Last week I got a new kitchen faucet. That may sound like the most mundane thing imaginable, and in a way it was. In another way it wasn’t.
I have a kitchen fetish. The kitchen was the nerve center of the house I grew up in. My father built a table that accommodated the dimensions while still seating eight. I was four or five years old when that table was built, and my father let me make a couple of brush strokes on the underside of it. I could write a book, or maybe two, about the things I learned at that table, which is a very mod shade of orange. It was eventually retired, replaced with a smaller, more squareish table and exiled to the attic, where it sits today, waiting for me to have it shipped to Oregon. My brothers and sisters and I divvied up everything in that house after our father died last year, and that table is the only thing I really want.
Portland misses the mark when it comes to kitchens, I think. They’re small and boxy, most of them, too big to be called a galley, too small for a real sit-down table. In the newer homes – the suburban monstrosities and the ostentatious condos in the city – the open kitchen seems to be all the rage. Personally, I think an open kitchen is a bad idea. First of all, do you really want to sit in your living room and look at the dirty dishes waiting for you in the kitchen? I don’t. But more importantly, open kitchens take all the romance out of it. There is no place for secrets in an open kitchen, and without secrets what’s the point?
The kitchen in my house is awful. It’s “L” shaped, sort of, but the small end of the “L” is where the refrigerator is, so there goes any chance of having a real table and chairs. Unless, that is, I were to move the refrigerator, which would require tearing out cabinets and cost lots of counter space. The cabinets on the wall are the originals, I think, although they’ve been painted so many times – including the hinges – that their surface is like a sponge. The counter is uneven, installed on the cheap, I’m sure. One of the lower shelves is about to fall right off its hinges, and rather than fix it I hold my breath every time I walk past it. The walls are the color of an antacid tablet.
It’s embarrassing to admit that for the past two years – yes, two years, eight seasons – I worried about the faucet. There was a single lever that required a shift to the left for hot water. There was a knob on the end of the faucet that, when pressed, switched the whole thing to spray mode. Shutting the water off made me nervous because it required more and more finesse. Guiding the lever to the left and slightly toward me usually worked, but the faucet always dripped. Over the last few months the handle felt less and less solid, less connected, which made me think that the washers were about to give out.
And then what, I wondered. I pictured water gushing out from where the faucet used to be, I pictured the kitchen flooded, so I made a few calls. My friend Derek rolled his eyes and grunted when I told him what the plumbers I’d spoken with told me it would cost, per hour, and how many hours they imagined it would take, and how those hours did not include going to buy the new faucet, which would be extra.
It was done in a couple of hours, and that included a stop at the post office. The most time-consuming part was removing the old faucet, which included a very odd connection to the water filtering system and a built-in soap dispenser. I’m still laughing at the soap dispenser, a gift from the same cleanliness-minded family that put contact paper down in the cabinet beneath the sink before removing the shrimp tails, which I swept out the afternoon I ripped up the paper and scrubbed the gluey residue off with a copper scouring pad. Last week, holding the hardware down and in place as Derek pulled everything into place from beneath the sink, I loved the symmetry of it all. The hoses from the new faucet, which fit perfectly through the three holes at its base, all matched up with the pipes. Home Depot had an entire aisle of faucets to choose from, and somehow Derek and I had managed to select just the right one, which amazed me then and amazes me still.
It was a week yesterday that the new faucet took effect. I still marvel at the fact that there is no dripping and the smoothness with which the handle goes up and down and side to side, for hot or cold, its glide as smooth as a gear shifter in a very expensive car. Derek did the work, but I paid very close attention, and I think I’m close to overcoming my fear of disconnecting something. The whole experience also taught me why plumbers are so expensive. When you wait until your pipes burst to call someone, the time for bargaining is long gone, a concept I need to embrace without remorse the next time a client calls me for an estimate on a project that is overdue before my number is dialed.
I have a kitchen fetish. The kitchen was the nerve center of the house I grew up in. My father built a table that accommodated the dimensions while still seating eight. I was four or five years old when that table was built, and my father let me make a couple of brush strokes on the underside of it. I could write a book, or maybe two, about the things I learned at that table, which is a very mod shade of orange. It was eventually retired, replaced with a smaller, more squareish table and exiled to the attic, where it sits today, waiting for me to have it shipped to Oregon. My brothers and sisters and I divvied up everything in that house after our father died last year, and that table is the only thing I really want.
Portland misses the mark when it comes to kitchens, I think. They’re small and boxy, most of them, too big to be called a galley, too small for a real sit-down table. In the newer homes – the suburban monstrosities and the ostentatious condos in the city – the open kitchen seems to be all the rage. Personally, I think an open kitchen is a bad idea. First of all, do you really want to sit in your living room and look at the dirty dishes waiting for you in the kitchen? I don’t. But more importantly, open kitchens take all the romance out of it. There is no place for secrets in an open kitchen, and without secrets what’s the point?
The kitchen in my house is awful. It’s “L” shaped, sort of, but the small end of the “L” is where the refrigerator is, so there goes any chance of having a real table and chairs. Unless, that is, I were to move the refrigerator, which would require tearing out cabinets and cost lots of counter space. The cabinets on the wall are the originals, I think, although they’ve been painted so many times – including the hinges – that their surface is like a sponge. The counter is uneven, installed on the cheap, I’m sure. One of the lower shelves is about to fall right off its hinges, and rather than fix it I hold my breath every time I walk past it. The walls are the color of an antacid tablet.
It’s embarrassing to admit that for the past two years – yes, two years, eight seasons – I worried about the faucet. There was a single lever that required a shift to the left for hot water. There was a knob on the end of the faucet that, when pressed, switched the whole thing to spray mode. Shutting the water off made me nervous because it required more and more finesse. Guiding the lever to the left and slightly toward me usually worked, but the faucet always dripped. Over the last few months the handle felt less and less solid, less connected, which made me think that the washers were about to give out.
And then what, I wondered. I pictured water gushing out from where the faucet used to be, I pictured the kitchen flooded, so I made a few calls. My friend Derek rolled his eyes and grunted when I told him what the plumbers I’d spoken with told me it would cost, per hour, and how many hours they imagined it would take, and how those hours did not include going to buy the new faucet, which would be extra.
It was done in a couple of hours, and that included a stop at the post office. The most time-consuming part was removing the old faucet, which included a very odd connection to the water filtering system and a built-in soap dispenser. I’m still laughing at the soap dispenser, a gift from the same cleanliness-minded family that put contact paper down in the cabinet beneath the sink before removing the shrimp tails, which I swept out the afternoon I ripped up the paper and scrubbed the gluey residue off with a copper scouring pad. Last week, holding the hardware down and in place as Derek pulled everything into place from beneath the sink, I loved the symmetry of it all. The hoses from the new faucet, which fit perfectly through the three holes at its base, all matched up with the pipes. Home Depot had an entire aisle of faucets to choose from, and somehow Derek and I had managed to select just the right one, which amazed me then and amazes me still.
It was a week yesterday that the new faucet took effect. I still marvel at the fact that there is no dripping and the smoothness with which the handle goes up and down and side to side, for hot or cold, its glide as smooth as a gear shifter in a very expensive car. Derek did the work, but I paid very close attention, and I think I’m close to overcoming my fear of disconnecting something. The whole experience also taught me why plumbers are so expensive. When you wait until your pipes burst to call someone, the time for bargaining is long gone, a concept I need to embrace without remorse the next time a client calls me for an estimate on a project that is overdue before my number is dialed.
