A Topsy-Turvy Kitchen

His architect had a vision, but the reality was a bad trip

ON SATURDAY, January 19, I popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, poured a flute-ful and celebrated the good riddance of the last contrac-tor. For 15 months, plumbers, electricians and carpenters had bedeviled my house on a daily basis, except when they would disappear for weeks, leaving their tools and chaos to keep me company. But for a little painting and a lot of cleanup, the kitchen was finished.

They say that this is the moment when it all seems worth it, when you slide blissfully into Renovation Amnesia, the strange forgetting of misery that keeps architects, contractors and home equity loan providers in business. But, even with the world twinkling from champagne, that hasn't happened for me. At least not yet. The bills are still rolling in, the economy is in free fall, and my home equity loan looks increasingly like a foolish choice. Most of all, I can't forget because I won't forget: I intend to nurse the rage I have felt for the past year into something epic and messianic. I hereby join the great cast of American Victims, and I will use my trauma to help save you from what I have suffered.

If I see you reading a kitchen magazine on the Metro, you may hear me scream, "By God, don't do it!" I'll haunt the tile and bath shops of Rockville Pike and sidle up behind you, whispering, "It's not worth it." I will be a prophet railing against the foolishness of fixing what isn't broken. What you see in those magazines -- the lovely stainless steel appliances, the warm maple wood cupboards dappled in late afternoon sunlight and the single bowl of perfectly green apples sitting on a pristine slab of burnished granite: lies, lies and more lies. What the pictures don't show is the hell of being all but homeless, caught in a sick game of blame and recrimination whereby architects and contractors extend the length of the job, line their pockets and leave you, at the end of the odyssey, broken, bitter and poor. With a new kitchen.

WHEN I SET THE WORK IN MOTION, IN THE FALL OF 2006, I was determined to see it through with equanimity and poise. Not long before I started planning the project, I began writing about architecture for The Washington Post. My home renovation would be educational, a good way to observe architects at work and the dynamic between design and construction. Things would surely go wrong, but that was all part of the process. The challenge was to remain even-keeled, prepared for the worst, ready to meet adversity with humor.

I was convinced that I had done my research adequately. The architect seemed skillful, and he recommended the contractors, who were genial. The whole English basement project -- which included lowering the floor by eight inches, opening up a window that had been bricked in decades ago and turning the cramped kitchen and dining room into an open, flowing space -- was to take from six weeks to two months. The plans were ready in October; demolition began in November; and, by January 2007, my things would be back from storage, the kitchen would be finished, and I'd be well advanced in my Renovation Amnesia.

My plan was to live in the top floors of the old three-level Victorian while its basement had a facelift. So, I converted the grand piano in the living room to a kitchen countertop; I bought a panini maker and placed it on the desk there; the rugs were rolled up, the sofa covered with sheets and the old refrigerator moved to the middle floor. Dishes would be washed in the upstairs bathroom. I was prepared. Or so I thought.

By February 2007, after I'd eaten about 65 consecutive panini dinners, the project was at a standstill. The workers still jolted the house awake each morning, but they had become caught in an endless loop of building and unbuilding, forging ahead with drywall only to tear it down to redo something underneath. There were all the manifest signs of a construction project: noise, dust, chaos and confusion. But rather like Sisyphus rolling his stone up a hill in Hades, there was no progress.

I was determined to stay strong, and my architect was still attentive. He accompanied me to appliance shops. He weighed in on the sink, the faucet, the tiles.

"That's very architectural," he'd say. That was his highest compliment. My house, it seemed, was making great architectural progress. Platonically, conceptually, it was improving. But downstairs there were raw brick walls, a cold slab of rough concrete and a tangle of useless wires and pipes.

One very cold Friday, the contractors knocked the thermostat off the wall for the fourth time. Before leaving for the weekend, they stuck it back on, but upside down and useless. The furnace wouldn't turn on, and the house slowly and inexorably super-chilled to the point where I could see my breath. The night before, I had washed a fork down the toilet (the best place to dump the dishwater), and it became so perfectly lodged in the pipes that nothing could pass. I had no kitchen, no bathroom and no heat. As my dog watched me prepare a bucket latrine in the shower, I realized what he, too, must be thinking: Only one of us has fur and does his business outside. I had sunk to a condition lower than my dog. I was functionally homeless.

It was about that time that the mice moved in and settled down to a steady diet of panini crumbs. I felt so estranged from my house that I didn't have the heart to evict them. I began to think of a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called "The Birthmark," in which a scientist married to a beautiful woman decides to fix her one physical imperfection, a tiny birthmark, with fatal consequences. I felt alien to my house in part because I felt guilty, as if I were subjecting an old dowager to an unnecessary facelift. The house, which I had bought when I first came to Washington, had charmed me with its light, its simplicity, its bare walls and old wooden floors. Now I was convinced that I could hear it groaning at night.

Things got worse. The architect and the contractors battled constantly, the former dropping in from time to time to tell the latter that they had misread his plans, while the contractors complained bitterly that the plans were changing, or unclear or badly measured.