So I broke down, got out the crowbar and opened my wallet. You see just about every appliance in our kitchen, along with the cabinets are disintegrating simultaneously. On top of that, I’ve never liked the color or pattern of our granite countertops, they make me nauseous. Appetizing!
So I enthusiastically signed up for kitchen remodeling – Read Sarcasm. (Shortly I’ll be writing a book, “Remodeling Kitchens for Idiots.”)
We’ve taken the precaution of sending our dog on vacation and we have the cat sequestered in the basement with a plug-in cat-calming thingy working overtime. It’s now day one of our kitchen project, otherwise known as demo-day. An unnerving amount of loud, angst inducing noise is happening pretty much non-stop. Just when you think it might be over, a bombastic crash startles the bejeebers out of you, sending you back into a fight or flight mindset. In concert with the noise is the vicious house shaking that tells you destruction is underway. Shaking so bad, it put to shame the cadre of earthquakes we had last month. By the end of the day our kitchen or what was our kitchen is nothing but framing wood and a lot of pipes and electrical stuff I wish I never knew existed. No sink, no stove, no refrigerator, and no microwave-Nada! And worst of all, no coffee in the morning. It’s time to get creative, there must be coffee in the morning. We came to realize that without the kitchen sink and its faucet, our bathrooms were going to need to start pulling double duty. We started off by calling it bathroom coffee, but with my affinity for toilet humor, I so deemed it, “Toilet Coffee” or TC for short. I can see the commercials now as Juan Valdez makes a pit stop for a fresh cup of TC.
As luck would have it, my wife convinced me months earlier that we should rent a cottage in Florida for the last two weeks of April when the rates are much lower. This sounded reasonable and it wound up coinciding with the start of our kitchen debacle, I mean work. What unbelievably good luck, I should have bought a lottery ticket. We left on day three of our remodel and arrived at our cottage with no issues – Hooray! The manager for this small enclave is a very nice older gentleman. When he stops by our cottage to pick up our final payment he tells us, “You know you could stay no charge for an extra three or four days, nobody has rented the cottage after you.” Wow, we thank him and take it under advisement. I’m leaning against it - too messy and lots of moving pieces would have to be dealt with. That and I’m a bit of a homebody. But since my home was a wreck, what the heck? Let’s stay, it’s a gift.
So now it’s time to leave Florida. At this point I’m climbing the walls. More like King Kong scaling the Empire State Building. We arrive at the airport in plenty of time and cruise through security. As we approach our gate, I can see through the large windows that our plane is already here – great! But as I get closer, I notice the plane is a strange distance from the jetway boarding bridge. And the jetway itself is only half extended. If I were going to make it onto the plane, I would have needed a big bowl of Wheaties that morning and then set an Olympic long jump record. There are now a number of serious looking fellows down underneath the plane taking pictures of the wing. It seems that when the pilot was coming in with the plane we were to be taking home, he hit the jetway. How do your do that? (Further investigation revealed that while at Top Gun school, our pilot’s nickname was Eagle Eye.) As it is, I’m not hard of smelling, and this situation reeked of impending doom. After a short eternity, my wife gets through to the airline and believes she’s made us a reservation on the next flight out. Airline then cancels our original flight and the reservation system goes bonkers. The AI capabilities of the phone App could not handle the onslaught of enraged travelers. It was sent back to night school for anger management training. We go to our new gate and the overwhelmed gate attendant with access to their computer systems tells us, “Yes, I see your reservation, but you don’t have seat assignments. And now this flight and all remaining flights to Newark for the day are oversold…by a lot.” After a commensurate amount of further torture, our luggage is lost and we’re put up in a Best Western that was supposed to be two miles from the airport. I’m not saying it was as far as the Braidwood Inn, but it was a hike. We caught a 6AM flight out the next morning, and thank goodness Eagle Eye was nowhere in site.
We’re back in our broken home now. And I’m enjoying the perks of toilet coffee in the morning…pun intended. Or as Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now would say, “I love the smell of Toilet Coffee in the Morning.”
