My home life is interesting of late. Not in terms of relationships or family or anything of the sort; it is simply that our physical space has been uprooted in a way that I find to be more fundamentally unsettling than moving. We are in the process of completely renovating our kitchen. On Hallowe’en, friends and family gathered to help us remove all of the cupboards, the ceiling tiles, the plaster and lathe walls, the mice nests, the nails, and everything else that was in the way. Then, on All Saint’s Day, the two of us chipped away at two layers of horrid flooring that was glued and brittle. There is no better word than ‘chipped.’ We used ice choppers.
Before all that, however, there was an interesting rearrangement of the entire downstairs. This shifting called into question something that we generally take for granted; for, when it comes to layouts of rooms, a certain number of conventions are generally followed whether we are aware of them or not. We store our food and cooking implements in the kitchen, our fancy eating accoutrements in the dining room, the comfortable seating in the living room, and some odds-and-ends of welcoming in a foyer or vestibule. This, in our house, is completely upside down and as a result, much of our sense of place is also turned upside down.
This is what we did. We slid the fridge into the dining room and plugged it in. Then we realized it was on a slight dip in the floor so we have to push the door hard to make sure it stays closed. In front of the fridge is a large cardboard box filled with various food items. There is no rhyme or reason – the box has everything from tea to oatmeal, from crackers to spices, from granola bars to peanut butter. I don’t even know what’s on the bottom anymore. We just keep peeling things off the top to get by. We also moved the stove into the dining room, which is making the somewhat small, burgundy colored space look a little cramped. Especially with the food-preparation table, the toaster, the dishes, and another cardboard box. The stove, which is gas, is not actually plugged in, so it’s being used as a dust collector and Holder of Things. We also had the microwave in here, but it turns out that if we ran the microwave for more than 30 seconds, it blew a circuit because of the fridge. So, the microwave, and the crock pot, are both on TV trays in the foyer. It makes perfect sense – writing desk, lamp, globe, slow cooker, dust.
Our living room has nothing living in it because, along with the layer of dust, it is filled with approximately 18 cabinets in various stages of not-put-togetherness. Tall ones, fat ones, drawers, parts, toe-kicks, cardboard corner-protectors, squishy foam protective wraps, shrink wrap, directions, dust. When I look at it, the thing that runs first and foremost in my mind is gratitude that it is not me who has to make sense of it.
We also ripped out a closet (which, ironically, was not a very good closet even before all of this happened) and now have a back hall that is as empty as the kitchen. But at least it is not filled with inadequate closet any longer.
So, what does it all mean? Our foyer is a squalid apartment kitchen, our dining room is a studio apartment kitchen with a bad landlord, our living room is a self storage area for disorganized people and, until recently, our kitchen looked like an attached shed. It has upgraded now, with drywall, but it still has a ways to go. As I paint and watch cabinets go in, I’m sure my ideas will change. For now, however, I’m mystified by how unsettling it can be to put one’s house into a contractor’s snow globe and then wait for the drywall snow to settle. It feels a little like the dust is but ashes and our living space is but a smaller version of Mt. Vesuvius.
All of this said, however, I must side with the optimists. They say that the kitchen is the heart of any home, and what I’m learning during this process is that it keeps beating even when you gut it completely and coat it with a fine layer of white dust.
But, still, I long to bake cookies.
No comments:
Post a Comment