Goodbye, Kitchen

The End Of One Conversation Makes Way For Another

Our kitchen is in the process of getting demolished.

Gutting it was the plan all along. I mean, we’d bought a cool mid-century modern house with a deteriorating pink and gold cheesy laminate kitchen. People would come into the house and say, wow, this place is so cool, then they’d get to the kitchen and there would be this silence because that’s the effect the kitchen had. This was the moment I felt the house tour got good; the long pause bursting into amused/incredulous laughter. What are you going to do with this? was the most common question, and of course, we told with relish what was around the corner, while pointing out the oddest elements, like the can opener built into the wall.

What we are doing to it involves crowbars and sledgehammers and the tearing down of walls and ceiling. We’re pulling up the bewilderingly poor choice of wall-to-wall carpet and pulling out the old appliances. We will fill a dumpster, maybe two, before putting in the new kitchen we have been planning for a year.

It’s exciting, right? Then why I am feeling so unsettled and, yes, melancholy? I sit here hunkered down over my laptop in a cramped bedroom antechamber, sipping coffee from the coffee maker we have relocated to the bathroom, wondering if we shouldn’t have just made do with the old kitchen. It was weird, but we had learned how to deal with it. It smelled funky from the carpet and what I am pretty sure was a bad rodent problem at some point in time, but after a while, I got used to it. The pink and gold stopped hurting my eyes. It was just far enough removed from hideous to feel like home.

But it’s too late. Plans have been drawn, payments made. The old cabinets have been excised, and new cabinets are being milled in some shop somewhere. The demolition crew is out there now. The ship has sailed.

I imagine a future when folks coming to this house ooh and ahh over how lovely the transformed kitchen is. But it occurs to me that I like the conversations surrounding how bizarre something is rather than the ones where I gracefully accept compliments. I understand this predilection isn’t typical or even normal, and certainly, no justification to keep living in kitschy squalor. I understand the new kitchen will feel like home, precisely what happened with the affront of a kitchen that is tugging at my heart as it bites the dust.

You won’t believe this kitchen is forever gone from our house tour narrative, replaced by here’s our new kitchen, but I know that will be immediately followed by, hey, come over here, you will not believe this crazy-ass fuchsia powder room. Suddenly I feel better, because now, we’re talking.