The Kitchen is Finished--BEFORE and AFTER pictures

Pies are done.
Cakes are done.
People are finished or through... with kitchen redo projects.

Kitchen redo projects are hard. But second kitchen redo projects done in the same year as the first redos are even more challenging because after making a mess of your kitchen--again--it's hard to remember just how necessary the second redo was. I mean, not having LED lights on a dimmer switch is not so bad. Did we really have to redo the kitchen for a second time for that?!

Luckily there is photographic proof. The best thing about Before and After pictures is that they justify all the blood, sweat and tears expended to make the redo project a great redo room. Okay, at least they look good.

Therefore without further ado the Before and After pictures.

The Kitchen Ceiling BEFORE.
Mr. Wonderful and I tried out several placements for the LED lights in the ceiling. Here you see where we thought we'd put two LED lights (the markings on the ceiling) as opposed to where we actually did (the LED lamp hanging from the hole). You can also see the guts of our old doorbell.

The Kitchen Ceiling AFTER:

I sawed holes in the ceiling for the lamps, Mr. Wonderful put the LEDs and their cans into the ceiling. Then I gave the ceiling two coats of paint. I love authentic things and wanted to keep the old doorbell. Mr. Wonderful painted its casing and silver bells so the doorbell matched our new color scheme thus making it better than new!

The Kitchen Ceiling and Cabinets BEFORE:

Before scraping off the four coats of ceiling paint down to the plaster, we also removed all the vents and cabinet trim to protect them. It would have been a shame to damage what we'd redone in the first kitchen redo during this second kitchen redo.

The Kitchen Ceiling and Cabinets AFTER:

With the vent and cabinet trim replaced and painted, the LED lights installed, and walls and ceiling repainted, the room feels brighter and cooler than before. While it was a hard work to do and live through, I'm happy that we did this second kitchen redo.

Now I love my kitchen... even more! Plus I won't be sweating under hot lamps when baking pies and cakes because each LED light we installed uses just three (3!) watts of electricity! It's grand!

So in this space I can bake pies until they're done and cakes until they're done. But as for me doing another kitchen redo project--I am finished!

Taking it Off

“I’ll be home late tonight,” Mr. Wonderful's voice said over the phone.

“That's too bad,” I said standing on the kitchen table.

“How so?”

“Because tonight, everything's coming off.”

“… Excuse me?”

No one works harder than Mr. Wonderful. The guy gives a 110% every day to every job and everything he does. But it’s exactly because of his giving, hard-working nature that sometimes the home improvement jobs at The House get started then stall because he’s doing things for other people, places and things. So that’s when I step in to finish the job.

Yes I: the woman who’s good at hammering nails and better at removing them. Yes I: the woman who excels at breaking a concrete sarcophagus in the backyard. YES I! The woman who knows there are two types of screwdrivers—the Phillips and the vodka/orange juice cocktail. 

So when Mr. Wonderful called to say he would be home late, I planned to surprise him by taking the rest of the paint off the kitchen walls and ceiling all by myself. So I slipped into something more comfortable—namely my painting shirt and yoga pants—and went to work. By my paint removal calculations there were seven coats of paint on the kitchen walls: five coats of various whites, over mint green over refried-bean tan. Evidently when the previous owners wanted to change their kitchen’s look, all they did was paint it again and again. And Again.

By comparison, the ceiling had a measly four coats of whites including: off-white, on-white, bright white and dirty white.

With the walls and ceiling stripped down to their naked plaster, I cracked open the paint cans, stirred the paint and set to work on redressing the walls and ceiling in a new, elegant white paint. Woo-wee! He was going to be impressed I’d taken all this paint off. And put more paint back on. I couldn’t wait to see his happy face!

Around 11 PM I heard my spouse’s car in the driveway. He hurried inside to find me standing behind the refrigerator wearing my paint-splattered shirt and yoga pants.

“Welcome home!” I said blowing a lock of paint-sprinkled hair out of my eye line.

“… Hey,” he said his voice dropping off.

“So what do you think?” I said swinging my arm around the room.

“I thought you said ‘everything's coming off tonight’.” 

“Everything did come off. In fact I scraped every last paint chip off the walls and ceiling but since you still weren’t home, I started painting again.” His face fell. This was not the happy husband I was hoping to surprise with my painting removal and reapplication. “Don’t you like what I’ve done?”

“Of course,” he looked at his feet. “But when you said ‘everything’s coming off tonight” I thought you meant something other than paint.”

“… like clothes?”

“… For instance.” 

“Well the night’s still young,” I said dumping the paintbrush in the can and stepping out from behind the refrigerator. He smiled. “But first tell me what you think of my painting!”

Punch a Hole In It

“That was delicious,” I said laying my fork and knife across my empty dinner plate.

“Yes,” Mr. Wonderful said gazing at the overhead lamp.

“I love cooking in our kitchen.”

“Yes.”

“In fact I love everything about our kitchen!”

“Want to punch a hole in the ceiling?”

In most relationships when I spoke to someone they listened and spoke back to me on that same subject. Because when the tables were turned and someone else addressed me on a particular subject they expected—and I complied—to respond to them on the same topic that they’d initiated. However after countless hours of field research and several years of committed study, I’d discovered that these normal rules of interpersonal, human communications practiced by billions of people around the world were lacking in the man I promised to love, cherish and talk & listen to… until death do us part. 

As a scientific person who relied on facts, I had collected numerous examples of our odd communications. Recently I told him, “I had a great meeting today.”

Mr. Wonderful replied, “The kitchen is too hot.” Since he changed the subject from my “good meeting”, I switched to his topic of “the hot kitchen”.

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” I said with a grin. 

“The lamps are all wrong,” he mumbled then beelined for the tool shed.

It’s hard enough talking to men but talking to one who wasn’t even in the same galaxy of my conversation was becoming increasingly difficult. To be fair to Mr. Wonderful, it didn’t happen all the time, just every time we were in the house, out of the house or together. 

Clearly something was brewing in his head and I thought if he would just talk to me about it I would understand what he was pondering and we could talk about it together. So when he finally addressed me over dinner with the question of, “Want to punch a hole in the ceiling?” I was in shock for several reasons: 1) He wanted to punch a hole in our redone kitchen ceiling; 2) He was talking to me! and 3) He wanted to punch a hole in our redone kitchen ceiling?!

I’m a fair minded person. In fact I’m sure that King Solomon himself, the fairest judge in ancient Israel, would totally agree with me on this point: My spouse was off his rocker. Mess up our lovely kitchen, which we had lovingly redone and that I totally loved by punching holes in the ceiling?! 

I stayed on topic and responded to my dear spouse, “No way!”

Mr. Wonderful proceeded to tell me he’d done oodles of research and discovered that LED lights were the coolest lamp option for a kitchen which meant that when they were on they would not contribute to the heat of the kitchen, thereby relieving us from leaving the hot kitchen—ever again. Also, LED light were highly efficient using just a fraction of the wattage of traditional bulbs or even the curly fluorescent ones. But I still balked. None of these features could convince me to make a disaster zone of my fabulous kitchen.

“I can put the LEDs on a dimmer,” he said.

“Yes way!” we shared a fist bump.

“I’m glad we talked & listened to each other about this,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“To get a saw to punch a hole in the ceiling,” I mumbled beelining for the tool shed.

As a scientific person, in my mind the most important fact about dimmable LED lights was: they looked cool!

Kitchen Cabinets BEFORE and AFTER

"The kitchen cabinets' interiors?" Mr. Wonderful had said looking up from his Lucky Luke comic book.

"Yes," I'd said holding a brochure of paint samples.

"Who cares what they look like?" 

"I do."

That's right. I cared then and I still cared now but that's because I did it! Here are some BEFORE and AFTER pictures of sanding and painting the interiors of the kitchen cabinets.

BEFORE: 

The interiors of the kitchen cabinets had been covered in shelf paper, which once removed left a residue of hardened glue on the shelves and showed how ugly the shelves were, thus explaining why the previous owners had used shelf paper in the first place. Shelf paper covers a multitude of cabinet sins.

I also wanted a shelf just for my cutting boards, so during my grueling sanding toil, Mr. Wonderful built a new shelf that hangs down from the upper shelf. This simple concept rivals the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as one of the Seven Wonders of the World! Now it's one of the seven wonders of my kitchen!

DURING: 

I applied three coast of paint to the interior shelves, ceiling and walls. Since the cutting board shelf was virgin wood, I gave it extra coats, like 76.

AFTER: 

Plates, bowls and cutting boards now have a bright place in the cabinet. And they look great! In fact the cabinet interiors look so good I keep opening the cabinet doors just to gaze at the ordered cleanliness. 

Once the paint was dry and I'd put everything back in its place, Mr. Wonderful opened the cabinet doors himself. 

"Not bad," he said with a nod.

"Now do you see why I cared?" He nodded. "You care now, too, right?" He shrugged. I just know deep, deep, deep down he cared about those interiors.

"Hey, I've got another job for you," he said. "It's sanding down--"

"No!" I plugged my ears. "I never want to sand again!" Even with my ear's plugged I could hear him laughing. 

He's so funny. [Said with an ironic tone.] So very funny.

An Unexpected Surprise

"Craigslist," I said putting a sticky note on the brand new box of never-worn men's roller blades.

"What's going on," Mr. Wonderful said finding me in the laundry room knee deep in stuff.

"Goodwill," I pointed to three bags of clothing.

"You're cleaning out the house?"  

"Garbage," I slapped a sticky on an old painting.

"Thank you!"

Yes, Mr. Wonderful was thanking me now but I'm not sure if he'd be thanking me in the evening. But then, why not? Mr. Wonderful was full of surprises. And thus far, January, too, had been full of surprises: 1) The weather had been 75-80 degrees F every day; 2) The sun had been shining every day; and 3) I'd gotten a suntan on New Year's day. I loved January surprises! One of the best things about January is getting rid of all the rubbish and detritus that accumulated during the previous year… just in time to make room for the junk I got for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa! 

On this glorious day in which Mr. Wonderful had to work at the studio, I decided that I'd work, too. I dropped off a car full of bags at Goodwill, snapped some photos of "For Sale" stuff for Craigslist and emptied everything from my kitchen cabinets. In other words, I cleaned out the laundry room then made a mess of the kitchen. 

Oh, yes! Mr. Wonderful was going to be surprised alright!

But this was done with the goal of painting the kitchen cabinets' interior. Therefore every pot, pan, plate, bowl, spoon, mixer and cookie cutter was removed from its place in a kitchen cabinet and put atop the kitchen table, the butcher's block and the cat's water bowl. I had stashed more kitchen detritus  in those cabinets that now any available counter space in my kitchen was at a premium. Besides Jackson never drank from his water bowl preferring the pool's water. I like my water with lemon, he likes his with chlorine.

I seized 16,000 sheets of newspaper and laid them all over the floor, then grabbed the paint and brushes. The cat looked at me with interest.

"It's time to paint the interior of the kitchen cabinets!" I sang to the feline. He blinked, yawned then exited the kitchen for his 10th nap of the day. They're called "cat naps" for a reason. Cat's take them. A lot. 

As for my painting, my plan was to have the cabinet interiors painted and every pot, pan, plate, bowl, spoon, mixer and cookie cutter returned to its rightful place by the time Mr. Wonderful came home from the studio. Unfortunately it was only at this time that I closely examined the interior of the kitchen cabinets to find them, in short: a lousy mess. Their surfaces were as rough as Jackson's tongue, without the sanitary element. Evidently, previous owners had glued shelf paper to the cabinet interiors, which had left them covered in layers of residual glue making the cabinets as smooth as a pot-holed, rocky road in Cleveland. 

My, my, what a surprise. I couldn't just paint. Oh no, first I had to wash every shelf, door and wall; sand all the surfaces down; wash everything again; then paint. I hated January surprises. 

I went to the spotless laundry room to retrieve the sandpaper then returned to the disaster zone of my kitchen to sand down everything--scrape, scrape.

When you're sanding wood for, oh I don't know, 65 hours, the best thing to pass the time is to listen to NPR's Fresh Air radio show--every single episode of its 25 plus years. And when Terry Gross has stopped asking insightful questions of the newsmakers and culture shapers of the day, well keep sanding, Sugar, because it's ain't over. Scrape, scrape.

I sanded in the morning, I sanded in the afternoon, I sanded into the evening and I still it wasn't done. What a surprise. Speaking of, my spouse was going to be surprised when he saw the "Area 51" I had created in the space formerly known as "our kitchen". But hey, if he wanted to eat in a clean place, he could chow down in the laundry room.

"What's going on," Mr. Wonderful said finding me standing on the counter, balancing on one foot to reach a far corner in the uppermost cabinet. 

"I'm sanding," I said my clothes, hair and face covered in the super fine dust of wood and glue circa 1960. 

"What a surprise."

"I was supposed to be done by the time you got home."

"You're full of surprises."

"So if you want to eat in a clean place, go to the laundry room."

"Only if you join me," he revealed a carryout bag of Indian curry. I smiled tasting the wood dust on my lips.

"I like your surprise better than mine."

"Only because mine's finished.

Touché.

Good surprises and gifts shouldn't be reserved just for the holidays. January needs them, too. Scrape, scrape.

Remodeling Connections

"All things are connected," observed the Victorian author E.M. Forester.

Clearly he had remodeled a kitchen.

When my husband and I embarked on our kitchen remodel we decided to do it on the cheap, which was a win-win situation: Mr. Wonderful liked my frugality and after "redoing" our guestroom together, I liked that he still liked me.  DIY home remodels had fractured stronger relationships than ours, so I was thrilled he was game to tackle the hardest room in the house on my bare-bones budget.

Our planned remodel consisted of painting the cabinets, replacing their hardware and installing a backsplash (that was both practical and gorgeous; another win-win!)  And that was where we planned to finish the remodel.  But plans are things you make before your kitchen collapses around you.  What we didn't plan for was Forester's insight: "All things are connected".   Let me tell you, the bookish Brit wasn't kidding.

A kitchen is connected to a stove, so we bought one.  A stove is connected to an overhead hood, so we purchased one.  A hood is connected to a ceiling vent, so we busted through to the roof and made one.  A ceiling hole is connected to repair work, so we insulated and replastered.  Hoods are connected to symmetry, so once our narrow stove was centered under the hood it produced gaps on either side of it... and gaps as wide as the Grand Canyon aren't connected to anything but needed to be, so we made two cabinets to fill them in.  New cabinets are connected to finding things easily or why else would you bother installing the darn things in the first place?  So we built pull-out drawers.  Pull-out drawers are connected to special parts, so we special ordered their specialness despite their extra special arrival delay.  All of this stuff is connected to our money, which was in shorter supply now than when we'd started this %&#@$ DIY project, which was all your cheap, frickin' idea!

The money, the stress of cooking in a lumberyard, the constant scrapping-and-making of plans, this gentle readers, was why relationships broke during DIY projects!

E.M. recognized the ugly truth of remodels but he also gave me the solution.  I walked out to Mr. Wonderful's work bench.  Sawdust covered his dark hair, band-aids were wrapped around three of his fingers.  He set his drill down.

"I'm making steak for dinner," I said.
"Great I'm starving..." he said giving me the first smile of the day.  "Crap, then I have to hook up the stove again."
"Nope.  We're grilling out."
"Yes" he said high-fiving me.

It's connections, people.  With all the kitchen, stuff, crap in a remodel don't forget to connect to the people.  Because... all things are connected.

Kitchen Remodel: Backsplash Installation

“I got the tiles for the kitchen backsplash,” I told Mr. Wonderful.

“Good,” he said while shaving in the bathroom.

“I got the grout for the tiles.”

“Good.”

“I called the handyman to install it.”

“No way!” he said nicking his chin.

Since buying The House my husband had turned into a Do-It-Yourself maniac.  It started small with him installing handles on the closet doors the week we moved in and grew with each DIY success until now he wanted to single-handedly expand the kitchen to feed 80, add a helicopter landing pad and build a second Griffith Observatory on our roof.  All while working a full time job.  It was crazy.  He was crazy.  He was driving me crazy.

Now he spent hours at hardware stores buying materials.  He spent days on the internet researching DIY projects.  He spent weeks avoiding local handymen. 

One of our neighbors, James, was a certified electrician.  When we first trimmed our palm trees, James thanked us by handing out his business card,

“If you need any electrical repairs, call me,” he said with a wave. 

Instead of seeing this as the friendly gesture it was, Mr. Wonderful viewed it as a challenge to his masculine virility.  I saw his chin jut out in defiance and could hear his brain screaming: Fix our electrical system?  Over my dead body!

So I said goodbye to a weekend with Mr. Wonderful.  And for the next 60 hours I worked, I went to dinner with my girlfriends, I watched every movie at Laemmle’s Polish Film Festival just to avoid being in his hair while he toiled on the remodel.  While I gallivanted around Los Angeles, he prepped the walls, applied the glue and slapped the tile suckers to it. 

Then he rested for two weeks.  After which I, again, became a weekend widow while he spent another weekend applying the grout.  This time I worked overtime at the office, I invited myself to dinner with my girlfriends and their boyfriends, I caught Laemmle’s entire Icelandic Film Fest.  I’d never seen so much ice on film.  During (another) harsh ice film scene I got a text message from Mr. Wonderful.

“Come home."

I returned to the house with coffee, sushi and ice cream.  I entered the kitchen and beheld a finished backsplash and a dirty spouse.

"It’s beautiful,” I gasped.  He ran his grout-encrusted hands through his hair.  He was beautiful.  There was nothing but masculine, virile perfection about him and his work. 

So I decided: If he really wanted to be a DIY maniac… I’d let him.