No One Else To Blame

• If you are following the saga, three quarters of my kitchen cabinets are done now. I’m disappointed with the results so far and if I had the decision to make over, which I don’t, I would have gone with refacing, not refinishing. One thing about living alone is that you have no one else to blame for wrong decisions. But as the Norwegians say, it could be worse. Jenn and I are beginning to move things back into the still doorless cabinets. If she has lost patience with me at least she has not quit. She keeps saying “Where does this go?” I shrug pathetically. If its ceramic it might be something I haven’t contemplated using in over ten years, or can’t even remember. If it’s a food item we check the dates. The bags of throw-aways hauled out match in volume the bags of thrift shop donations, yet the cupboards are still crowded. One reason is that I have in the kitchen four different sets of dishes. Two sets were donations, yet I love them and am willing to rededicate space to them. A third set now nests in a very high cupboard above the fridge. I fear none of this set have been used in thirty years; still I can not part with them, for I bought them in 1953 with my very first pay check teaching school. They are heavy Franciscan ware. To me they were a symbol of being employed in the real world. Kind of emancipation though I don’t know from what, as I was pretty much emancipated from age seven or eight. I brought the symbolic set from Tacoma when I moved down in 1956. The fascination wore off in about 1960. For one thing, the knife would never balance on the side of the plate when one was eating. Guests would be embarrassed and I would be annoyed and apologetic. Tut!

Where we are now in the cabinet refinishing is at least creative. Even sanded down to bare wood the sixty year old Birch doors would not forgive the impression of their original brass knobs leaving a white circle to mar the clean lines of the new Swedish handles in brushed nickel. The arc of the handles is just fat enough to accommodate my arthritic fingers. No backplate was made to cover up the span of the two inch diameter in the original knobs. So a couple of days ago Chris, the contractor, and I made a trip to McBeath lumber in Berkeley. There I picked out a panel of veneer in a contrasting color. Its called Mappa and has gorgeous designs in it, like burl. Today using a plastic template we traced in mechanical pencil the outline of the template in various spots, trying to pick the most artistic burl patterns. From here the pattern will be laser cut for the handles of 25 doors and fourteen drawers. Maybe the results will be stunning and we will be on the cover of Sunset magazine. Dream on, Bonnie.