I feel like the universe is telling me it’s time to redo the kitchen.
On Thursday, our cooktop snapped. It was a crazy evening where we had 30 minutes to do homework, eat dinner, and get ready for soccer. I had made dinner in the crockpot because I knew it was going to be a crazy evening so I have no idea when or how it happened. We noticed it after we got home from freezing our patooties off at soccer. (It’s officially October with temperatures anywhere from 75° to 20°. )
Yesterday, our dishwasher started on fire. Thankfully we caught it in the smoking and sparking phase. I held the extinguisher at the ready while Jesse ran downstairs to turn off the power and for half a second I thought, “Maybe we should just let it burn.” But…that seemed a little extreme, even if I do feel betrayed by kitchen right now.
One of my girlfriends jokingly told me that if the toaster goes I really do need to redo the kitchen.
If only the universe was giving me the funds.
Oh, man! I’m sorry to hear about your kitchen mishaps. But I love these images! A while back I found a couple of Sunset kitchen design books from the 60s and 70s that I bought because I’d love to have some of the design features I saw there in my kitchen some day. (Love those angled, glass-covered cabinets in the second photo you shared.) Is it wrong that some part of me is envious of your mishaps? Because I’d love to have a good reason to re-do our kitchen…Wait, no! I didn’t mean it! Gosh, I hope the universe wasn’t listening…
Hahahahah! 🙂 Sadly, there will be no redoing just replacing. Though that is nice too. I did get a NICE dishwasher since that we can keep when we can afford to redo the kitchen. Since I WILL change over to gas when we redo the kitchen (I hate cooking with electric) we just found an “okay” cooktop that fits in the current footprint and will get us through until we can redo the kitchen (which hopefully will be the end of 2016- beginning of 2017).
These things always seem to happen in clusters, don’t they? I have to admit I laughed at your momentary thought: “Maybe we should just let it burn”. It reminds me of when, shortly after moving into this house-from-hell fixer-upper, we found out the fireplace was not to code. The expert who was inspecting it said she was amazed the house hadn’t been burned down by one of the previous owners, and my words to my husband were, “I wish!”
You made me laugh! Though I’m sorry your house is a from-hell-fixer-upper. I don’t know what is worse – that or having a house like ours where everything functions (but the appliances, I guess) but it’s not ME. Redoing perfectly functional things so that they look like I want them to goes against my grain but in the meantime, I kind of hate my house. And then I feel guilty for hating my house because it’s a perfectly lovely home. Ahhh, I could talk for hours about all the things I want to do.
Having lived both scenarios (the fixer-upper where EVERYTHING must go, as well as the perfectly-fine-just-not-ME), I personally would prefer the latter next time around (if there IS a next time around, and I’m really hoping there isn’t for a good long while). Our house is no longer the house-from-hell, but it took four long years of work to get it to this point, and it was a very difficult process, in large part because so much of it went completely against the grain of who we are and what we believe. By North American middle class standards the house WAS a dump. But feeling so acutely that millions of people around the world would have happily lived in the house AS IS…? That made me feel extremely guilty. And then there was the fact that a HOUSE had suddenly taken over my life…which is a whole other subject altogether! For what it’s worth, I do think the internet has made it much easier to be dissatisfied with the perfectly-fine-just-not-me house; it’s unfortunately way too easy to find yourself caught up in playing the comparison game 🙁
What I find interesting is that we both are saying “There are so many people who would be happy living in this house AS IS” and feeling guilty because we aren’t.
I’m chiming in here because I’ve also felt the same things. Our kitchen, for example, functions really pretty nicely. I don’t like the cabinets because they are laminate, and the plastic is beginning to peel away on some of the doors. And because I hate the idea of plastic. But I’ve had the same thoughts–there is no way I can justify getting rid of perfectly good cabinets (even if I could afford to, which I feel I can’t) given so many things in this world. I guess the compromises I’ve made are these: I’m OK with making changes to improve function. I’m OK with making cosmetic changes for the simple reason that they make me feel better in the space. Forgoing those are not going to make life better for anyone else. Lately I’ve been thinking about selling this house, though, and that puts a whole different spin on this line of thought. Which sends me down the road of: I don’t want to make changes only for some future buyer. If I’m going to do that, I might as well do it now, while I can enjoy it. (And I’m not talking about things that some people do that the new buyer wouldn’t like anyway–like all the sellers who put in granite countertops that I, as a buyer, would not want. I mean things like stained vinyl flooring, and two different types of wood trim in the same room, and unfinished stairs.)