’t normally order from there, I prefer the take-out Chinese 10 blocks away)…but they have a DELICIOUS fried half-chicken!

Five dollars!  

It’s take-out Chinese, so I can’t vouch for the pedigree of the chickens.

But it got me thru the night while I was painting my kitchen.

We’re not talking an episode of This Old House.  After all, I’m a renter.  There’s only so much money I’m willing to put in here.

But since the construction of a new apartment complex next-door to our Pre-War building, there have been some cracks in the walls.  The building management sent in surveyors with devices that resembled those laser-pointers you use to torment your elderly cat.  Everything was notated.  Many letters regarding various insurance policies were slid under our front doors.  

But in the end---nothing.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands.  I may not look especially handy----but I am!

I started making plans.  I Googled things.  I spent hours pummeling the Dominican guys at the local hardware stores with lady questions.

Several people suggested, “Why don’t you just call your super?”

Well…supers all across this great country of ours have a tendency to blame YOU for whatever problem you’ve called them upstairs from their mole-like basement apartments to repair.

I once had a super try to blame me for the fact that my 1962 refrigerator had finally met its demise.

“Ehhh….the problem is,” he explained in a thick Egyptian accent, “you open it, eeehhhhh, too quickly.  It ruins the plastic.  Then!---it does not work anymore.  But we will get you a new one.  You just have to open it VERY slowly.”

This advice came with a demonstration on how to open my refrigerator at the pace of Continental Drift.

And he was a Coptic Christian, so he suggested that a portrait of Jesus above my refrigerator might help.  After all, he kept the picture of Jesus in the boiler room----and was there ever a problem with the heat?

Well....it was Minnesota.  So there was. But I didn't want to blame Jesus.  I kept my mouth shut.

Not only would my Spanish-speaking super somehow find a way to blame me for the cracks in the ceiling.  “Mami, I hear you are tap dancing in here.  You can no do that.  Tap shoes will destroy even The Empire State Building!”

And I'm not here to hate on documented or un-documented citizens.   

They work hard and they deserve the best.

But you can't choose your super.

You can barely choose your over-priced NYC apartment.  

It's a sad fact of life here.

But no matter where you live, he's a troll-like guy who's missing a few teeth and dwells in the basement with the roaches and rodents

I ALSO knew from experience that he and his assistants would do a sloppy job.  Don’t even get me started on the time a portion of my ceiling got flooded from a burst pipe upstairs and fell to the floor.  My super saw the damage that day, but I waited months before I finally braved that call the would bring on the angry crusaders to rape and pillage.  All I remember is that I got home from the dinner shift at 1:30 am.  I had no idea when they would finally reach Jerusalem all drunk on mead, scrofulous and bedraggled. But by 7:10 am, they were pounding on my door.  I begged for five minutes to put on some clothes while they sulked and diddled themselves in anticipation of their pre-apartment rape of my ceiling.  Within fifteen minutes of rolling out of bed after 4 hours of sleep, they’d smashed thru my walls and covered my entire apartment in a fine coat of asbestos dust.

yay.  

And because I’m a doormat when it comes to supers, I tipped them 50 bucks for the dastardly deed.  This ensured that they did a “curtsey sweep” and left me to clean up the bulk of the mess.

In short-----I’d spend as much time and money trying to clean up their mess as it would take me to do it myself---and do it better!

So I put on my overalls and got down to business.

Walls are an arduous task.  First you wash the walls (kitchens are notorious for collecting grease), then you lay down the tape, then spackle, then paint…  Not to mention all the time you have to wait in-between these tiresome steps.

It's pretty boring stuff.  But I don't think of it as "boring".  I connect with my Buddhist side and I don't think---I just paint the walls white. 

In the beginning, I decided to listen ONLY to The Velvet Underground while working.  But I ran thru their oeuvre so quickly, that I switched to Tom Waits.  And then Bix Beiderbecke (but he died so young!).  So I moved onto violin concertos.  And there are a lot of them, but….  Now it’s strictly Mozart.  He also died young, but was amazingly prolific.  By the time my kitchen remodel is finally finished, I’ll be climbing down from the step-ladder as Gregorian Chants echo inside my pristine monastery walls.

Bear in mind, I’m not weaving medieval tapestries-----it’s not all about the walls.

But those Zen moments you have while spackling around the gas pipe and cleaning up the paint drips from the ceiling after you’ve spent five hours of looking forward to nothing but “white----clean white”-----those moments are when you’re at your most creative and problem-solving best.

Why are the pot holders there?  That’s not convenient.  If the homemade crackers are about to burn, I need the pot holders HERE where they’re handy!  

The perfect place for the pot holders has been driving me bananas for almost two weeks now.  

And why is the coffeemaker there?  I should not have to gather things from five completely different places in my kitchen just to make a cup of coffee at 7am.  What have I been thinking?  Why am I making my life so hard?  You do realize you’re doing this all to yourself, you know?  And why do you still have that old coffeemaker from the break-room of an office you worked in years ago?  I mean, it still works, but for godsakes, it’s old and stained-----and you broke the glass pot in the dishwater THREE months ago!  Why have you been content to make coffee in a measuring cup for the past three months?  What is wrong with you?  Stop being a doormat!  Just buy a new coffeemaker!

And that stupid ice cube tray….really?

Oh!----EVERY inch of my kitchen has come under consideration!

And it should not only be user-friendly----but warm and inviting!

Why am I re-painting it white?  Why is my kitchen so damn white?!?!

Which brings up my “tidiness”.  I don’t like to say OCD.  Because I swear, I’m really not.  But my grandma’s idea of babysitting was to put me to work cleaning.  I’d spend entire afternoons of my youth crawling into deep cabinets and pulling out cast iron skillets that weighed a much as me, “You’re small and I can’t bend down there, honey.”

It’s why I know how to do old lady things like wax floors, polish silverware, clean ovens, and take apart and clean a crystal chandelier.

When she died of a sudden heart attack, I spent the entire week of her funeral helping the family by cleaning her house for the wake.  

Because that’s what Grandma would have wanted.

I still have the Webster’s Encyclopedia of Dictionaries my aunt bought for me as a reward.  It’s inscribed:

"To Joyceee for being hostess at Grandma’s during the week of her funeral.” 

I was fourteen.  I’d spent my life learning that if you cleaned, you would be loved.  

The strange thing is that, to be honest, I’ve put down a three-month moratorium of letting ANYONE into my apartment.  There is no instant-love-gratification in the works.  Not that I’m party-central.  I’m SO boring.  But outside of the super (my toilet HAS been a bit tricky lately) I really just want some time to be in my comfy space and make it perfect for ME!

No drop-ins.  No reservations.

This is so selfishly and unabashedly about me.

I did a pretty good job in my kitchen when I moved in almost 8 years ago----but my needs have changed.  I’ve grown smarter, wiser, and (with all my quirks) even more self-confident.  

I am a woman who knows what she wants in her kitchen.

And in her life.  

I want the pot holders THERE.

And a little to the right.  

Up just a bit….