While exposing the framing in our house, I noticed that the builder used 2x4s which are made of cutoffs and scraps that have been finger jointed together. The entire kitchen is framed with this shite. I’m absolutely astonished – and not in a good way. The builder is (Gordon) Reykdal Construction, and based on what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t buy another home from this builder if it was the last one on earth.

The trim and cabinets are a very cheap grade of particleboard (sawdust and glue, actually) with a plastic coating that serves as a finish. In some places, the bond has failed, and the surface coating is peeling away from the doors and trim. I’m curious if the builder foisted this garbage on hapless buyers, or if this was installed later by someone who valued economy over quality.

I’ll probably never know for sure.

There was a hideous cabinet in the center of the kitchen (visible in the foreground here) that I christened “the abortion.” It was impractical, poorly designed, and stunningly ugly. Camille simply could not stop bringing people into the kitchen to show them this hideous sideshow freak!

It turned out to be an assemblage of three odd-sized cabinets and panels held together with a minimum of staples, and secured to the floor with three drywall screws.  Imagine my astonishment when I pulled off part of a cabinet to find that a piece of ordinary cardboard was used as shim material!  In workmanship, a new low!

It has become a point of intense curiosity to guess and discover what the nadir will be. Bubblegum and paperclips? Papier-mâché? Salt and flour?  Enquiring minds want to know!

At last the abortion and the soffit are gone and stashed neatly in the back of my truck for an unceremonious run to the dump, which is an appropriate dénouement, methinks.  The kitchen now looks cavernous, and in retrospect, it is clear how that miserable cabinet dominated the room.

In terms of scope, time, energy and cost, the kitchen remodel is probably the largest project we will ever undertake on our home. Of course, it will also give us our single biggest boost in equity position as well.

I am still proceeding off the back of an envelope. Our initial budget was based on providing installers with an empty room with plumb walls and all problems corrected, and it is turning out that the hardest work is the tearout – by the time I get done ripping everything out and overcoming all of the shortcuts, shoddy workmanship and bad design, hanging the new cabinets will be a single afternoon project that could be done between a few hands of poker and Mai Tais.

There are a few exceptions to my abilities (a gas line has to be run to serve the new range, some wiring will have to be moved, and the floor needs to be refinished), and these tasks will be farmed out to people with the mad skillz.

Other than those few exceptions, it might turn out that I will be doing this entire project in the evenings over the next month!

This house is full of mysteries and amazements. Here is a homemade writing surface next to the fridge that was slapped in place using scraps and cutoffs. It is held to the wall by four drywall screws. Thankfully, I never set anything heavy on it, and I never stood on it, because it would have collapsed.

The surprising thing is that the tile glued to the top is very heavy, and I would have expected it to fail under its own weight. But like so many other things in this house, it remained precariously balanced until my attention was focused on it.  And now, thankfully, it is gone.

There is a wealth of contradictory clues about the history of the “interior decorating.”  Oh, if only these walls could talk! I have an enormous attraction to the mystery of how much of these ghetto-riggings were done by well-meaning but deeply ignorant handymen, and how much was done by incompetent and/or careless subcontractors and laborers at the original build.

From time to time, I find myself standing in the middle of the room in slack-jawed amazement, and I stop myself from wasting any more time puzzling over the origins of these misdemeanors. I can hear my friend Wayne Kuhn softly in my ear, “Mister Tabor, just press on.”

Above that desk was a fluorescent lamp fixture, wired to a switch. The “installer” ran the Romex through two studs, up two feet, poked it through a hole in the drywall, then made a series of bash marks in the drywall in order to come back down the two feet it had just traveled up, and lie flush behind the wall cabinet.

My feeble imagination simply will not stretch far enough to guess at the process by which any human being thought that was a good way to run a power line, or the calculus and circumstance that might have directed that outcome.

Then there is the conversion of drywall to Swiss cheese by a blind monkey looking for studs to mount the wall cabinets. The last time I checked, this could be accomplished easily with a tape measure, a pencil and an IQ over 65.  There are dozens and dozens of holes behind the wall cabinets, a handyman’s Whac-a-mole.

It appears that the person mounting the cabinets was also working from their jar of spare screws, because the screws are all different sizes and colors – all of them too short for the task of reliably supporting the weight of cabinets full of dishes.

At least the tile came off the wall fairly easily with a heavy scraper and a mallet.  The technique I perfected will be important later, when I remove the tile from around the kitchen window.

The next few weeks will be a grand adventure full of a complete range of emotions. I’m sure we will catch a few breaks, and I’m sure I will be deeply disappointed in things I did not correctly predict, or in unforeseen things we have to cope with.  Semper Gumby!