We have different ideas about kitchen remodeling
CODY SOSSAMON PUBLISHER

Me and my big mouth. Several months ago, while making small talk with my wife, I observed that it might be about time to remodel our kitchen.

I really don't know what I was thinking. Maybe that it would probably never happen.

When I said something in the fall of 2006 about getting some new carpet, nothing ever came of it, so maybe I was reasoning that she'd never actually get around to redoing the kitchen.

Wrong.

And my idea of remodeling the kitchen and her idea are nowhere close.

My idea: reface the cabinets and drawers, new countertops, maybe some new flooring and a coat of paint.

Her idea: all new cabinets, new countertops, new appliances, new flooring, new window treatments, new breakfast table and chairs, new television - new everything except maybe pots and pans and that's probably because she hasn't thought of it.

But what Sherry doesn't think of, I'm sure her interior design consultant will.

That's right. My wife didn't think she could put all of this together without the help of a 'professional.'

I tried to convince Sherry that she has exquisite taste and it wasn't necessary to hire someone to help her coordinate cabinets with countertops and such.

After all, she had hundreds of magazines to look through and find something she liked. And what about all those great ideas we saw at the home show? Speaking of which, that's a great way to spend a Saturday.

I lost that battle.

I also lost out on the idea of just replacing the fronts of our cabinets.

I pretty much lost out on all of the money-saving aspects of remodeling.

We (the interior design consultant, the cabinetmaker, my wife and I) had a meeting in our kitchen about a week ago and the more they talked, the more money it was costing me.

Literally.

The cabinetmaker gets paid by the job. The interior design consultant gets paid by the hour - "How much do you charge?," was the first thing I asker her. The longer we talked, the higher her bill went.

Just when we were about to wrap things up, she looked at the ceiling. "What about that?"

"What about it?" I asked, not knowing that sprayed ceilings are no longer in vogue.

"We'll have to do something about that." And then Sherry chimed in.

"I never have liked that ceiling. It looks like popcorn."

That was news to me. I never heard any complaints before. Who looks at the ceiling anyway, unless you're in the Sistine Chapel?

And since that ceiling has been painted a couple times (not bad for 30 years, huh?) the 'popcorn' probably cannot be scraped off, I found out. "We can put sheet rock over it," the interior design consultant said.

That's something I could probably do to save some money, because I don't want to spend the next several weekends scraping my kitchen ceiling. But I definitely can't hang sheet rock on a ceiling.

A friend of mine recently added a sunroom and a dressing room to his home.

He figures it cost him about half as much to do that as it did to build his house.

The way things are going, my 'little' kitchen job is going to easily meet that percentage.

And that's not counting the new carpet in the rest of the house and the new bedroom furniture my daughter wants when she moves upstairs.

Oh, about that move. She and her mother say the bathroom upstairs needs to be remodeled.

While we're on bathrooms, the wife would like to add on a new one off our bedroom so she won't have to share with me. (She already has her own sink, for Pete's sake.)

Did I mention the screened-in porch she wants to redo and put tile on the floor, among other things?

How about the storage building I've got to move because, since I cut down some trees, it's too visible from the kitchen?

Just a couple of months ago I was jumping for joy after making my final house payment - after 28 years of mortgage payments, I was FREE!

And then I made a casual comment about how maybe we ought to spruce up the place since we had it paid for.

Cody Sossamon (cody@gaffneyledger.com) is publisher of The Gaffney Ledger.