A ridiculously stupid thing we did, again

Once again, I am cooking with gas. For the past two months, I’ve been cooking with an air fryer and a microwave. Why? Because we did a ridiculously stupid thingagain. We remodeled our kitchen.

Now that the construction, which actually involves a shocking amount of destructionis in the rearview mirror, I’m happy we did it. But while we were doing it, I questioned everything:

• Home ownership? A joke — the home owns you.

• My marriage? Still awesome, despite our date nights shifting from dinner and a movie to Lowes and Home Depot outings.

• My sanity? Always in doubt.

Since Christina works regular hours at an office and I work irregular hours at home, I was the project manager. If you don’t know, a project manager’s core competency is anxiety. The more you worry, the more likely it is that the project comes in on time and on budget. Other must-haves for a project manager include being a relentless motherfucker who demands the win, while also being an empathetic leader capable of inspiring vendors to do their very best work, even though you know deep down that their best isn’t nearly good enough.

Like all project managers, I try to apply lessons from previous projects to future projects. The technical term for this is “learnings.” My big learning was … don’t remodel, ever. But that learning undermines all the other learnings — and the premise of this post. So I unlearned the big learning in favor of smaller learnings — and in the spirit of mining human misery for comedy.

We weren’t changing the footprint of our kitchen, so from the outset we knew our plumbing needs were minimal: reconnect the dishwasher and sink, install a new garbage disposal. In theory, a “capable” handyman, handywoman, or handy-they/them could do the job, but I called our plumber, Sean, because I had yet to learn that he was a dipshit.

Sean came to our house three times. The first time, he did the job, or so I thought. The second time, he replaced a leaky p-trap, blaming the leak on “cheap” parts at Lowes, without explaining why he didn’t go to Home Depot, which he called the “pro move.” The third time, he replaced a leaky valve that I told him to fix on the second visit. Also, he came on a Sunday night, which felt like a Johnny-on-the-spot move, except he brought helpers — his two demonic kids who ran around our house breaking shit and screaming at our terrified dogs, along with his wife, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, manage their children.

The learning? Fire the plumber before meeting his family.

I thought they would, but they don’t. We needed a lot of caulk on this job, and even now as I type this, I’m giggling.

The learning? You can never have enough caulk.

Several Russians worked on our kitchen. I asked them why they came to the U.S., and they told me they’d rather remodel our kitchen than face Ukrainian drones. Fair. One of them also told me how construction works in Russia. “If they don’t like your work, they don’t pay, and if you fuck up their house, maybe they kill you.” Ouch.

The learning? Do our next project in Moscow.

I thought I knew this one going in, but there were a few dicey moments when I forgot. Thankfully, the guys who worked on our kitchen were in the habit of asking helpful questions like, “Your wife approves this?” Answering their questions slowed the project down, but guaranteed better outcomes.

The learning? You don’t expect things like tile layout, paint selection, and hardware placement to impact the happiness of your marriage, but they do.

This was a tough one. We had a budget, we had the money, and we even had a contingency in our budget (and in our bank account), just in case things went tits up. As it turned out, our kitchen project (mostly) went tits down. Thank the construction gods! Still, we could’ve used more money. A lot more.

The learning? We bought way too much caulk.

Construction means dust. How much dust? Enough to film the Arrakis scenes for the next Dune movie in your house.

The learning? The spice must flow, but the dust flows harder.

Yeah, me too. But then I remembered something: Goonies never say die. I had this idea that I’d start another Substack called Slacker Noir to focus on crime fiction, which I did, but that felt limiting. That was unexpected because Situation Normal also felt limiting. And I fucking hate limits. But in middle of destroying and rebuilding our kitchen, I had a lot of time to think. And this is what I came up with: People who subscribe to this Substack like my writing (or they’re friends / family and feel guilty about unsubscribing). My new plan is a lot more straightforward:

That’s it. That’s the plan.

See you next time! And until then, let’s have some fun in the comments section.

1. What are your learnings? Share your wisdom.

2. Did you miss me as much as I missed you? Lie to me.

3. Caulk? Explain.

4. Lowes or Home Depot? Wrong answers encouraged.

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