The Last Kitchen Remodel

Yesterday we went to the local big box home repair/remodel store for our noon appointment about the kitchen remodel.  We sat with the very patient consultant and she entered possibilities into the computer.  In the end, it took us less time than we anticipated to make decisions.

First, here's a picture of the "before" kitchen:

With every kitchen remodel, there's some part of us that says/hopes, "This is the last kitchen remodel we will ever do."  We try to make choices that will have some chance of aging well.  Thus, we thought about gray cabinets (yes, we're late to this party), but in the end we went with a natural wood color.  We thought about a lighter shade, but we went with the color we always choose, a cinnamon.

It's the color I always choose.  I have loved cinnamon as both a color and a spice for decades longer than I've been choosing kitchen cabinets.  So we could think of that choice as a failure of imagination or as knowing what will delight me every day--or both.  The style will be a simple Shaker, a box within a box.  We have vaulted ceilings, so we'll go with taller cabinets, 42 inches instead of 36; we'll get a lot more storage for not much more money.  We will wait and choose pulls and handles later.

Usually, we've made these decisions well in advance.  We've often spent hours in the big box home repair/remodel stores, looking at cabinets, dreaming of countertops.  This time, we did not, apart from a brief moment back in the summer, during our quest for a refrigerator, when we looked at countertop possibilities.  My spouse thought that the one we wanted had been discontinued, but yesterday, it was there (or something close to what we remembered, quartz, white as a background, shot through with grays, blacks, and blues, and a bit of tan roundness here and there--the color is mountain river or maybe river rock).

As we've been working through kitchen remodel decisions, my thoughts occasionally turn back to our last kitchen remodel, which at times felt hard for so many reasons.  We were trying to do repairs after Hurricane Irma in 2017, which meant everything was delayed.  But a deeper reason for my exhaustion was the certainty that we'd be needing to do another repair and remodel after some future storm, if our house was left standing.

It's very different this time.  We're taking out the first kitchen that this house had, back when it was built in 1975.  It's a solid house built in a place that will be sheltered from much of the coming climate catastrophe.

If we make good decisions, this kitchen remodel may very well be the last one that we ever do.