I know, I know. Just like Dante delighted in telling anybody who would listen to him whether they wanted to hear it or not, I'm not supposed to be here (only unlike Dante, it's not today that I'm not supposed to be here, it's ever again). Becoming Kelly, the post I wrote nearly two years ago, was meant to be my last. What was it I said? Something about how it was time to stop writing this blog, Life's Waiting to Begin, because my life had inarguably begun, and then I went on about all the things I was still waiting for. Or maybe that order is reversed. I could look, sure, the post is just a click away--I already linked to it, for the love of God--but does the order in which I wrote my goodbye post that turned out not to be a goodbye but just a ridiculously long hiatus really matter at all? I'm here either way despite that long ago, excited intention of mine--that new frontier I so boundlessly set out to discover--so let's just pay attention to the fact that despite that intention, I'm back and to what was so important, I felt the burning need to blow the dust off this here keyboard of mine and go back on my word, and that something, people, that something that has brought about my decidedly less than triumphant return, is the faucet on my kitchen sink.
Yep, that baby right up there. That's the one.
You may or may not know this, I guess it depends on how closely you follow my life, but right before the pandemic hit three years ago, I remodeled my kitchen. You know what? Just for fun, it used to look like
and now it looks like
Way better, right? Like, serious upgrade, yes? Actually, you know what? Remember how I said I was going to talk about my sink? Well, I am, but looking at that photo of my old kitchen made me want to widen the scope, to write about the whole damn thing.
Like I said, it's way better. The old kitchen cabinets were constructed of some super cheap material from the 1970s and rotting from the inside. I took the doors off รก la Monica from Friends, and while I admittedly liked how it looked, it wasn't exactly optimal for keeping my dishes clean. The counter was made from I don't even know what, but as you can see, it was not cute, and the fridge? I don't want to say itty bitty, but it sure wasn't big.
My kitchen now, though, I designed entirely myself. I painstakingly picked out the blackboard cabinets, the horizontal cabinet above the sink, the green terrazzo countertops, the pink cabinet pulls to go up on the top and the black for the bottom, the black and white stormtrooper fridge (although on that choice, my Virgo had a little bit of input), the pink subway tile backsplash set vertically instead of horizontally as is the norm, the black socket covers, and I picked out not only the undermount sink but also the black faucet that sits right smack in the middle of it.
Now, the first thing I want to say is that I love my kitchen. Like I said, I designed it entirely by myself. But truth be told, the sink is small. I thought I wanted more counter space, something I always used to complain about not having, so I chose a smaller sink, but now that I have a smaller sink, I complain about that. I do have to say, small sink or not, I am happy that I have room on my counter for an espresso maker, a rice cooker, an iced coffee machine, an insanely expensive toaster that looks like a fancy box, a food scale, and a drainer. If my sink were bigger, I definitely couldn't have all that. But still. . . a bigger sink would give me room for more dishes. Whatever. Either way, I'd just find a way to complain.
Let's talk cabinets for a sec. Just look at my new cabinets. Go ahead. Look at them. Not only are they beautiful, but the combination of black and white and pink is one-hundred percent Kelly, and as if that weren't Kelly enough, I can draw and write on them whatever I want! They're perfect! I can even move the shelves on both the bottoms and the tops so I could now fit things that used to be tall, and maybe this isn't a big deal to you, but it's a big deal to the queen of lazy Susans me, the corner cabinet has a built in lazy Susan that I use for my twelve million coffee mugs. Did I mention my cabinets are perfect? They're perfect, indeed!
Except, okay, maybe perfect isn't exactly the word because somehow, and I don't understand this, I lost all this under-the-sink space and now have a bunch of dead space to the left of my sink where I used to store things, and while the space isn't exactly dead, the stuff all the way to the left in the cabinets on the peninsula is pretty far and very frustrating to reach, and I've seen some cabinets that have some sort of shelving on the inside for the lids of pots and pans, and it would be really nice to have that, and I know this is dumb, but the top shelves are so high, they're sort of useless to me, and I know I sound like I'm complaining, and well, I guess I am because complain is just sort of what I do, but when I tell you this kitchen is so much better than my last kitchen, and while, no, maybe it's not perfect, I'm so glad I have it, it's the truth. One day I would like to rip out the peninsula and extend it along the wall to open up the kitchen, but that's a goal for the future. What I've got now is actually just fine, better than fine, it's what I created on my own, frustrating little imperfections and all, except for . . . and here it finally comes . . . except for the faucet on the sink. The faucet on the sink is not fine at all; in fact, it needs some serious help.
I'm not sure how it happened, but the once completely flush, tightly mounted faucet somehow came loose. If you scroll up to the top and look at the photo I posted, you'll notice an oval (oval? I'm not good with shapes) base. Well, in the beginning, that oval base was unwaveringly attached. I could turn the sink on and off all I wanted, pull the stretchy thing out to spray dishes and the insides of the sink, and it moved nary an inch. One day, though, I guess it's been about two years now, maybe a little less, I noticed it had somehow come loose. Not super loose but loose enough that I noticed. It moved just a little bit when I lifted the handle to turn the water on. But like I said, it was just a bit. After a bit of time went by, maybe a month, maybe a few weeks, it got looser still, and my Virgo, who knows a bit about fixing faucets, said he'd fix it for me. Under the sink he went where he did whatever he did, and the faucet base was tight again. Maybe not perfectly tight, but better. Way better than it was.
Well, time went by, and of course you know what I'm going to say, the faucet base loosened again. This time it got even looser, though, or maybe it was the next time, or maybe it was the next, because since the first time that faucet base started to move, it was never the same. My Virgo would tighten it every month or so--or sometimes he'd have done such a good job tightening it, he could wait three or four--and it would be way better than it was, and once he went and bought a tool, and I'm pretty sure at that point we thought the problem was completely fixed, but now?
Now the faucet is doing (fingers crossed that my little movie works)
It's worse than ever! Despite all the times my Virgo tightened the stupid faucet, despite the fact that he installed a perfectly good, solidly mounted faucet upstairs in the bathroom sink and a fancy shower head in the shower and, therefore, is obviously capable, despite his even having bought a special tool, that fucking faucet just keeps coming loose, and so, even though we tried to take care of it ourselves, and by we, I mean he--I just stood there and watched and occasionally handed him things--it obviously can't be done without professional help. If I don't want my faucet to be loose, the black faucet that I painstakingly chose after looking at who knows how many faucets online, so loose that it slides back and forth every time I turn it on and off and pull out the spray-ey thing to spray the sink, I'm going to have to call a handyman or a plumber because sometimes, it turns out, no matter how hard we try, we just can't fix things by ourselves.
