Our recent kitchen remodel which was projected to last 3 weeks, lasted 6. I don’t understand why contractors can’t predict the amount of time it will take to finish a job. They spend every day doing this work, they should have a sense of how long it takes. Have they ever been correct in their estimates? We all know they’ll be wrong. Contractors are either in a constant state of delusion and denial or quite possibly, their experience of time is different than ours. Maybe contractors are from a different planet where days have more than 24 hours.

This was not my contractor:

My kitchen designer was a genius. She picked gorgeous cabinets and accessories. The only problem was she wanted me to do the actual choosing of the colors and cabinet handles. Here’s the thing: I don’t care. I just want it to look nice, and I trusted her expertise. I was either her easiest client or her most difficult. Our conversations went like this:

Designer: Which sample of counter top do you like (displays 5 small squares of grayish stone)Me: Well, which one do you like? Designer: I like this one (points to one with shiny flecks in it) Me: That’s the one I was going to choose.

These were not the stones:

And so it went on like this, for cabinet cuts (that’s the little edges around the doors) and paint color, etc., etc.

Also, I now have an appliance garage. I don’t have a garage for my car, but my toaster and coffee pot live in a little house of their own. The blender is allowed to come for visits.

Post-construction, our kitchen is beautiful. So beautiful that our daughter walked into the finished room and said, “It doesn’t look like our house. It looks like some fancy hotel.”

The child has no idea what a fancy hotel looks like.

This is not my kitchen:

In the end, I admit it was worth it. If only for our small appliances to feel at home.