Kitchen Nightmares

"Remodeling" is a circle of Hell.

When we bought our house, we understood it was a flip. But in East Nashville, if you aren’t buying your house from the original owner, who, based on several places we saw, spent the last half-century sucking down Marlboro Lights in front of a fan specifically aimed to blow the nicotine directly onto a wallpaper trifle covering the load-bearing walls, you’re buying it from a flipper.

Best to let them do the scraping.

At the time, we assumed it was nothing we couldn’t fix. The work seemed to have been done well; there were a few things they cheaped out on, but we didn’t need to fix them immediately. The house is over 100 years old, and the hardwood infrastructure and basement carved from stone would save it from whatever a middle-aged hipster with a YouTube carpentry degree could throw at, we assumed.

YouTube carpentry degrees are, it turns out, infinitely more valuable than YouTube plumbing degrees, and you can do a lot of damage with a wrench and an overinflated sense of confidence — notably, fail to notice that you plugged the refrigerator’s water line to the HOT water instead of the COLD WATER. Which is hard to do since the lines are PEX and the HOT one is RED and the COLD one is BLUE.

Anyway, about a year after we acquired the house (and the poorly plumbed fridge), the water in the RED tube finally eroded through the water line and fused all the high-quality plastic parts together, and then promptly ejected itself into the wall, where it dripped our filtered fridge water into the basement, creating a lovely indoor pool.

I figured this out one morning while working at the dining room table. I started hearing a drop drop drop coming from somewhere in the basement. I was too afraid to look, since I typically pay the bill for the homeowners insurance, and after sending the Man of the House, we determined the indoor pool was not, in fact, included on the original schematics of the house.

In all seriousness, the refrigerator flooded the wall behind it, the floor beneath it and, subsequently, the ceiling and walls directly below it in the basement. The water seeped into the kitchen cabinets next to the refrigerator and behind part of the range, and then outward from the fridge toward the dining room. The flooring in the house is contiguous, so taking out just a few square feet imperiled all of the hardwood on the first floor. The water leaked through to the subfloor in some places; luckily part of the kitchen’s subfloor had been replaced when the basement was sealed, so the damage was contained in one direction.

The next few weeks are a blur of calls with USAA, which is an excellent insurance company to have if your fridge ever accidentally floods your basement, and discussions with various members of the skilled trades, all over the pleasant, 100-decibel droning of industrial dryers.

I think it was the dryers that ultimately drove me insane, because less than 24 hours after they sent me the estimate for the mitigation, commercial cleaning, and restoration — which included an attempt to preserve, rather than repair, the 100-year-old original floors, I decided we should just renovate the whole thing.

I don’t know why. I still don’t. When I think of that moment, there’s jut a calm that washes over me. It’s the tranquility of the deranged.

This last week, we embarked on a full kitchen and flooring renovation, which first involves packing up our first floor and moving out completely for a little over a week while they destroy my existing kitchen, pull up the flooring in part of the house, sand all of the wood on the first floor (which is all connected, of course), repair and replace the floor, and stain and steal the floor.

Theoretically we’ll be moving back in at the end of this week.

Right now, we’re living in a short-term rental building, which is fascinating in Nashville, where all of the other tenants are bachelorette parties. My kids are very excited because the apartment has bunk beds they’re all terrified of sleeping in. I’m very excited because the true horror of being without a kitchen for 6 to 8 weeks hasn’t quite sunken in yet.

There are some bright spots. We don’t feel bad about ordering takeout. And since this is the first and last time we plan on renovating the kitchen, we’re sparing no expense on appliances. For me, that means spending so much money in one appliance store that I’m now blind to prices. At one point, my kids decided that our appliance package should include one of those fancy Japanese toilets that washes you and warms your booty and sings you a pleasant song to soothe you while you’re eliminating and I’m still not sure I should say no.

Once this is done, we’re all going to deserve it.

Stay tuned here for updates!