Joe Blundo: Kitchen remodeling job is already cooking up some humor – The Columbus Dispatch

After 20 years of column-writing, I needed a fresh source of humor, so I decided to have the kitchen remodeled.

Doing it myself would have been the richest source of material, but actuarial tables predict I will live only another 18 years, which wouldnt have been nearly enough time to get it done.

So I turned over the remodeling to a professional, confident that merely disassembling the existing kitchen would be plenty inspirational. It was.

Do you know what an appliance garage is? Its a countertop enclosure meant to hide toasters and blenders.

I found that if I lay on my back on the countertop, with my feet supported by a ladder and my head and shoulders inside the appliance garage, I could gain access to the screws that stubbornly prevented me from removing it.

And because those screws were, oh, Id say2 feet long, I had plenty of time, while twisting, to ponder why we need to hide appliances behind a door anyway. Were talking about toasters here, not a countertop toilet.

Having removed the garage, I turned, with my sons help, to moving the refrigerator. I thought sliding it across the floor would be the hard part, but no. The hard part was disconnecting the water line for the ice-maker.

As we headed to the basement to turn off the water to that line, my wife said, Dont break the valve.So we gently twisted it. Then we roughly twisted it. Then we took a wrench to it. And then we broke it.

We arrived breathless at a hardware store just minutes later. Yes, said a clerk, we have what you need to cap that flowing water line. "Good," I replied. "Because this means I wont have to get divorced."

Not until I had demolished the kitchen did I fully realize how central it was to life. It wasnt just a food storehouse. It also held utility bills, pizza coupons, Lipitor, pliers, wind chimes, school photos, wedding invitations and the Worthington trash pickup schedule.

I still find myself instinctively heading for the familiar locale, then circling aimlessly like a migratory bird searching for recognizable geography in a barren wasteland. Occasionally, I forlornly cheep something like, Where is the cheese grater?

Of course, the wasteland will soon be replaced by a new kitchen, which will shift the challenge to forming a new mental map, a slow process for me.

I can pretty much guarantee that I will put yogurt in the oven for at least a few years before the refrigerators new location is firmly imprinted on my brain.

In fact, for humor purposes, I'm counting on it.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

jblundo@dispatch.com

@joeblundo

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Joe Blundo: Kitchen remodeling job is already cooking up some humor - The Columbus Dispatch