Harusami's Random Thoughts

I love my home. I have immense gratitude for this humble 1952 brick ranch with coved ceilings, oak floors and 12′ picture-window framing the huge maple in my back yard. It was love at first site back in 1991, but as women often do, I fell in love firmly believing in the power of transformation…I lived with the flaws until they became intolerable, and one-by-one, as money permitted, I began the process of chiseling out my dream.

When my then husband and I moved into this home in 1991, I had to turn a blind eye to the hideously ugly kitchen. Battered white-painted cabinets with peeling chrome handles, yellow and pea-green plastic tiles covering most walls, the blue & white 1970’s “Ducks wearing blue bow-ties” wallpaper insulting my dining nook. The kitchen sink was scarred from years of abuse, and no amount of bleaching could rid it of the gray cross-hatching, black cast-iron pockmarks in the porcelain and orange rust spots.

Ugly Old Kitchen 1

One side of the galley kitchen had the stove set on one side of the wall with the refrigerator about 4ft. away from it…a 4ft. expanse of floor and plastic-tiled wall with no countertop. 

Ugly Old Kitchen 2

So, the first order of business was to install a dishwasher (for me a necessity rather than a luxury and this house didn’t have one) and the cheapest countertop and small cabinet to go under it. Of course I thought this was just a temporary convenience…surely we’d be doing a total kitchen remodel in a few years time! So I thought.

Before we could put in the new dishwasher, we had to upgrade the aged electrical system to 220v…Ka-ching! Redo the plumbing…Ka-ching! Then the water heater died…Ka-ching! So I had to put off replacing the kitchen sink.

I had to prioritize, and over the last 18 years, the kitchen came last…after the deck to cover the mud-paddy in front of the picture-window, the bathroom remodel (another story), the garage door to replace the broken wooden one, a busted sewer plug in my crawlspace (ugh…it was a world of shite that took 2 hazmat companies to clean up), emergency replacement of the main sewer line that led to the replacement of 40′ of fencing after a section of it blew down in the wind from being weakened by its temporary removal during the excavation of the sewer line, new lighting (this place was DARK!), new roof and gutters, new furnace and AC,  new storm doors, painting and all sorts of general and much needed (usually emergency) maintenance including an $1800 rotor-rootering from hell that took 3 days.

So, the kitchen had to wait. I planned and dreamed, kept wish books and samples, devoured kitchen remodeling magazines and HGTV…but it seemed an illusive dream. 

I still entertained friends, I love to cook, but I was so embarrassed by the state of my kitchen! It was a joke among my friends that once I got my new kitchen, I would reach Nirvana.

Well, in spring of 2008, after doing some major manifesting meditations, I refinanced my home, got enough to pay off my credit debts and a wad of cash to remodel my kitchen…or so I thought.

I picked out my cabinets and got the plans drawn up at Home Depot for $125 (refundable if you use their contractors for the actual remodel).  I even bought the kitchen sink! A fantastic Pegasus sink made of some sort of granite resin…in black. I paid for Ubatuba granite countertops.  I picked out paint chips and bought a black LG French door, bottom-freezer refrigerator on sale, they would even keep it in storage until the remodel was complete! Whoo Hoo! Nothing was going to stop me now! I’d waited 17 years and didn’t want to scrimp on any detail for the kitchen in which I would most likely cook my last meal.

But then the recession and eBay’s “new & improved” modifications hit me…big time. While I’d  had my Soul2Soul Treasures store running since 2005, about  3/4 of my business was thru eBay, a sad fact for most small online business owners is you need the traffic that eBay can provide…and you pay the price in ever-growing fees and ever-changing regulations and modifications that can drive your traffic and sales to a halt.

That’s what happened in the summer of 2008, after I’d rented a Rat Pack storage pod for my driveway to store the contents of my garage and excess household stuff while the garage held my new kitchen cabinets, sink and various things of construction. My house was packed to the gills, but the money I’d earmarked for construction was quickly dwindling away just to pay the mortgage, bills and costs of living. Yeah, I was in a bit of a panic. 

I hoped I’d be able to recover, get back on my feet and commence with construction in the following Spring, but before Thanksgiving of 2008 I got my first warning from the city of Denver…a neighbor had complained that my storage pod…parked on my private driveway, was impeding her view of traffic. WTFudge? I knew immediately who this neighbor was.

The summer of 2006 is known as my Summer in Hell. A couple of realtors bought the modest-sized ranch home next door to me and proceeded to demolish it to build what looks like a Hyatt Regency…yeah, one of those million dollar McMansions.  After I told them of my concerns about the noise…I work thru the night most of the time, and my housemate/ex-husband (yeah, another story in itself) works the night shift at UPS, they promised to find some sort of sound barrier to make the construction a little more tolerable. Never happened. The only times they contacted me were to ask for permission for some phase of construction…like tearing down a part of my fence.

So, it was about 6 months of constant ear-splitting construction noise, from 7am to 9pm. With both my bedroom and my office situated on that side of the house…I couldn’t even hear myself think I couldn’t take calls or do readings. It got to the point I was crying from the constant noise and lack of sleep. At one point I was nearly thrown off my bed by the violent pounding that shook my house, and peered out my bedroom window to see the full-moon arse-crack of a construction guy on some huge pounding machine inches away from where I slept.

I would have thought a fruit basket, a thank you card, or a gift-certificate for some headphones or a caribbean cruise would have been a classy way to make amends and thank me and the rest of the neighbors for our tolerance. Instead, she’s made herself “The Queen of the Neighborhood” as one city inspector put it. The last time she’d spoken to me was to make an offer on my house…it probably ticked her off that I laughed her off.

She’s taken it upon herself to report every slight infraction…including trying to cite the woman to the north of her of having “an unsightly brown Ford truck.”

This is a sweet woman who’s lived here longer than anyone I know, and she caught this “Queen of the Neighborhood” spraying her ornamental bushes with herbicide, then was forced by the city to remove her well-trimmed hedges because of a “neighbor’s complaint”…the hedges had been there since the 60’s, so go figure who complained. It wasn’t enough that this 2-story “castle” now blocked most of the sunlight from her gardens.

Anyway, after many trips to city hall, appeals and talks with inspectors and the council woman of my district (all during my busiest pre-holiday season), they all agreed that my pod posed no danger, that the citation was frivolous, and after writing a detailed appeal I had the citation rescinded. Then I got hit with a citation again at the start of 2009…this time it had to be removed within 2 weeks or I faced a $500 fine.  At that point the best I could do was beg them to give me a month’s extension. There was no way I could have the pod moved, I had china and artwork sitting on shelving inside of it…I hadn’t planned on this being a long term storage solution.

With trepidation and a lot of faith, I took out another loan. I talked to a wonderful kitchen guy named Brian at Home Depot who took pity on me and who told me I could probably save some money by using a independent contractor who Home Depot often used to fix the boo-boos their own contractors made.  Thus, I found Nathan at Compass Construction and their crack-team of professionals.  The construction cost was considerably less than Home Depot’s estimate. I had to reorder the Ubatuba granite since the warehouse couldn’t hold it until 2009, and I ended up saving about $150 on that too.

So, on February 16, 2009…during the cold tail-end of winter, I watched with utter delight as my old kitchen was demolished by a crew of way-too-cute construction guys.

So, I’m cultivating an attitude of gratitude for this “Queen of the Neighborhood” who through her nastiness and control issues, managed to light that fire under my keister to finally manifest my long-held dream.

To be continued….