Debra Pickett

There are certain people who enjoy this sort of thing, who really like having a "project" in their lives, and who, when they are not personally involved in remodeling things, will watch television shows about other people remodeling.

I am not one of those people.

And I'm not married to one of those people, either. This should have been perfectly obvious to me when I met his three brothers, each of whom lives in a house with at least one unfinished room. Unfinished for years.

It seemed to me that the best way to avoid this fate -- dust, noise and asymmetry being pretty much my three least favorite things in life -- was never to start remodeling.

So we made a newlywed life plan that specifically excluded remodeling projects. My place was sublet without so much as a fresh coat of paint. His place -- now ours -- could be sold in a couple of years, we decided, as a sort of blank slate for other people's remodeling ambitions. And we would buy a new place only when we found one that required no modification.

I really liked this plan.

In my enthusiasm, it is possible that I never determined his feelings about it. In truth, I didn't think they mattered very much, since his tendency toward inertia can generally be counted upon to prevail against all other inclinations, such as his enthusiasm for the assembly and disassembly of household objects.

And it did seem reasonable to believe that the whole inertia thing would work in my favor, if only just this once.

How do you say 'bad idea'?

For reasons that are still not quite clear, the word "kitchen" started appearing on my husband's to-do list back in December.

Probably the topic came up among his friends and someone used the phrase "return on investment." Those words seem to evoke the same reaction in him that, oddly, both "semi-annual sale" and "starving orphans" do in me. Still, it didn't strike me as an irresistible force/immovable object situation. Inertia, like paper covering rock, beats shopping every time.

Then Mykola, the incredible Ukrainian handyman, came into our lives. And, suddenly, all things seemed possible.

"We could have him install some new cabinets," my husband said with the kind of enthusiasm you know, as a spouse, you are required to support.

I tried not to imagine all the complications that would surround this, beginning with the selection of the cabinets and continuing through their installation by a non-English speaker with whom we communicate primarily by calling our Ukrainian cleaning lady on her cell phone and having her translate as we pass our phone back and forth.

I dealt with my anxiety by telling myself that we would never get past the shopping stage.

Blame it on the meatballs

A couple of weeks later, I was on a food-related outing to Ikea when my friend Judy (who enjoys the white chocolate mousse cake in the cafe there, almost as much as I enjoy the meatballs) pointed out that they sold perfectly nice kitchen cabinets at very reasonable prices. Emboldened by a slight lingonberry buzz, I decided to check them out.

The center of the kitchen department at Ikea is not, as one might expect, a big display of cabinet doors and counters and such -- these samples are relatively small and sort of off to one side. Instead, the main attraction is a bank of computers loaded with their "kitchen planner tool" software.

"Wow," I said, sitting down in front of a flat screen monitor, "I could really get into this."

The software -- similar packages, not affiliated with any particular store, are available online -- allows you to re-create, blueprint style, your kitchen as it exists now, with doors, windows, appliances, cabinets and counters. Then you can click-and-drag your old stuff out and replace it with new. There's even a 3D view, so you can see what the newly fabulous kitchen would look like from, say, inside the cabinet above your sink.

After only a few minutes, though, I realized I couldn't get very far with the exercise, since I hadn't committed the exact dimensions of my dishwasher to memory. Still, I was enamored enough of the clicking-and-dragging that I mentioned it to my husband when I got home.

He promptly downloaded it to his laptop and, his engineer brain quickly snapping to attention, began measuring every inch of our kitchen.

The new cabinets should arrive in a few weeks. And the disruption, he promises, will only last for 10 days or so.