But WHY?

 This is my kitchen.

I like my kitchen, but I don't *love* my kitchen, and I spend a lot of time in here.

About three months ago, my husband and I decided that we would do something terrible and wonderful: we decided to re-do the kitchen in our house! To be clear, we decided to hire someone to do it. I feel like this represents a lot of personal growth on my part, as my impulse is usually to watch a video of someone (competent) doing some crazy-cool DIY project, smash things with a hammer, and then figure out how to fix them later (or not).

But I can hear you asking already: why are you taking the Hammer of Justice to a perfectly good White Kitchen? What even is a Hammer of Justice?

As for the why, I have a few major quibbles with this kitchen. If you step back and squint, it's really nice. When you get closer and actually start using it, not so much.

Quibble 1: Storage

For having so many cabinets, the kitchen is remarkably short on useful storage. The cabinet below the cooktop is almost useless due to an extremely sketchy gas line installation:

The pantry storage is also not super easy to make use of. I joke with my husband that I'd have to go to Narnia to use half of my pantry because it's so deep. I'm only able to effectively use about the front third to have of the lower shelves; everything else essentially gets lost because apparently I lack object permanence--if I can't see it, it doesn't exist:

Quibble 2: Safety and Sanitation

We've already replaced one microwave due to it being too close to the gas cooktop. This current one periodically overheats when we're cooking. Additionally, the paint is sticky and bubbling and melting on the uppers over the range. So gross, very unsafe, very unsanitary:

Quibble 3: Aesthetics

These cabinets are 30 years old. They aren't solid wood, they're some sort of laminate over MDF, and after having been painted several times, they are in bad shape. The paint is chipping and bubbling, the laminate is warping and pulling away from the MDF, and the last paint job was just kind of sloppy.

The pantry cabinet door is the worst offender, that little strip of laminate is very sharp and I've cut myself on it a few times:

Toward the bottom, you can see how the laminate is warping and pulling off the cabinet--this is happening in a lot of places:

The paint is chipped off in a lot of places, and there is a lot of gunk and other paint residue all over them:

So, that's the why in a nutshell. There are some other issues that we could have addressed, like the wallpaper on the ceiling falling off (yes, there's wallpaper on the ceiling). Or the kitchen island outlets that randomly trip the GFCI circuit, usually when you're plugging something in like a phone charger that isn't currently pulling any current. But those don't address the larger issues with layout and safety, so here we are at the beginning of a five week process (fingers crossed).