Kitchen Remodel: Backsplash Installation

“I got the tiles for the kitchen backsplash,” I told Mr. Wonderful.

“Good,” he said while shaving in the bathroom.

“I got the grout for the tiles.”

“Good.”

“I called the handyman to install it.”

“No way!” he said nicking his chin.

Since buying The House my husband had turned into a Do-It-Yourself maniac.  It started small with him installing handles on the closet doors the week we moved in and grew with each DIY success until now he wanted to single-handedly expand the kitchen to feed 80, add a helicopter landing pad and build a second Griffith Observatory on our roof.  All while working a full time job.  It was crazy.  He was crazy.  He was driving me crazy.

Now he spent hours at hardware stores buying materials.  He spent days on the internet researching DIY projects.  He spent weeks avoiding local handymen. 

One of our neighbors, James, was a certified electrician.  When we first trimmed our palm trees, James thanked us by handing out his business card,

“If you need any electrical repairs, call me,” he said with a wave. 

Instead of seeing this as the friendly gesture it was, Mr. Wonderful viewed it as a challenge to his masculine virility.  I saw his chin jut out in defiance and could hear his brain screaming: Fix our electrical system?  Over my dead body!

So I said goodbye to a weekend with Mr. Wonderful.  And for the next 60 hours I worked, I went to dinner with my girlfriends, I watched every movie at Laemmle’s Polish Film Festival just to avoid being in his hair while he toiled on the remodel.  While I gallivanted around Los Angeles, he prepped the walls, applied the glue and slapped the tile suckers to it. 

Then he rested for two weeks.  After which I, again, became a weekend widow while he spent another weekend applying the grout.  This time I worked overtime at the office, I invited myself to dinner with my girlfriends and their boyfriends, I caught Laemmle’s entire Icelandic Film Fest.  I’d never seen so much ice on film.  During (another) harsh ice film scene I got a text message from Mr. Wonderful.

“Come home."

I returned to the house with coffee, sushi and ice cream.  I entered the kitchen and beheld a finished backsplash and a dirty spouse.

"It’s beautiful,” I gasped.  He ran his grout-encrusted hands through his hair.  He was beautiful.  There was nothing but masculine, virile perfection about him and his work. 

So I decided: If he really wanted to be a DIY maniac… I’d let him.

What the Rodeo Taught Me

“Welcome home,” I said embracing Mr. Wonderful at the airport.

He rubbed his neck.  “Remind me never to take a trans-Atlantic flight that starts on the Pacific.”

“The House missed you,” I said.

He nodded.

“The neighbors missed you.”

He nodded.

“Jackson missed you.”

“All that cat misses is a brain.”

He called it.  After witnessing Jackson’s recent run-in with a wild opossum where the cat rolled over and played dead, Mr. Wonderful took to calling him the “Dumbest Kitty Ever”.   Looking at the cold hard facts, if the opossum had attacked Jackson, the cat would now be dead.  So our cat’s existence on the planet continued despite his lack of a brain and his complete physical unfitness.  Forget Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest theory, it didn’t apply to dim, pampered felines whose only street cred was they were named after “Jack” Bauer. 

This pushed me to act.  Perhaps I could help Jackson become less of a pillow and more of a cat?  Perhaps I could reawaken an inner tiger hidden deep, deep down inside him?  Perhaps I could give him the skills to fight off a fierce opossum attack?  

Nah.

But I had to try. I thought about the Reno Rodeo I’d just been too.  All the events were activities that cowboys, cows and horses really did on a working ranch.  Perhaps I needed to simulate real life cat activities to awaken Jackson’s latent tiger?

Currently Jackson’s day consisted of sleeping, eating and playing with his catnip toy, then… sleeping some more.  We’d bought the mouse-shaped catnip toy for him after he arrived in our home.  It had a Velcro pocket where you could remove the old catnip and restuff it with a fresh supply.  Once a day Jackson would hug it between his front paws and slowly lick it like an ice cream cone.  After which he’d crash into a drug-induced stupor right on the kitchen floor. 

Then it hit me.  Catnip was a drug!  It was preventing our cat from functioning at his highest intelligence or any intelligence.  The worst part: I was his supplier!  How could he get in touch with his inner tiger if he was as high as a kite?  I confiscated the catnip mouse toy and stashed it in the closet. 

Another game we played with Jackson was “catch the pocket pen laser”.  Friends had given us this toy to get our sad, lazy cat moving.  Initially he liked chasing the red light across the floor and around the furniture but after two minutes when he couldn’t catch the red dot in his paws he slumped off to his food bowl and ate.  The laser hadn’t help him become fit, it made him fatter.

So I went out to the garden, found a stick and tied a ribbon to the end of it.  Then I tied the ribbon to the empty catnip mouse toy.  Back inside I twirled this contraption around our cat, who ignored it with boredom.  His message was clear: Hey lady, I'm not bothering with this mouse toy if it isn’t full of drugs.

I continued wiggling the stick, ribbon and mouse toy on the floor for 30 minutes and just when I felt my wrist would fall off from spinning this clunky homemade contraption, the cat turned his head and pounced.  He clutched the mouse toy in his paws and bit the toy even though the toy was devoid of catnip.  He has animal instincts!  He's a tiger!  He's alive!

Back at the house, I showed Mr. Wonderful Jackson’s progress with the mouse toy tied to the ribbon and the stick.  While Mr. Wonderful ate dinner, rehydrated from the flight and kicked back on the sofa I spun the ribbon and stick toy until the cat collapsed into a panting, happy heap on the floor.     

“See,” I said admiring our feline.  “He has some cat instincts.  We just had to simulate his natural environment to bring them out.”

“Chasing a mouse toy doesn’t mean he can fight a opossum.”

“It’s a beginning.”

“It’s the start of a beginning.”

“It’s better than nothing.”  Mr. Wonderful nodded.  The cat walked to the sofa and rested his paw on Mr. Wonderful’s foot. 

“I told you the cat missed you,” I said.

“Did anybody else miss me?”

“I missed you.”

“Prove it,” he said pulling me close.

Kitchen Remodel: From Wave to Straight

The first step in our kitchen remodel was to give the cabinets the straight line we wanted.

Here's a close up view of the old kitchen and the unattractive wavy line of our otherwise beautiful wooden cabinets.

Mr. Wonderful used a hand jigsaw to remove the wave.  The saw's noise was so intense I thought an LAPD chopper was using our kitchen as a landing pad.  Or that Mr. Wonderful had bought a Harley-Davidson and was doing wheelies in our kitchen.

He then inserted a straight piece of wood where the wavy line had been.  He used wood fill and wood glue to fill in any gaps. 

He's amazing, isn't he?  Or I should say, he's wonderful, isn't he?

Next step: Painting the kitchen!

Kitchen Redo--Step 1 Ride the Wave

“I love these wooden cabinets,” I said.

“They’re solid,” Mr. Wonderful said pounding on the old cabinets in our pre-redone kitchen.

“I love how they go all the way up the ceiling.”

“They’re big.”

“I want to keep them for our new kitchen.”

Mr. Wonderful smiled, “I like it when you say practical things like that.”

“But… can we change them?”

We were discussing what to keep, what to toss and how much money we needed to steal to pay for our kitchen remodel.  I truly loved the wooden cabinets but I disliked their country-kitchen, wiggley-wave bottom line because it didn’t make me think of an elegant epicurean epicenter, (which I hoped our kitchen would become) but rather a cookies-tossing, vomit-inducing roller coaster ride at Six Flags.

So I wanted to change it.  Or more honestly, I wanted Mr. Wonderful to change it.  If he could change it successfully, then I was game to keep the cabinets but if he couldn’t, we’d have to spend more money and buy all new cabinets.  The question boiled down to: Could he remove the wave without hurting the cabinets?

Well folks, he’s not called “Mr. Wonderful” for nothing. 

Here’s something else I know: you cannot force “wonders” or a man.  So I left him alone and watched from afar.

First, he thought about it.  At the kitchen table he started sitting in a chair facing the wavy cabinets.  While sipping his coffee, while eating his pasta, while reading the paper he would suddenly pause and stare at the cabinets. 

Second, he took his time.  We discussed removing the cabinet wave on Tuesday.  On Wednesday I did not ask him about it nor did he tell me about it.  That Thursday, Friday, and Saturday followed the same pattern where we discussed work, the vegetable garden, Jackson’s toenails, literally everything except the wave.  

Third, he went shopping.

“I’m going to the store,” he announced.  I chased after him and together we drove to The Home Depot.  He marched to the lumber department and I trailed after him at a polite distance like a court jester following his king.  He picked out several pieces of wood 12 feet long.  He picked up saw blades, wood fill, wood glue, a box of nails, six energy-saving light bulbs and 20 pounds of organic potting soil.  I may be an idiot in how to remove a cabinet’s wavy line but I was pretty confident he wouldn’t use all those items to do it.

Or maybe he would?

Back at the House I left him alone to his work only silently popping my head into the kitchen when it sounded like an LAPD chopper was landing or taking off in our kitchen. 

He sawed into the bottom of the cabinet to cut out the wave and replaced it with the straight wood he had bought. He measured everything.  The fit was perfect!  He swapped the wave for a straight line from the rest of the cabinets.  By the end of the afternoon he’d changed the cabinets while keeping them in tact. 

I gave him a glass of lemonade.  He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the cabinets.  He didn’t saying anything but he didn’t have to because it was my turn to speak and to tell him how wonderful he truly was.

With our lemonades I toasted to him; to our new/old cabinets; to saving money; and to him, again, because he’s full of wonders.