The Kitchen Built From Grandpa’s Barn

The plan

I showed Megan the drawings the next evening, after the kids were in bed. I spread them out on the old laminate counter and held the corners down with a salt shaker and a coffee mug.

She looked at them for a long time without saying anything. Then she put her finger on the island and said, “Can it have drawers on this side? Deep ones, for the pots?”

“It can have whatever you want,” I said.

“What does it cost?”

That was the real question, and I had been up half the night working on it. A kitchen is not mostly wood.

It is mostly boxes, hardware, counters and the hundred small things that make doors close soft and drawers run straight.

I figured maple plywood for the cabinet boxes, three quarter inch, about sixteen sheets. Good full extension drawer slides. Hinges. Pulls. Finish. Counters.

If I bought solid oak for the doors and face frames, which was what I had in mind that January, the wood alone would run close to two thousand dollars.

“I can do it for around five thousand,” I told her. “Maybe a little under. We keep the sink and the stove and the refrigerator. I do the work nights and weekends.”

“How long?”

“Honestly? I think Thanksgiving. It’s a lot of nights.”

Megan looked at me, and then down at the drawings, and then out the window at the shop with its light still on where I had left it. “Thanksgiving is at our house this year,” she said.

“I know.”

She smiled for the first time since the birthday. “Then I guess you’d better get going.”

We agreed on one more thing that night. We would not tell her mother. Not to be spiteful, Megan said, and I agreed with her.

Just because if it went wrong, or if it was not done, she did not want to hear about it at every Sunday dinner until spring.