Refugees at Home

I swear to heaven that it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Hypnotized by HGTV, we took a perfectly good kitchen (if not our aesthetic ideal), ripped it out by the seams, and have for the last four months given a painful, bloody Lamaze-style birth to the placement of each pantry cupboard, each major home appliance, each light fixture.

We have weathered swirling Iraqi sandstorms of sawdust as new floors were placed and finished, fled clouds of toxic polyurethane gas as wooden surfaces were sealed, and watched the dumpster in our front yard fill up with the shattered remains of our once calm lives. My husband estimates that it’s also half full of hundred-dollar bills.

Our entry in the brutally competitive South Minneapolis home-remodeling derby got out of control in a classic example of mission creep. The kitchen remodel begat the brainstorm of knocking down the living room walls and making everything flow. That led to the inspiration to replace the first floor’s retirement-age windows with modern ones. The great new light and sightlines made the old fireplace look frowsy, so we ordered a radical facelift. Each project dominoed into a half-dozen others.

We can hold no one but ourselves responsible for this, our own personal Alamo. We cannot indulge in a soul-exfoliating self-pity party, and neither can we finger-point our way to blamelessness. Note to the contractors: Please send all future invoices and correspondence to Husband and Wife, Chumptown, USA.

Our household consists of three teenagers, two adults, and a predictable stream of neighbor kids. That makes for one busy kitchen. Oh, I promised in the beginning of this unrest that I’d drink Slim Fast and Instant Breakfast every morning, and hand the kids piping hot toaster strudels on the way to school, then make it up to them nutritionally with crisp, sweet apples and a balanced, root-vegetable-laden slow-cooker meal in the evening. But no. Pizza it is, three times a week, and pizza it will be, until this is all said and done with.

Not all the feathers in our humble nest are ruffled. The mini camp kitchen in our basement TV room is like a dream come true to our kids. Now, they need only slog five feet’s distance from the beanbag chair to the microwave oven, jab at the buttons blindly while keeping both eyes focused on the Cartoon Network, and in thirty seconds yank out a salty, yellow gravy-rich Santa Fe chicken pocket. The middle teen eats a diet that consists of Wonder Bread, peanut butter sandwiches, and microwaved bacon. While he remains Keith Richards-thin, we’re convinced that he’s on his way to total cholesterol collapse. We’re thinking of stirring a Flintstone vitamin/Lipitor drug cocktail into the Skippy. It’s chunky style; he’ll never notice.

We actually bought the components of this dream kitchen last year. They sat out on our breezy sleeping porch during the warm months, ruining our summer. And now, rested by their vacation, they’re ruining our winter, disrupting the school year, business trips, and major holidays.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. On the last two holidays we’ve hosted, major snafus have gone down. Last Christmas, we forgot to turn the oven on and we served up a fully frozen ham for dinner. And the Thanksgiving before that, I set the turkey on fire. I was trying to save time, using one of those newfangled Reynolds Oven Bags. The fire department tracked the problem to me shoving a twenty-two-pound turkey into a fifteen-pound bag. Old habits die hard, I guess. That’s the same logic I apply to my wardrobe.

Or maybe it’s just that our kitchen space is cursed. I should look at this project as an exorcism. A healing time to clear out the bad culinary juju and begin afresh. The next holiday we’re set to host is Easter, and if all goes well, we might have the countertops in by then. We’ll say a prayer of Thanksgiving. Jesus saves. And Domino’s delivers.