Remodeling Kitchens Can be Hard on a Marriage

We've been through this before. When Jerry and I got married, we (or at least I) never thought that owning a house would be in our future. I'd grown up in a series of rented places in strange countries, with a father who was so unhandy that he wouldn't let me push pins into the walls for posters because he wasn't sure how to cover the holes up when we left. So marriage to MacGyver led to some real culture shock. Not only did he want us to buy a house, but he wanted to remodel everything, including the kitchen.

We started from opposite philosophies. In his mind, the perfect kitchen was a 4' by 4' square. The cook stood in the center and swiveled to get to everything. In mine, the kitchen was the heart of the home, enormous, welcoming, and who cared if you had to carry a potful of boiling soup across a half acre to get it from the stove to the table.

This may have been why our only vicious fight in the past 42 years was over some detail about a kitchen remodeling three homes back. (We won; we're still together.)

The present project has gone amazingly smoothly, in part because I think Jerry has come to his senses about size. His wistful suggestion that if we simply cut the kitchen in half we'd have room for a grand piano didn't really fly.

We haven't fought about cabinet placement or materials, the new microwave/hood exhaust over the stove, or even countertop material or color.



However.... We're still in disposable mode (the sink doesn't get delivered until maybe Friday), and tempers are beginning to fray.

Somehow, over the past 25 years in this house, we'd accumulated an amazing number of paper plates and napkins, and plastic utensils. Every time we had an informal party we'd buy more, and then stash the leftovers where we couldn't find them again. The latter are supplemented by my packrat tendencies. I collect little knives, forks and spoons from airplanes, fast food joints, and occasionally from potluck parties. After all, they're perfectly good.

Well, they aren't. This experience has pushed me to discard the forks with missing tines and the spoons with the jagged edges, and to suggest that we should throw everything out and get some decent ones.

Jerry, caught by his own packrat-itude, refuses, and, certain that we're going to run out of paper plates and have to eat off the bare table with our bare hands, goes out and buys more to supplement what we've got. But because it's only for another week or so, he gets the cheapest. Coffee exploded in his crappy styrofoam cup in the old microwave yesterday. And somehow we've ended up with a couple hundred knives and three spoons.

I don't do this often, but I'm laying down the law. The minute the new sink is in and we can really truly wash dishes again, I'm throwing out all the limp paper plates, defective coffee cups, and slasher utensils.

Jerry says, "But we might need them some time."

I say this is beyond physical need. It's a matter of our marriage.