Danielle Crittenden: The Reno: How A Minor Repair Gutted My Kitchen

Tag : children's bathrobe

Danielle Crittenden's 1905 house in Washington, D.C. has beenundergoing a major renovation for the past year (and off and on forover a decade). In this weekly summer series, which appears Fridayson HuffPost, Danielle records what it has been like for her and herfamily to live through the construction with their builders,Virginia-natives Brent and John.

My daughters, Beatrice [left] and Miranda, just before our kitchenwas demolished. They were allowed to scribble all over thewallpaper before the sledgehammers flew--a longstanding childhoodwish fulfilled!
MY FAVORITE STORY about renovation is inspired by an incident inthe life of Denis Diderot, the 18th-century French philosopher andwriter. An admirer sent Diderot a gift of a handsome Chinese silkrobe. Diderot delightedly donned the robe and suddenly his oldnightcap looked shabby. So he bought himself a new nightcap. Nowhis ancient slippers looked out of place. He replaced them and inhis handsome new outfit sat down to write - but how could such anelegant figure sit at such a broken old desk? And so on, until theentire room was redecorated.
Our current renovation began in the same way: My silk robe was myoven door.
The hinges on the door broke almost a decade ago. The door wouldclose about 9/10 but not quite all the way. The problem seemedsimple enough: just replace the hinges. But the oven was so oldthat replacement parts no longer existed. I needed a new oven. BUT:The oven had been built into a cabinet - and so any replacementwould have to be precisely the same (maddeningly small) size of theold oven (How small? Our annual 12-pound turkey resembled a400-pound passenger squeezed into a super-economy seat. ) Also, thecabinet had been foolishly mispositioned so that you could not openthe oven and the dishwasher at the same time. Why spend good moneyto rebuild a dumb cabinet?
No, the cabinet would have to be completely ripped out. And oncethat was gone, I began to think, a range could be installed alongthe adjoining wall...? Certainly it would allow for more counterspace (the entire kitchen measured only 14-feet by 10-feet; it wasmuch later that we learned it had been retro-fitted into an oldtool shed). But, if I'm ripping out cabinets already, I'mrenovating my kitchen. And if I'm renovating my kitchen, I'membarking on a renovation of our entire first floor. Because notonly is my oven in the wrong place--so is my whole kitchen.
For ten years I put up with my malfunctioning oven door while wefixed other areas of the house. We finally got rid of theMexican-tiled master bathroom by ... you guessed it ... gutting thesecond floor and rebuilding it (because you see once we startedthinking about changing the bathroom, we realized the masterbedroom was also in the wrong place). That was a nightmarish year,and I'll spare you that story. Suffice it to say that whenever myhusband and I hear someone say, "Oh they don't build homes likethey used to," we burst out laughing. Ah yes, the days when theystuffed newspapers in the walls for insulation! When wood framingwas set right against the chimney with no protection from the heat!Don't build them like they used to? They built them like crap.
However that first big renovation did have one positive result: Itbrought John permanently into our lives. Up until then, he'dappeared only very briefly to help Brent, his partner in theirtwo-man business. He built a small side-porch for us and, later, afence. He was silent, diligent, and good at what he did. And heprovided a taciturn contrast to the two employees of thepartnership. I'll call them Mike and Joe - that's probably thesimplest thing, since those were their real names.
We got to know Mike and Joe during Brent's legendarily expensiverepainting of the house exterior. They were good- natured,broken-toothed men who'd occasionally vanish on benders. Thechildren adored them. They fished baseballs out of gutters, playedHot Wheels, and left dangerous tools excitingly within reach. Onesummer day, a bee of prehistoric hugeness buzzed Mike's head as heworked. He turned and sprayed it with his can of varnish. Not onlydid he kill the bee instantly, but he preserved it in flight, likea biological specimen, for all the neighborhood children toexamine.
Mike and Joe got used to the sight of me in the morning, putteringaround in my bathrobe and glasses with my hair sticking up. And Igot used to being woken up by Mike grinning at me through mybedroom window as gonzo breakfast radio blared from below. Sportstalk, Rush Limbaugh, the ads for the Sleep Number Bed - this is thesoundtrack of construction, now as sweet to me as the song ofnightingales. It means: the men are working. It means: one day, myhouse will be finished.
Before that day could arrive, however, the Diderot principle wouldhave to be applied to the first floor. By then, Mike and Joe hadlong left Brent's employ, off on some eternal bender. It was justBrent and John alone who showed up on that first sunny morning,exactly this time last summer, armed with sledgehammers and a caseof Bud, ready to deal with my oven door problem once and for all.
This series originates in the National Post.