Another Kitchen Surprise

The kitchen in the Bungalow has been an ongoing project. Our current goal is an interim state that will allow us to change our focus to the upstairs and come back to the finish work on the kitchen once we are fully moved. Between catching colds, the snow complicating outdoor work for the business, and having to clean the kitchen out before each time we work in there, it has been a slow process. (No matter how hard I try to keep it clean and empty, things like the coffee marker, bottles of cooking oil, and dog pans all tend to migrate back in there.) We are finally to the cabinet painting stage and so I started in on the old upper cabinets, the only ones that we kept, a couple of weeks ago.

The first thing that needed to be done was to remove the contact paper from the shelves. I had been avoiding starting on this because I had expected it to be an epic battle, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the glue was old and not holding very well. Then came the shock. As I was removing the paper from the bottom shelf of the center cabinet I found that it was stuck to a piece of cardboard. What in the world were these people thinking? So after yelling at the cabinet for a few minutes and getting Eric’s attention, he came over to see what the problem was.

That was when he pointed out to me that the cardboard had a purpose. It had been used to cover the large hole cut in the bottom of the cabinet. What? Seriously!?! Yes. Seriously. It looks like it was possibly used for the flue of a stove or something like that at some point. In all the time that we had been dealing with the cabinets we had never noticed the hole, as it could only be seen from the underside of the cabinet.  If we had seen it, we would have just ripped out those cabinets and replaced them when we replaced all of the others.

Here is the cabinet with the cardboard pulled up.

A closer shot of the partially scraped up cardboard.

This picture is from the underside of the cabinet. It's not very good and doesn't show the entire whole in the cabinet, but you get the idea.

For now Eric is going to cut a piece of masonite to fit in the bottom of the cabinet and it will become another “live with it.” Eventually we will probably replace these cabinets so that they match everything else in the kitchen, but for now I just want the kitchen done. As long as my dishes don’t fall out of the cabinet and it’s not all that noticeable, I am going to just move on. So I keep dreaming about the day that I can create my perfect kitchen in Toad Hall, and to appreciate the hard work that has been done to make the Bungalow not just livable, but nice too, and be happy with the blessings I have been given, hole in the cabinet or not.