It took four years... but my kitchen renovation is finally finished. Well, except for the floor, which I can't afford to replace just yet. But most of the remodel is done.

When I moved in, I was blessed with a kitchen that had dingy linoleum countertops and peachy-putty-grey-brown wood cabinets. It was so awful, and I hated it since day one. I am very particular about keeping a clean kitchen, and everything in this place was fighting me on it. How could I tell if something is dirty if it looks dirty all the time?

In addition to the cabinets being such an ugly color, they were these complex carved inlay design which had a literal ledge-on-a-ledge at the top to collect dirt. I was grossed out every time I cooked in my own kitchen, despite scrubbing it constantly.

See that tiny corner bevel WITHIN the main bevel? Try getting that clean. You have to use a brush and it's always dirty.

And so I had it in my head that I would rip everything out and remodel it.

Then I looked at all the money I didn't have and decided to wait. Which was really tough to do because I hated this kitchen so very, very much.

Finally, in 2019, three years after I moved in... I couldn't take it any more. I ripped those ugly-ass cabinet doors off and decided I would make my own cabinet doors and drawers then paint it all myself. It may take a while... because I'd have to save the money after each step... but I would have the kitchen I always wanted eventually: cement countertops, white subway tile walls, and white shaker-style cabinets.

But then the pandemic hit, and everything stopped until Fall 2020.

First I painted the cabinet frames (August 27, 2020).

The countertops were installed (August 28, 2020).

A new sink was next (September 1, 2020).

I ran out of money for a year (then had issues hiring somebody because of COVID) but finally got my tile walls (November 4, 2022).

Had my cabinet frames professionally repainted (October 19, 2022).

Ordered my cabinet doors and drawers in late 2022. Then waited months for measurements to be taken. Then waited months for the pieces to arrive so I could select paint. Then waited more months to get them installed after several delays (July 19, 2023). Except the glass for the cabinets I wanted to have windows didn't arrive, one of the doors was the wrong size, and one of the doors was built wrong. But, hey, things were looking nearly finished. Here's a before and after...

Then yesterday I finally got the last of my cabinet doors installed... with glass (October 13, 2023)...

Ironically I had glass put in the doors with the dishes and glasses so that when I had guests over they could find stuff without openeing every door in the kitchen. But then COVID happened and I stopped having guests. Oh well. At least I won't be forgetting where they are.

Along the way, I also got the cheap-ass drawer glides replaced with glides that are heavy-duty enough to actually support some weight, and they pull out all the way so I can get to things in the back. It's glorious...

So, yeah. A long time coming. But I have my frickin' kitchen back at last.

AFTER FOUR YEARS.

The first two of which I was living out of boxes on the countertops because I had ripped everything out in anticipation of having work done that never happened.

I don't know if it was worth the wait. But at least I finally have the kitchen I wanted all along.

When the landscaper asked me what plants I wanted out front, I said I didn't care. Just so long as they are low maintenance, like full sun, and can survive people and animals. Welp, I have no idea what these things are that he planted, but they are fucking VICIOUS! I was taking the tags off and sliced two of my fingers wide open from the thorns! How cool is that? I can't WAIT for them to grow full sized! I may have to get more and plant them around my whole house!

The purple one is called LAVA NUGGET BARBERRY! How fucking perfect is that?

The yellow one is named BONANZA GOLD BARBERRY. And it's like... okay, I guess. But I sure wish they had come up with something more lethal-sounding. Though it would be hard to top "Lava Nugget."

I have ten of them, and have named them after metal bands thusly...

• Slayer
• Megadeth
• Pantera
• Slipknot
• Anthrax
• Sabbath
• Metallica
• Behemoth
• Death
• and Henry

Okay, Henry is not the name of a metal band, but Henry Rollins is the lead singer of one of my favorite punk bands, Black Flag, so there's that.

Hopefully they're going to survive. I don't have the best track record with keeping plants alive.

Way back in early 2019, I hired a guy to re-landscape my yard. He came and took a look that Spring, then came up with a cost. I told him I didn't have that kind of money, but said I should have it saved up by the end of the year so we could start in the Spring of 2020.

Y'all know what happened in the Spring of 2020.

First my landscaping was postponed because of quarantine. Then it was postponed because my landscaper got COVID really bad and was hospitalized. Then it was postponed twice so he could recover. Then it was postponed permanently when he ended up having "Long COVID" and could no longer work. The poor guy ended up having to move out of the state so he could live with family that could take care of him.

I hired another contractor who ghosted me. Then another contractor who quoted the project without all the things I had asked for, then ghosted me when I asked why. I finally found a fourth contractor back in April who said he could fit me into his schedule late Summer.

AND TODAY WAS THE START DAY!

They're ripping out all the spider-infected shrubs that were never maintained and grew far too big. They ended up growing up against my house to create a spider super-highway and could no longer be re-shaped or trimmed. Unfortunately, they had to go...

I didn't feel bad about it until I drove home to get a sandwich and ended up following the truck that had the carcases of my poor spider-house shrubs in the back. SORRY, GUYS...

And now they can start rebuilding my yard with new plants that are easier to maintain, require less water, and won't explode to become spider-laden death-traps. That'll be nice.

It's absolutely fascinating how easy it is to drop astounding amounts of money on things that you're already spent money on.

As an example... the paint sample from the new company mixing the paint for my new kitchen doors and drawers arrived and it's a bit less warm. My choices were to A) Ask them to try again and wait another week... B) Wait until the original paint company gets the parts for their machine at the end of August... or C) Repaint my cupboard frames the slightly cooler color. I decided on Option C because I didn't want to wait any longer, and it was more in the direction of my tile color anyway.

$80.00 blown in the blink of an eye so I can pay for new paint...

The end result looks good, so now I wait for the new paint to arrive sometime this week... wait for the pieces to be painted... then wait for the installers to fit me into their schedule.

After that?

Should be my front yard landscaping.

Followed by the re-do of the upstairs bathroom which had to be torn out.

Talk about spending money on something I've already spent money on. That's going to be a doozy ON TOP OF the money I paid to my shitty fucking contractor who fucked it up in the first place.

I seriously should have bought a tent and lived out in the woods or something.

=sigh=

The last thing I'm going to do is complain about being a homeowner. First of all, I feel grateful that I even have a home. Second of all, the cost to rent an apartment in my parts is even higher than my mortgage payment. Like a lot higher.

But holy shit have I had my share of costs when it comes to my seven-year-old home purchase (A list of the absurd amount of repairs is here).

When I bought the place, I had a hugely expensive renovation to make it safer for my mother to inhabit with her dementia. From there it's been a non-stop parade of problems. The worst of which is my shitty upstairs shower leaking downstairs. And it ain't no old shower... it was installed just six years ago and was likely leaking since Day One (but I only found out about it four years ago as it worsened). I spent thousands of dollars just to get it diagnosed, and even then they're not 100% sure that it was a leak from the drain plumbing which is what they suspected. Which means they ended up having to rip it all out so I can start over...

The demo guys noted that the shower pan was made of something spongey... the likes of which they have never seen. So fuck my old contractor for that. And fuck my old plumber for doing a shitty job that's been leaking. And of course insurance is denying my claim, because they don't cover "slow leaks," only a "sudden catastrophic leak," which fucking sucks.

This time I'm not dicking around. I'm going to find a metal shower pan myself and hire the expensive plumbers I use for everything because they aren't incompetent.

This popped up in my social media this morning, and I felt it to my core...

This is very quickly becoming me. I don't dare ponder what could go wrong next, despite my already having fixed or redone the whole place by now. I think the best I can hope for is that I at least get to complete what's currently fucked before the next thing goes wrong.

Oh what a glorious day!

The sun is out. All my clothes are washed. The kitchen has been cleaned. My groceries have been ordered. What more could I want?

OH YEAH! THE GIANT HOLE IN MY LIVING ROOM WALL HAS BEEN REPAIRED!!

So tell me honestly. Are two turbo-fans running on high speed enough to dissuade my cats from rubbing up against a freshly-painted wall... or am I coming home to two white cats where I originally had an orange one and a grey one?

Home ownership... am I right?

Today I got the worst news possible... the upstairs shower, which has started leaking again (and it's worse than ever)... will have to be entirely torn out so they can replace everything the original plumber did. The pipes. The pan. Everything. Which means I will, of course end up having to re-tile and re-paint. Lord only knows how much that's going to cost.

Let's see what this brings us to in seven years of owning a home, shall we? And this is after the complete renovation I had already paid for when I bought the place...

• Repair hardwood floors because the hugely expensive hardwood I bought was flawed.
• Tear out wall strips that were buckling.
• Rewire electrical once half my kitchen stopped working.
• Fix the kitchen plumbing, which was so poorly done that the plumber thought it was a joke.
• Tear out all the smart light switches because the company went under.
• Rip out the guest bath due to leak from above shower (ONGOING!).
• Rip out the guest bedroom changing area due to leak from above shower (ONGOING!).
• Add electrical outlet to laundry room because it didn't have one(?!?).
• Replace hot water heater.
• Replace HVAC compressor and blower with heat pump and blower.
• Rip out living room wall to access noisy HVAC return lines that were badly clamped to the studs so I could completely reinstall everything and add soundproofing (ONGOING!).
• Rip out automated sprinkler lines to reposition since they added a service box that blocks them (STILL WAITING ON A CONTRACTOR).

I am positively terrified as to how much this all cost me. A big thank you to my original contractor, who is responsible for half this mess.

Good thing I'm not going on vacations any more. I couldn't afford it.

The good news is that the massive hole in my living room wall is very close to being fixed...

Later today they skim-coat to level everything out.. Then tomorrow morning they prime it. Then tomorrow afternoon they paint.

And how happy will I be that one of four ongoing projects (soon to be five) will be checked off my list?

Very.

It is remarkable how time just keeps blazing by me. Tuesday is wrapping up, tomorrow is hump-day, and then it's a race to the weekend again.

Which would be great, except my weekends are also blazing past me.

The weekend before last I was sick.

This past weekend I worked from morning until night trying to get my home put back together.

I started with my guest bathroom, which had a leak that caused a bunch of damage. As they were putting the bathroom back together, it was found that the leak had not been resolved, so repairs had to be put on hold. I hired an expert who only confirmed that "Yep, you have a leak" but couldn't figure it out. Then, without notice, the leaking stopped. But instead of tearing out the upstairs bathroom and more walls to find out what happened... or seal up the walls and hope it didn't happen again... I decided to build an access hatch in the guest bathroom ceiling...

There's a panel I'm building which will magnetically attach inside the hatch. That way I can put some water leak sensors up there and be alerted to when/if something starts leaking again.

Then there's my new HVAC system. The heat pump outside has a return line to the blower which runs up my living room wall and over to the garage. For whatever reason, the line is noisy as hell. Sometimes when the heat pump is running, the noise gets so ridiculous that I have to turn up the television.

And so... I tore out the wall... installed mass-loaded vinyl panels... secured the line with vibration-dampening clamps... then installed some pricey sound-absorbing insulation on top of it all...

And that was that.

Now all I have to do is wait for my drywall guy to come in and put my walls back together... then wait for my kitchen doors and drawers to arrive... then I'm going to halt home improvement for a while, because I want to live in a home that's not torn apart for a bit.

At least I hope that can happen. Just my luck something else will go wrong the minute I've finished up the current disasters.

IKEA's furniture is a weird duck. The finish they use on all their classic "brown-black" furniture is not quite a paint... not quite a stain... it seems like a cross between both. There's enough pigment to even out the wood grain, but not enough to be completely opaque.

Pure stain turns out nice, but it doesn't match my other stuff.

So I decided to try paint. The first thing I did was try "Black Mocha" by Behr, which is supposed to be as close as you can get. It didn't seem to match at all. So I started looking all over the internet to see if anybody found something better. The most promising seemed to be this guy, who had a custom formulation matched at Sherwin-Williams. He posted the formula and everything...

I showed this to the guy at Sherwin-Williams and, sure enough, he mixed it right up.

When I applied it, the maroon component was making things look too "berry" to match. But as it dried it started getting closer. Still looks like it needs a touch of brown to be a little warmer, but you can't tell unless you really look at it, so I'm happy. Even if it is a bit too "solid" to ever truly match. Maybe in the future I'll try thinking it down and see if that makes any difference.

Or maybe I'll just repaint everything different colors and not worry about it.

When the new company was hired to inspect my HVAC, they guy immediately told me of all the problems which were wrong with my 26-year-old system. This came as quite a surprise, because the previous company always told me that my system was great for an older model. But the new guy had the receipts... he took photos of everything and told me that it wasn't a matter of "if" but "when." Everything could run for another two years. It could fail tomorrow.

The cost to fix it so it wasn't on the verge of failure? $1,200.

There was no way I was going to spend $1.200 on a band-aid, so decided to invest in a new system.

The options presented to me were Silver, Gold, and Platinum. The Platinum system was simply beyond my finances to pay for. The Silver and Gold were ultimately the same price once a rebate from the local utility district was considered (they pay you to install a heat pump system to save energy so they can then sell that energy at a bigger profit to businesses or other regions). So Gold it was.

It looks nice next to my new water heater. It also looks like money...

Fortunately I had been sinking money into an "emergency fund" for just such an occasion as replacing a water heater and HVAC system. Once the rebate is considered, I "only" had to come up with $650. Which will, in turn, come out of my tax refund.

Of course now I have no emergency fund left, so hopefully I won't have another emergency any time soon. Knock wood.

So there you have it.

Hot water. Hot air. And (eventually) cold air too.