Ok - none of this is a complaint. This is a cautionary tale for you to use whenever your significant other proposes a kitchen renovation. You can say, “well, I knew a guy who renovated his kitchen and he killed himself by jumping off his deck 187 times.”
This is really long. Print it out and keep it somewhere you can get to quickly. I recommend hiding it in your kitchen somewhere.
We hired a kitchen designer and we hired a cabinet designer. Don’t ask - I don’t know why.
The cabinet designer came over four times and produced a plan that you would have produced if you came over once and wrote “Install the same cabinets, but fancier” on a piece of paper. He was a wonderful gentleman, but we no longer speak.
The kitchen designer worked up a bunch of different paint colors, tile colors, cabinet colors, counter top colors. I found her helpful, but she picked out this one particular tile from this one particular store...it was an absolutely generic ceramic tile that you could have gotten close to for $2 a square foot at Home Depot. But at this dopey store, it was $6 a square foot. It’s a big kitchen....that crap adds up. I kept that to myself, but that will come back later.
She/we/not me picked out a countertop by CaesarStone. It was fine - I didn’t really care.
Now, we go back to cabinet guy. He has worked up a plan and a price. The price was stupid, but the cabinets were nice, so fine. We place the order. Couple of weeks later, we go back - we’re ordering the countertop from him, too.
While we’re there, he gives us some kind of printed update from the cabinet making peeps and I’m reading it because I just could not care less about whatever else is going on and I notice that the receipt he gave me did not match our plan. Cabinets were wrong, cabinets were duplicated, cabinets were omitted, they forgot the fancy-ass molding - the order was entirely botched.
We call a halt to the whole thing and someone is going to call us to straighten things out. They did call, but their efforts were really just to try to get me to accept most of what they got wrong. It was like a Honda Civic’s worth of “not what we wanted”, so I just told them to cancel the works. Cabinet guy is apologetic; we part as friends. Friends who will never speak again.
A friend of mine tells me that he knows a custom cabinet maker in Westchester who can help. We drive from the first cabinet place in northern Dutchess County down to southern Westchester. And then we go back the next day, too - the day after that, they come up and measure. We make a deal and the cabinets arrive eight weeks later. (They’re spectacular. Not without issue, as you will see, but they’re so well-made and somehow came out to be about 1/2 the cost of what we expected to pay.)
When the cabinets come in, I start taking down the old cabinets. We also had these dopey soffits that we hated - while I was taking them down, I tore a ligament in my elbow that will need to be repaired. I’ve broken ankles, feet, ribs and even a stress fracture in a hip - this is not the most painful thing, but it is tops for sheer annoyance. Picking anything up hurts. Shaking hands with people is agony. I see stars if I so much as rest it on the arm of a chair. I tried to fist bump a priest at my nephew’s confirmation because I couldn’t move my fingers that day.
In the middle there, without going into detail, we lose our kitchen designer. The poor woman had something so bad happen to her that no one in good conscience would ever think to bother her about something so stupid as a ceramic tile. So we set out on our own there.
My wife and I kind of bicker about the tile - I didn’t care about the color, but paying that much for a simple ceramic tile grated on me. Finally, I give up, I tell my wife to meet me at the tile store after work and we’ll place the order for that and for the CaesarStone counter. My wife gets to the tile store a half hour before I do....and no one helps her.
My wife is the nicest person in the world. But certain things bug her - if she’s in your store about to drop thousands of dollars on something, she expects someone to say hi in less than 30 minutes. By the time I get there, they could not have given her the tile for free - they were done for and the tile problem was solved.
We then drove to some hole in the wall tile place next to an OTB. The woman working there is from Yonkers - only thing you need to know about women from Yonkers is that they’re right and you’re wrong. She looked at our kitchen tile and countertop colors and she tells my wife, “You don’t want any of this.”
Over the next half hour, the woman throws out all of our plans. At some point, I started to make excuses as to why we had to leave because I was sure my wife was boiling inside. Nope, my wife loves this woman - an hour later, we walk out with an entirely different kitchen floor and the next day, she drives us down to this huge fab in Westchester where we pick out a completely different countertop. Woman was a genius.
Every thing is starting to come together after the fits and starts. I take the kitchen apart, redo the wiring, installed the recessed lighting and then have a plaster guy come in to do the Sheetrock, etc. (Quick note - if you’re doing recessed lighting, I cannot say enough good things about Halo - I’ve used the 5” cans and the 5” reno fixtures....really well-designed. Also, I give high marks to LeGrand’s Adorne switches and outlets - they’re a serious pain in the ass to find and they’re stupid expensive, but they’re really well-designed and look terrific. My wife saw the ones in the kitchen and forced me to swap out everything in the house.)
After agonizing over the appliances, we picked out what we wanted - my brother renovates houses in DC and he orders his appliances from US Appliance. They deliver quick, says he. We did save some money, but they most definitely did not deliver quick. They deliver quick when you live in metro DC....when you live in upstate NY, it is no so quick.
It took three weeks for them to put them on a truck. It took a week to get them from Michigan to New York and then it took two weeks for Fed Ex to put them on another truck to travel the last ten miles. They missed their promised delivery date by about three weeks; I was impressed at how little that bothered them. Buy from Best Buy or Lowes or Sears or Home Depot instead.
Now, all the appliances are in, floors are in, cabinets are in, plumbing has been moved, etc. Contractor comes up to install. He’s a friend of mine, so we’re working together. We set out all of the base cabinets and what we had really did not match the plan. After beating our heads against the wall, I call the cabinet guy and tell him that I think he screwed up - he says, ahhhh....I think you have the old plan.
Long story short, there were two plans. The working plan that we did with him and the actual plan that was generated when his guy came and took dimensions. An 18” base cabinet became a 12” base cabinet - no big deal but moving things six inches was not going to happen with the plumbing. So there’s a week delay.
Here’s where we screwed up....when that happened, we really should have set out the wall cabinets, too. That is what we should have done. What we did do was we went out and sat on the deck and drank beer.
So fast forward a week, we set the base cabinets, appliances, install the fancy-ass fake door stuff that I would never have brought, but my wife declared non-negotiable, etc. We have some carpenters helping us and one of them comes in and asks where two of the 36” wall cabinets were. We go out and look through a garage-ful of cabinets in boxes. Called the cabinet guy. He calls the trucking guy. Cabinet guy calls back and just says, hey, we just didn’t make those.
That was three weeks ago. They were supposed to be delivered last Thursday. Friday, at the latest. Monday, at the absolutely outside window. Definitely will not be later than Tuesday. Not sure what the timeline is now, but they ain’t here.
But at least the countertops were being installed today, so that we would basically have a functioning kitchen.
Countertop guys park in front of the house at 7 am and eat breakfast. Odd, but all right. At 8, they pull into the driveway. At 8:03, they pull out of the driveway and park about 100 yards down the road. They keep getting into and out of the truck. Obviously, there is some sort of calamity that they want to sort out somewhere that I’m not.
Eventually, they drive back, knock on the door and tell me that they cannot install the countertop. Who knows how, but the biggest piece cracked on the drive up. The fab shop calls me and asks if I can come down today and pick out a new slab and do the layout. I leave work early, drive to their place, spend about an hour trying to figure out how to lay out this new slab in such a way that it won’t piss off my wife. (I can’t call her or send pictures because she’s on the Cape with no power.)
Finally, it’s all decided. They’re really apologetic, etc.,etc. Can’t do enough for me....until I tell them that I’m going on vacation and I really need this done by the end of the week. (Because I am going on vacation and really need this done by the end of the week.) Somehow, with a straight face, the manager said, “But sir, that is not realistic....we are very busy, you know.”
I am not, by nature, a drinker. There hasn’t been one time in my life where I’ve gone to the refrigerator to get a beer or a drink unless we have people over. My wife hates when I buy beer because it stays in the fridge for years. Since this thing has started, I have ended nearly every day with some sort of drink, sitting on my deck staring at nothing. I now have six different kinds of gin in the freezer; I can make a gin and tonic about 14 different ways. There are three deer that frequent my yard - I have spent enough time staring at them that I actually told my wife tonight that I thought the middle one and the small one are not getting along right now.
You don’t want to end up like me. You don’t. Don’t renovate your kitchen. Buy a new house, find a new wife, whatever. Don’t.
