Buy a house, they said. It will be fun, they said.


The most dreaded words for any wife: “Don’t get mad, babe, but…”

Now these words could most certainly be followed by terrible possibilities, but “I gutted the kitchen” was not high on the list of sweet things that I hoped my husband would be saying to me this past weekend.

Let’s review the plan for the kitchen update:

  1. Replacing the appliances that pre-dated me
  2. Giving the cabinets a coat of white paint and new pulls
  3. Replace the existing, scratched laminate counters with a new butcher block counter
  4. Fix the gaping hole in the ceiling from where we took out the old oven and discovered an exhaust vent
  5. A fresh coat of paint

Jordan called in the experts, two of his uncles, to come patch the hole in the ceiling with him, and I went and ran some errands for things we needed to start working on our MINOR kitchen renovation. The operative word here being “minor.”

When I returned from said errands, the counters were removed, every single cabinet had been taken down, and 3 of the 4 walls in the kitchen were stripped down to the studs. Panic mode fully engaged!

When the uncles assessed the current kitchen situation, they found that the wall that they needed the ceiling patch to meet was wildly uneven. The kitchen was the only room in the house that still had plaster walls, as opposed to drywall/sheetrock. They determined that it’d be best to see if they could remove the cabinets, even out the wall slightly, and then replace the cabinets, except when they moved the cabinets they discovered a Theresa-sized hole in the wall behind them… and the base cabinets weren’t even attached to the walls. Lovely!

Please keep in mind that I am not a contractor, electrician, or a plumber. I know y’all are shocked by this revelation, but long story short, when the walls were opened up, they found some concerning wiring, suspect plumbing, and a lack of insulation in the walls. I could write you a list from here to tomorrow of all the things that now needed to be done before my supposedly minor kitchen renovation could get back on track, but my head is too busy seeing dollar signs.

We can all have a good LOL at how they decided to insulate the kitchen for the time being:


Why yes, those are pizza boxes stapled to my kitchen ceiling!

Off to Pinterest to pretend my dream kitchen visions are coming true.

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