Thursday, September 27, 2007
When adversity = blessing
So one night last week Cat came out of her bedroom complaining that some blankets she’d put on her floor were soaking wet. I went to investigate and found her carpet was all wet, too. Didn’t take me long to realize her wall shares a wall with the kitchen sink. We had a plumbing leak!
I didn’t tell the apartment manager until the next morning. The maintenance guy investigated and eventually it was determined we’d need all new cabinets in the kitchen and Cat’s room would need new carpeting.
At first, the manager was talking about recarpeting our entire apartment, which would’ve been cool, but incredibly hard for us to move everything out of the way. So we said just do Cat’s room. Which kinda sucked, since her carpet was probably in better shape than the entire rest of the apartment.
I spent an entire day cleaning out Cat’s room, organizing her junk into storage bins, something we should’ve done years ago but I never had time/energy for. (Something the boys’ room needs even worse, which I do have on my radar, but as yet haven’t gotten to.) Then we both spent an evening and a morning moving stuff out of her room. And later…back IN.
Daniel and the boys tackled emptying out our kitchen cupboards, thankfully. Because in the middle of all this, I got sick.
Cat was complaining to me—how come the bad stuff always has to happen to us? Whine, whine, etc. But all I could say to her was, “Hey! No complaints! I GET A NEW KITCHEN!”
And she gets a newly organized, clean room, mostly done by ME.
Our kitchen always drove me insane. The cupboards were really old, and painted over so many times, they never shut properly. My kids got used to them not shutting properly—you really had to jam them shut, and keep them the shut, which no one ever bothered to do. So our cupboards were always open, even if it was just a little bit. It drove me insane. I’ve been known to demonstrate my irritation in a rather passive-agressive way, by opening all the cupboards in the entire kitchen as wide as possible, as well as all the drawers, and leaving it that way for someone to find. I called it our Sixth Sense kitchen.
Well, now I have new cabinets. And not just new cabinets—they also recently gave us a new kitchen floor and stove, and now we also have a new dishwasher! YAY!
Our old dishwasher could barely be called that. It was more like a dishsprinkler.
I tried talking the maintenance crew into extending the cabinets all along one wall, but they just laughed at me. “Yeah, and we’ll give you an island, too!” But our kitchen is really small, and we don’t have enough space to store all the food we go through in a week. It ends up being stacked on the counters, and it’s not like we have a lot of counter space to begin with.
Now to refill the cabinets. They’re a little bit smaller than the old ones. Argh.
This is my entire kitchen.
Wow. I think my kitchen is bigger than yours…though you have more cabinet space. And it’s just me here, so half my cabinets are empty.
Our fridge is to the right, and there’s a cabinet above it, but it’s up so high, I never use it except to store stuff I never use. There’s no place to store mops/brooms, except right next to the fridge, along with the garbage can and a mop bucket.
I finally have everything put away.
Our kitchen is just slightly bigger than that, but looks nowhere near as nice. I wish someone would give us brand new cabinets, a dishwasher, a range, etc.
that’s cool that you practically got a new kitchen. as for lack of cabinet space, in our apartment we have to use our hallway closets for food since we can’t fit all of our dishes and our food in the kitchen cabs. and that’s cool that you got a new dishwasher and stove. i am of the opinion that it doesn’t hurt to ask. we’re apt managers and if our tenants would just tell us that their dishwasher or stove sucks, then we could easily get them a new one.
We were supposed to get a new dishwasher when they put the new floor and stove in awhile back, but the maintenance guy never got to it. If he had gotten to it earlier, I bet it would’ve saved Cat’s carpet!
Yay for a new kitchen!!
Aubrey: we have one hallway closet. It’s full of camping gear and sports equipment. Our vacuum cleaner just sits in the corner of the living room.
We need to get rid of about half our crap.
that’s great that you got a new kitchen out of it and a clean room for kat. i feel so great when i purge a bunch of old stuff out of my apt.
i definitely hear you on the cabinets w/ 20 layers of paint on them. our apartment’s kitchen is straight out of the 1950’s and the cabinets never close.
Believe it or not your kitchen has just about the same amount of storage as mine and MORE floor space. I seriously cannot open the oven and the stove at the same time without the doors stopping mid air! My fridge door also doesn’t open all the way because the wall is solidly next to the fridge. But like you say, it’s nice to have a kitchen! And your looks lovely!
duh, make that
open the dishwasher and oven at the same time”
btw, we have that same “island” lol
I hear ya on the kitchen. In our last place we had our table shoved up against the wall. If anyone cam over for dinner we had to get everything we needed out of the fridge and then move the table out, because you couldn’t get into the fridge with people at the table! And old metal cabinets that had been painted over, and the non washing dishwasher…Are you sure you don’t live here?
This new place is pretty great though, and we finally have a dishwasher that works too! Now if we could only get a garbage disposal…
Glad none of your stuff was destroyed with all the water and whatnot. You should build furniture out of your canned goods, storage and sitting space all in one!