Another project begins for want of a cup…

I’m in my kitchen. I’ve got a cup of coffee in one hand and I’m looking for sugar. I’m holding a cupboard door in my other hand. This wouldn’t be noteworthy except for the simple fact that the cupboard door is no longer attached to the kitchen cabinet. I’m staring into the cabinet that no longer has a door and into the sugar bowl that is currently holding some saw dust and two of the four screws that hold the European hinge in place. The other two screws are dangling from the hinge that is still affixed to the door.

From here the sugar bowl looks like a tiny ski chalet with tiny skiers all over the little sugary slopes next to the lodge that looks like two giant screws (because they are). There are bits of powdered press wood all over the shelf. My blood pressure is now audible in my ears.

Luckily for both my cardio vascular integrity and the rest of the cabinets the arrival of the new kitchen stuff from Ikea was imminent. And luckily the guy doing the demo and installation was right now staring jaw agape into a sugar bowl full of screws and particle board dust. The old cabinets were white Formica over press-wood with flimsy plastic white handles that were probably considered cutting edge design about 25 years ago.

The floor, which started life as 28 one foot-square garishly white patterned tiles had over the years become something like 42,000 little tiny pieces of garishly white patterned one-inch square mosaic tiles because they were improperly set. Nothing like thinking someone is in the kitchen preparing a crunchy fresh salad only to discover that its just the tiles cracking under foot.

In addition to new cabinets, I’ll be installing the new wood floor and the new back splash and the new range and the finish carpentry and the new light fixture as well as assembling all the cabinets and drawers and shelves. The counter will be subcontracted out because hey, I don’t want to knock myself out with too much to do. Before any of this can be done…there is the demolition. The old kitchen will be reduced to something like 300 heavy garbage bags of detritus that I will have to hump haul down to a waiting hired garbage truck. Included will undoubtedly be my pride, one or two vertebrae and quite possibly my nuts. Despite my best effort to seal off the kitchen from the rest of civilization I will raise enough dust and soot to make what happened at Pompeii look like a sneeze.

Some hands-on types love the demolition part. They love the primal manly act of taking a hammer to something and reducing it to unrecognizable rubble. They grunt and they scream and they roar like some kind of dumb gorillas in the wild. They hi-five each other as if it took some great effort to smash drywall into powder. I have friends who only offer to help me with my projects if they can limit their efforts to the demo. The construction crew I worked for strangely had 100% attendance when there was a new demo project. It is a cloddish heavy handed job absent of finesse. They never consider the electricity or the plumbing until the lights go out and/or the water starts spraying in to the room like we were on a ship in a storm- at midnight.

I hate demo. I hate making a mess and noise and dust because the next step in the chain is cleaning it up. Fine dust resists the best efforts of vacuum, wet rag and mop and sticks around longer than your mother in law after an unexpected visit. I am your atypical OCD construction dude/entertainer. I like to keep it neat and quiet and organized so that ratio of work to clean up is kept in a nice balance.

So here I am, holding the door and a coffee considering the job at hand, saying my calming mantras and congratulating myself on starting the demo almost without a sound…

Do stay tuned….