Kitchen Stories (Part 2)
March 10, 2005

It was classic case of Color Remorse. We'd spent weeks deciding on a vibrant new color—Bermuda Teal—to repaint our old cabinets in our do-it-yourself kitchen upgrade. But the difference between a two-inch square paint swatch and an entire hanging cabinet hovering above my white stove like a lurid hot air balloon was about a trillion volts of attitude. We thought a little color would jazz up the place, but this was John Coltrane playing Giant Steps on helium.

But maybe it was just the shock of the new. After all, they laughed at Beethoven, they scorned Matisse, they knocked the rock, and we'd been living with faded aqua paint and white confetti Formica counters for so long. Art Boy loved the color (but having spent two hours applying it, his opinion was hardly impartial), and I told myself our incoming darker countertops would lend it a certain gravitas. We didn't want to be sorry later that we didn't have the courage of our color convictions.

Within minutes, I began to notice how pale and uninteresting the rest of the kitchen looked. I suddenly couldn't wait to repaint all the cabinets. The ancient Romans kept effigies of household gods to protect their domestic environment; the kitchen gods I imagined were mermaids and pirates eager to dance the limbo in an undersea grotto of Bermuda Teal. The very name seemed too polite; it should be Parrot Green, Peacock, Calypso. I heard steel drums every time I walked by the room!

To celebrate our new color, we ventured down to Home Depot for new drawer pulls and hardware. The kitchen section yielded up all kinds of exotic handles with price tages to match—up to $30 apiece—and we had 29 knobs to replace. Who says Big Box stores are cheap? Fortunately, while Art Boy was reeling off in a daze, he stumbled upon the cheap hardware section for us peasants. That was our mistake; we'd started out in the Design department! On the real-people aisle, we found much more reasonable stuff—and the knobs of our dreams: circle-of-life spirals in a faux pewter finish at $3 per. Mass-produced in China, they had a funky hand-made look, as if they'd been carved from pieces of eight.

Art Boy spent a day in the garage, assembling the two new cabinets, upper and lower, he'd built from spare art plywood, then painting and finally installing them in the empty kitchen corner. (It required new mouldings to disguise the gaps between his level cabinets and the wildly uneven walls.) One week later, the lower corner cabinet had to be ripped out and rebuilt to fit the countertop the Counter Guy had already cut according to preliminary measurements—before anybody discovered how badly bowed the walls were. This was an unexpected setback, but Art Boy was game. (Does that make him Game Boy?) He rebuilt and repainted, and when the crew came back, he helped them rip out the old Formica counters; in return, they set in our new sink (eight inches deep, and no divider; the better to wash champagne flutes), which Art Boy connected—very gingerly— to the house's antique plumbing.

The new dark teal counters looked spectacular with the Calypso cabinets. The extra five feet of countertop was a luxury of Babylonian proportions—everywhere I turned, there was a surface to set more stuff on! We ordered tile for the sink backsplash in variegated shades of turquoise, and splurged on complementary tiles in "cinnamon olive" (rust, peach, turquoise, and teal) for the wall behind the stove, under the newly repainted copper hood. Art Boy even built new under-the-counter rails for the funky (but useful) roll-out cutting board that came with the original kitchen.

But just when we were congratulating ourselves for keeping costs down by doing all the work ourselves, the unthinkable happened. Art Boy was reconnecting the stove after installing the tile, when the elderly plug made a noise that belongs in a Frankenstein movie and shorted out half the kitchen—including the refrigerator, which we re-routed via extension cord into a working socket in the next room. The fusebox did not respond to meddling, and visions of soaring electrical bills riverdanced in our heads as we contemplated the time, labor, and materials of rewiring a 45-year-old house. Oh, the humanity!

It was a cold morning (literally; our thermostat was on the blown circuit) waiting for the electrician. While we waited, Art Boy invited our next-door neighbor over to look at the problem. 30 seconds later we had full power. There was nothing wrong with the fuses, the vintage switches just needed a little persuasion. Our kitchen gods were certainly looking out for us. I figure our 18 hours of panic over the wiring was our penance for getting through the rest of the project relatively unscathed. (Aside from the fetching Mohawk streak of green hair Art Boy sported the day he painted the lower cabinets.)

While there's still some tweaking to be done, our hand-made upgrade is now mostly finished. You'd never mistake it for a designer kitchen, but Art Boy and me and the kichen gods are loving it. Anybody can have a muted, refined, grown-up kitchen—but this is where WE live.