Acronyms you forget the moment you create them.

11.13.22 #thedayafter #thekitchen #ktchn

Yesterday (11.12.22) Luke and I worked on computers. In looking back on our afternoon I am more aware of my desire to push to work. I do not want to take a break. I don’t mind chatting, but I don’t like to lose momentum. This is how a man operates when he thinks he’s running out of time.

I do think that.

I am running out of time...

House
Today I’m stealthing out the kitchen. Temporary Kitchen mk3(84) “TK3” is the third temporary kitchen to have been setup in the house, something which has occurred over the course of the two previous remodeling efforts. TK3 is me putting my “high concept with humble materials in a sustainable way” ethos to the challenge.

TK3 is both a live in place triage arrangement as much as it is a prototype for the new 384 kitchen. As I am in this business and also in the process of a remodel I’m eating my own dog food and I’ve decided to take my time, not feel rushed, not over spend. I’ve had a number of clients who had to make tough decisions as their budgets balloons due to the Covid-19 outbreak, how our capitalist world responds to disaster and opportunity and how all the aforementioned tilted us into this inflation crash. Yeah… I’m doing a temporary kitchen, it feels tone deaf and foolish to do anything but spend less to get us whole. This is a story about finishes though, I came to be here with TK3 cause I made the opposite decision when it came to high concept elements relating to the house and my infrastructure budget.

The problem about temporary kitchens is that they turn into sport. In the most spare execution of a temporary kitchen when you’re working with a card table, and a microwave oven, people will cheerfully take out any loan to get to cabinets and installed appliances. There is the temporary kitchen layout though where there is enough old kitchen and scraps to cobble together a functioning space. This kind of triage living often times allows for you to halt the hemorrhaging of funds by falling back to a fully functioning and livable “FFL” state. Temporary kitchens stick around too long, though as long as they’re around you do get to keep your cash. The silver lining to a good temporary kitchen is that you get to conceptualize and live with the space you’ve designed, if you have the will to rough a humble version of that concept into your living space.

In my FFL TK3 the oven is back! And because we didn’t have it for a while we got this amazing toaster oven, which is big enough to cook a whole chicken. We’ve also moved the fridge which gives us a preview of our enlarged appliance station. Pre TK3 we had an appliance area (it shared space with the fridge), an island, and a very shallow sink area, that was originally against a wall but is now back, sans the wall, about twice the size and it is now a peninsula. Everything is well enough as it is, but I want to push to have the kitchen feel cohesive and intentional, before thanksgiving 2022.

I think it is also me closing the chapter on the kitchen, I suspect we’ll be 9 months at a minimum before we’re ready to circle back to replacing the kitchen, but I really think it’ll end up being more like 18 months.

The Plan

I’m going to move the fridge one more time. Or this week I’ll go buy our new fridge. I’ll also stealth out all the riggery by bathing the entire lower kitchen in black. TK3 will likely be in deployment far longer than anyone (but me) initially assumed it would be.