I have a buddy who owns a condo on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, which I have visited several times. It is a wonderful tropical place to hang out. It is on top of a mountain right above Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. The balcony looks down on the turquoise ocean, and has a beautiful view of sunrise, which is my favorite time of day. I love visiting there. Right next door is a beach where the bar serves deeeelicious fish tacos with a rich aioli sauce. I try to go eat tacos at least once while I am down there.
There are only two things that bother me about being there. One is that on St Thomas, which is a mountain that rises out of the sea, no matter where you go, it is either uphill or downhill. The only flatland that I have seen there is where the airport is, and there is so little flat space that they had to build the runway out into the ocean. Looking out of the airplane window as you are landing there, it looks like you are crashing into the water. Once leaving the airport you either go uphill or downhill. Walking around the condo, you have to go down the mountain side and climb back up when you are done. It is not a place for the faint of heart.
The other thing that bothers me, is that it has the smallest kitchen space it is possible to cram a kitchen into. If two people are cooking dinner in the kitchen, you had better like each other, because cooking with two is a ballet of bumping butts and elbows moving from the stove to the sink. It bothered me less when cooking with his wife, Sarah, because she is a smokin’ hot totally gorgeous woman, so bumping butts is more fun. But even so, David and I have had many discussions about how we could make the kitchen less cramped and more functional. There didn’t seem to be much that could be done about that because one end of the kitchen is the concrete block outside wall, and the other end of the kitchen is an interior concrete block support wall, which can’t be moved. Not many options.
After studying the space several times, I found that if we could move the cabinets with the sink out into the living room space on the open third side of the kitchen, we would at least be able to move around more easily, and would be able to open the refrigerator door all the way. It was limited by the plumbing that comes out of the interior wall for the sink, but if we moved the cabinets out to where the plumbing pipes were in the front of the base cabinets instead of against the back of them, it would give us 15 inches more width to the working space. That wouldn’t be much, but would feel spacious compared to how it was now. David asked me to make a scale drawing of what that would look like.
The old cabinets were some really ugly teal painted cabinets with louvered door panels, and rusty hinges, and they needed to go. I drew up plans for new cabinets, rearranging the upper wall cabinets to utilize the space more efficiently, with a list of the common cabinet sizes that would be necessary, and sent them off to David.
Six months later, David emailed me that he was ready to start ordering what would be needed to get going on the project. He had decided to buy some beautiful maple cabinets, which he ordered from a cabinet shop in Vermont, where he lives, and have them shipped to Florida, where they would be put on a ship and taken out to St Thomas. Was I ready to get started? Sort of.
I was just coming off of two years of chemotherapy, and felt like the living dead. Chemo sucks really badly, and leaves you wondering if you are really still alive. I could mentally wrap my mind around the job, but I was so weak with chemo fatigue and hot flashes, that I worried about being up to the physical task of the project. Nonetheless, being Sam, I said yes, I would somehow find the strength to do the work. I worried about the uphill and downhill walking on St Thomas. Walking very far was tough in my weakened state. Even just getting to the parking area of the condo, you had to walk to the top of the mountain, and down the other side to the car.
I flew into St Thomas and David picked me up at the airport. The cabinets and formica for the countertops were due in customs in a couple days. We went to the condo, and we got started tearing out the old cabinets. This was going to be a tough job. Aside from my lack of energy in general, I was going to have to remodel the kitchen with a minimum of tools. Back in Austin, I had a garage full of tools with which I could do the work. In St Thomas, David had a circular saw, a jigsaw, and a cordless screwgun. I packed some laminate trimming router bits, and my formica ripper for making the edge pieces for the countertops in my suitcase, and figured I could make do with what there was.
The tear out went well. Fortunately, it was just David and I, and a buddy I invited to help me lift the wall cabinets to mount them, so we could make a mess and live in it while the work progressed. His wife Sarah wouldn’t be there until the end stages of the job. In my experience, women aren’t happy living amid chaos, and chaos it was, with furniture stacked against the walls, covered with plastic sheeting, tools scattered on the floor, and dust everywhere.
The cabinets were stuck in customs, waiting for whatever they do in customs to allow us to pick them up. The waiting cost us a week after we had torn things out, and the clock was ticking. David had guests who had booked the condo for mid November, and we had to have it done by then. But hey, I was in Paradise, with wonderful sunrises, beautiful beaches, women in bikinis, and fish tacos. So the wait was days of laying in the sun, snorkeling in the sea, and enjoying the tropical ambience. Finally customs said we could pick the cabinets up. They were flat packed, and were two pallets of heavy flat boxes that we hauled to the condo up the mountain, and dragged inside and stacked in the hallway.
The next couple days, David and I worked on opening the boxes and building the wall cabinets. David has been my friend since he graduated from high school a hundred years ago, and we have worked together on a bunch of projects. He and I work together seamlessly, mostly. We got the wall cabinets built and mounted and it was looking great. Then we built the base cabinets. The condo was a mess with cardboard boxes everywhere and stacks of assembled cabinets. We tried to keep up with the mess, mostly David really. Every day we would take some of the pieces of old cabinets, and boxes, and drag them up the mountain and down the mountain to the dumpsters, then back up and down back to the condo. At first I had to rest 5 or 6 times getting there and back, because my energy was so low. As the days went by, I regained some of my stamina, just a tiny bit each trip, but after feeling dead for two years, it seemed miraculous. Some days I only had to stop and rest 3 times.
Once the base cabinets were built, I started setting them. As we got around the corner to the cabinets that were to span the open side of the kitchen, we hit a problem. For some reason the lady at the cabinet shop had replaced a 30″ cabinet with a 36″ cabinet, and that was not going to work. The plan that I had drawn clearly showed the dimensions, because if I draw plans, I make sure that they will work. Unfortunately, the cabinet shop lady decided that a 36′ cabinet would fit, which it would not. There was 90″ of space between the walls, with 96″ of cabinets to fit in. I had neglected to bring my cabinet shrinker from Austin, so we were stuck. Ordering a new 30″ cabinet was not an option, as it would not get there before the guest booking, and the condo, at that point, was not functional. A new solution was needed.
David was really upset that he had not caught the error, and because he is a recovering Catholic, went into his bedroom to sulk and mea culpa himself to sleep. I, on the other hand, being an optimist, and knowing that we had to solve this problem or tell the guest that we had to cancel their reservation, stayed up and moved cabinets here and there trying to find the solution that we needed. The original plan was not going to work. It seemed hopeless. Eventually I came up with a plan that not only used all the cabinets we had, but in changing the layout radically actually allowed us to have a pass through space at the far end of the kitchen, leading into the living room, thereby giving two entrances to the kitchen. All I had to do was shift things around and eliminate the dishwasher, and voila!
When David woke up the next morning all I had to do was convince him that guests in a tropical paradise condo did not actually need a dishwasher. There had not been one before, and nobody had complained about having to wash the dishes in the sink. He was resistant at first, but there weren’t any other options really.
So, having surmounted that obstacle, we set the base cabinets in the new arrangement, and I got busy building the countertops. Meanwhile David worked on hooking the plumbing back up. I can tell you, building nice looking countertops with minimal tools was a challenge. I tried not to let David know that I was not sure I could actually pull it off, and I kept working, and thanks to creative solutions and perseverance I managed to whip up some nice countertops that wrapped around the interior wall and covered the extra base cabinet on the living room side in which a slide out trash can was to be put. I guarantee there is no other kitchen in the world that looks remotely like the new kitchen as it came out.
The new kitchen looked spectacular. Sarah arrived as I was building the countertops and although the condo had a lot of dust to be cleaned up, it was not as chaotic as it was before she got there. She smiled and liked the new kitchen. By then we had the new stainless steel stove and fridge in service, and all that was left was the final detail work. To celebrate, Sarah cooked us a pot roast in a crock pot on the new counter, and it was the best pot roast I have ever eaten.
During the last week there, David and I replaced both bathroom vanities, and we cleaned the place up. I was pretty damned proud that we pulled it all off. And I was almost back to feeling alive again. My energy was moderately better, and I had done a complicated job with minimal tools. And I had spent a month living in paradise and eating my favorite fish tacos. What could be better than that? And I got back to Austin in time to vote.
Perseverance and optimism.
Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Working seamlessly with a great friend