The kitchen is a wreck. I don’t know how old it is, but the house was built in 1934. It looks like the cabinets are home-made. The top ones are nonstandard heights and are too close to the counter to my liking. The latches are bizarre things that ‘flip’ to secure when the doors are closed, and the hinges are exterior ones. The drawers below the counter don’t have ball bearings. They don’t even have tracks. They’re like boxes that slide wood-on-wood. I don’t remember what the floors looked like before my friend I bought the house from bought it, but there’s a strip of black vinyl from the sink to the fridge, and the rest is carpeted in the same burgundy carpet that’s in the the living room.
And that’s not the worst part of the kitchen.
The worse part is on the other side. My friend left a circular table with folding leaves. One leaf is folded, and the table is stuck in a corner where it supports the microwave oven with the toaster oven on top, a bag of cat foot, and other things. Abutting that is a four-foot table I made from parts I got at Ikea and was using as a dining table when I lived in L.A. Now it’s a catch-all. The Kitchen-Aid mixer, the SO’s Soda Stream, bottles of syrups for the sodas, cereal, bread, baskets of stuff, and other things crowd the top. Underneath is the box containing the pan hanger that I never put up, the slow cooker, the electric skillet, large bowls, the potatoes, and who-knows-what else. It’s ugly. Very ugly.
I’ve been wanting to do fantastic things to the kitchen, but I don’t have the money. I wanted to at least replace the afore-mentioned mess with cabinets, but thought I’d have to re-do the floors first. I asked the SO, and she said I could just put cabinets on top of the carpet and it would be perfectly functional until we have the resources to do it right. I checked prices, and a new cabinet and counter is surprisingly affordable. I ordered four 24-inch cabinets, each with a door and a roller bearing drawer, from Home Despot for $115 each. I got a nice (for a given value of ‘nice’) for $125 with tax (plus gas to make the 160-mile round trip to get it from the store that had it). We wanted a pantry, but they’re 84 inches and the ceiling is 85 inches. We would have had to do some sawing and reassembling; hence, the four cabinets instead of three.
The cabinets are not impressive. Particle board. Definitely won’t last forever. But they’re cheap. They’re white, so the SO can paint them how she wants to. They’re functional. The local store only had two cabinets in stock, so I have to wait for the other two before I pick them up. Once installed, we’ll have six feet of countertop (the microwave oven takes two feet out of the eight) to prepare food on. We’ll even have enough space to make ravioli. The large appliances like the electric skillet and the crock pot, plus the foodstuffs and other things, will be nicely out of sight behind closed doors. With four smooth-functioning drawers, we can organise our flatware and utensils much better than in the two smaller, clunky drawers that came with the house.
Cheapo cabinets and a laminated countertop are a far cry from what I want to do to the kitchen; but they’ll be considerably better than the existing situation, and a fraction of the cost of what I really want. Had I known how inexpensive it would be, and that I didn’t have to do the floors first, I wold have done this years ago.
