Tripping the Edge of Chaos...: And, we did a thing….

I am lucky and have a somewhat unusual situation. I was lucky enough to be able to buy the house I was raised in from my mom, and will also pass it on to my own children.

My parents bought the house brand new, when it was first built, around 1963. Through the years, there were some changes, and I still marvel at the strength of my mom. My dad died suddenly, from a heart attack, a month before I turned seven. After that, my mom was done with men. She never remarried and she never really dated seriously.

Many, many years ago, the kitchen looked like this:

This picture was probably taken, like, 1987? Maybe 1988? That fabulous honey-packet-holding awesome is my dear friend Joe, who I was able to see recently for the first time in many, many years. BUT, that is not this story….

Before we bought the house from my mom, we did a kitchen remodel. My mom was at the beginning of the decline in health that would eventually take her life. Uncontrolled diabetes led to peripheral vascular disease, painful feet and legs, and eventually, the stroke that killed her. I am positive she also had some sort of dementia happening because she couldn’t remember things she had agreed to and also became mean and bitter. She wasn’t mean to me until almost the end, but it broke my heart to have my beautiful mama not know things. That was a time of conflict for me. She fought me on a lot of things, and once the kitchen was put back together, she continued to be “set in her ways”. My mom was born and has earliest memories in the Great Depression. She was a hoarder, not super bad, but she wouldn’t let go of things because she thought they were perfectly good and still had life in them, then would lose them and buy new ones, then find the old things. This was the kitchen after the remodel with my mom:

When we were doing the things for this remodel, it brought back up so much turmoil and pain surrounding that time! My brother has been a construction tradesperson for over 40 years. He said he would help us. We thought that meant he would guide us on the road to making the best kitchen possible. We didn’t understand that what he meant by “help” was to scream at and belittle us for not also being construction tradespeople and also not being as helpful as he could have been. What’s past is past, but man, did it bring everything back up! This was a tremendous opportunity to PURGE all that energy, and boy did I!! I am the total hippy dippy, and was determined to do right by my daughter. We saged, we incensed, we cleansed, and we made everything as good as we could get it on this remodel!

I didn’t want my daughter to have to go through that when we remodeled the kitchen this time. I know so very many people right now are suffering, and for that I feel somewhat guilty. AND, for those of us who’s incomes and such haven’t been affected, we were able to remodel our kitchen again after 20 years. We refinanced our house, took out money to do the kitchen and some other things, dropped our payment amount by almost $300, and were able to get things done properly through Home Depot. May I present to you, our new kitchen!