SURVIVING SURGERY OF THE KITCHEN

By Helen Glissmeyer

I’m hungry, so I head for the refrigerator. But where is it? Vanished. Okay, then I’ll settle for a drink of water. What? No sink. Well, then I’ll just sit down at the table and chew on an apple. Oh, no. The table is gone, too!

My husband and I found that redoing a kitchen is one of the most traumatic experiences of a lifetime. It’s like having surgery on your nerves and digestive system at the same time, especially if you have all the vital parts of the kitchen removed and new ones installed, as we did. The pain of decision and disruption is intense. And no anesthetic can be administered—no Percocet or other pain medicine is prescribed. Nothing.

Throughout the ordeal, my husband consoled me every hour on the hour with, “It’ll be worth it, honey. You’ll see.” Thank goodness the reconstruction was his idea. If I had been the one to initiate the project, he probably would have paced and growled the whole time. 

As it was, I was the one who felt lost. I was ousted from my domain. Exiled. I felt like Thucydides, the ancient Athenian politician who was expelled from his country for twenty years. Though my exile lasted only two weeks, it seemed like an eternity. (We were lucky. I hear reports from others who say their kitchen remodel did last an eternity.) 

A temporary headquarters in my basement was the only thing that gave me a bit of security.  A small microwave and electric fry pan saved the day, along with a washroom sink. But I wore holes in my sneakers running to the garage to get milk and eggs from the refrigerator, which we had temporarily moved there. I often thought of Martha Washington, whose cookhouse at Mount Vernon was a separate building away from the main house. Of course, Martha had a crew of cooks and servants to do her running between stove and table. Or do you suppose she “let George do it?”

I was just glad I didn’t have to camp out longer than two weeks. The kitchen builders kept to their battle plan—which they had nailed to the wall the first day of the invasion. The hammers and saws kept firing away. The noise was like the battlefront at Gettysburg, and the dust like the precursor to a Missouri tornado.

Then the banging stopped; the war was over. The dust finally cleared, and what appeared was a vision from a fairy godmother’s wand. The operation was complete, and I woke up to a bright new workplace. The agony now forgotten, euphoria set in. Somehow I had survived the nightmare, and I awakened to find a kitchen that is a dream come true.

My final conclusion: a complete kitchen remodel should be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But having been through it, I can now work in a dream world. And I can tell the story about our giant metamorphosis, which turned a caterpillar kitchen into a beautiful oak-and-marble butterfly.