Cabinet Dissatisfaction and other dangerous emotions

Or, why I don't go on Parade of Home tours.

“Rachel Ray is building a kitchen in her bedroom,” my wife said. We were talking about a TV show concerning a famous cook who was renovating a house in Italy. It was a massive job, requiring the importation of ovens the size of the Titanic coal furnaces, leveling a mountain, moving the entire country a quarter-inch to the east, and so on. And, as mentioned, constructing a kitchen in the bedroom.

“Why?” I asked, a word that stood in for curiousity about the chef’s particular rationale to a cri de coeur about the existence of the show in the first place. I mean, it’s like “Drywalling with Julia Child,’ no? I have never seen a second of the woman’s TV show but I am aware of her existence; in my mind she looks like a Katie-Couric with a haircut that says I want to speak to the manager. But my wife is on an Italy binge, and until Stanley Tucci does another series where he roams around the peninsula and finds wise old people who tell him that bread and wine are very important to their small community and he nods and makes a oh-that’s-a-very-good-tomato face, she’ll have to do with Rachel.

I mention this because A) "Rachel Ray is building a kitchen in her bedroom” is not a sentence that has been spoken in our 36 years of marriage, and B) it was followed a day later by “would you like to go see the duplex down the street?” Two home-improvement remarks in a 24 hour period may mean something is brewing. She may have reached a point in life where she is dissatisfied with the cabinets, a point from which there is no returning. It cannot be modified with new drawer pulls. If not heeded, it may spread to the countertops, and then everything that was loved when we moved in will be a persistent affront, and before you know it the entire kitchen is torn up, the contractors aren’t coming today, and you’re washing dishes in a bucket for four months.

As it happened the tour of the duplex cost $7, which answered the question for me nicely. I will walk down with you and look at the outside for free, unless they’re asking a dollar to cast your eyes on the dwelling. You saw through the window! You owe us 75 cents!

I don’t enjoy home tours. You always come away disappointed in your own dwelling. If only we had the room for a wood-burning dishwasher. Did you see that walk-in pantry with the spiral staircase up to the roof garden and secret telescope room? I can’t believe that bowling alley in the basement, though. Surely you hear the pins when someone’s watching a movie in the IMAX family room.

You go home to your own house, which is nice, and full of things you love and happy memories, and you grouse a little. I wish I had a walk-in pantry. Every day I’d just . . . walk in that sucker, and get something. It is not absurd to want a home theater, especially since it pays for itself after about 25 movies, given the ticket prices these days. It is, however, ridiculous to want a kitchen in the bedroom, which will be the next thing In Demand, thanks to Rachel Ray. After that, a jacuzzi in the tool shed (which is two stories with a firehouse pole and has a rooftop gas stove for grilling.)

When my wife came back, she reported that the duplex was owned by an unmarried couple who had split it up into a Him floor and Hers floor, each with its own kitchen and bath. I presume this is because she doesn’t want to deal with him leaving Guy Stuff everywhere and he wants a bathroom that does not contain 472 phials and flasks and bottles and small containers of cream that can only be applied after sunset, and perhaps a bed whose ratio of pillows-to-head is less than 20:1.

It seems an odd arrangement. You spend your happy evening with your spouse, and then you go home. I hope they have a nice long life there, but I guarantee you this: it’s going to drive her nuts if she becomes dissatisfied with his cupboards before he does.