Cash Poor, Kitchen Rich

A glimpse of my new kitchen,
with one hole for a missing cabinet.
In March, Boyfriend and I bought an apartment. We definitely view home-ownership as an investment and crunched a lot of numbers before deciding to buy.

We knew before we took the place, an enormous one-bedroom in Sunnyside, Queens (New York), that the kitchen needed work. What we didn't know was it would be impossible to do all the work piecemeal. Without getting into the details (I'll save that for another post when it's really really all done), it was like a three-dimensional puzzle, where all the parts lock into place precisely and fall apart if even one piece is jiggled from where it belongs. The broken oven, the floor tiles, the dropped claustrophobic ceiling all knit together. Change one, and you'll have to change them all.

And change them all we did.

We gutted that kitchen down to the studs. Today, the last cabinet will be installed. The final piece was stalled because the manufacturer initially built the wrong size cabinet. But it arrives today.

I'm excited to have a completed and usable kitchen again, but I'm pretty broke at the moment. My friend and I were chatting the other night about how I'm tightening the belt for a while, and he said, "You're not broke. You're just cash-poor," and I had to remind myself, "Oh right. It's an investment."

Indeed: cash-poor and kitchen-rich.

P.S. We still need to paint.